"Why are we fated to meet again, and here?" was the ever-recurring thought of Clare, as she strove to fix her eyes on the grave face of her husband and listen to his eloquence, but she heard it not.
Her face was not a beautiful one, but it was sweet, earnest, and most winning in all its varying expressions.
India had paled it already, but the light of her dark hazel eyes, the warm tint of her rosebud lips, and her rich brown hair, almost black in hue, were all unchanged as when Wilmot had covered them with kisses and caresses, in the sad hour of their severance that seemed so long ago.
In due time the service was over, the congregation dispersing and departing on horseback or in buggies, while the new regiment, to the clangour of its band, was marching into its lines, and Fred Wilmot, she knew, was with it. Fearful that he might address her ere the column was formed, she remained nervously in her seat, striving to pray for strength of purpose, or for her past dull content, and then, when she deemed herself safe, drove home alone, for her husband, though hot the coming noon, had sick and other visits to pay.
Clare feared that Wilmot might call at their bungalow on the following day, as every one calls on every one else on arriving at a new station in India; so she resolved to take her horse and be out of his way in the cool of the evening, and also early on the following morning, but to evade him always in the narrow European circle at Mirzapatam she knew would be impossible.
That day her husband was long absent on his parochial duties, and Clare was not sorry; she wanted time for thought—but thought only took the line of refining, and a comparison of what was now the inevitable, with what might have been.
Clare was formed by nature for excitement, society, music, and gaiety, she did not like to be left to mope as a parson's wife "in the station to which the Lord had called her," as her husband constantly phrased it; and she had been wont to writhe under his advice as to how she was to comport herself, what she was to wear and not to wear, and to avoid the groups of young officers about the "Band Stand," and all risk of gup or gossip. His intense goodness, his awful sense of propriety, even his fervid piety, had bored and wearied the young wife ere their dull honeymoon was well over; for though a good girl in every way, Clare was not pious, as Mr. Thorne understood piety. She went, per order, to church twice on Sunday, but flatly refused to teach "little niggers" in the mission schools, and he groaned in spirit over her contumacy. The excitement she wished, was not to be found in visiting old Hindoo women and teaching naked little boys that the precepts of Menou, the lawgiver, were idolatry.
"Oh dear, for what did you marry me, Cecil?" she asked one evening impatiently, when she heard the strains of military music coming from the forbidden band-stand, and knew that all the little gaiety of the place was centred there.
"To be a helpmate to me, Clare," he replied gravely, "and to share with me, so far as becomes my wife, my labours in the vineyard of our Divine Master. In our little Bengali church are regular Sabbath services and weekly prayer-meetings; there are four patshalas or elementary schools; but to not one of these have you gone; there are much evangelistic work and colportage work to be done, yet you assist in them not, and will not even sing the hymns I have translated from the Tembavani."
"If I did, Cecil—dear Cecil, would you let me go even once a week to the military promenade—I do so love the band?" she asked, with her eyes full of tears.