"Sir George Head, who has been stationed with the men in Montreal all winter, will be here in a week; and, with what remains of the —nth Royals, will sail at once for England."
The announcement dropped very quietly from the Captain's lips, pregnant though it was with so much to himself. Maud started and turned pale. The mention of Sir George and the Captain's company in the same breath, placed the Doctor and the Major in a relationship that she had heretofore declined to realize. Something seemed imminent, she hardly knew what.
"Which means that you will go with him," she said at last avoiding his eye.
"Yes, Miss Maud, that is what it means; and besides the gruesome and terrible things that have happened, the beautiful and happy days I have spent in Halifax will be at an end."
"If the gruesome things have surpassed the pleasant ones, you will rejoice when all is over," said Maud gently, regaining her self-control. "In such case I know I should."
"Women are different from men," was his comment. "Perhaps men do not balance things so clearly. With us I fear every experience of life stands alone. The terrible reality of the slaying of a thousand men in a night may be one thing; but the presence of a single thread of sunshine which enthralls you and penetrates your whole being is another."
"You are very poetic as well as practical, Major Morris, and I think you are right," said Maud, determined not to understand him. "What you say of the soldiers is terribly sad; but about the sunshine, we have many threads of sunshine here. I was born in Halifax and never even crossed the ocean; but from all I hear we have five times as much sunshine in Nova Scotia as you have in England."
"Egad! I suspect you are right," was his answer, as she went off in a little ripple of laughter, her cheeks aglow with color. "It must be the sunlight that freshens your beauty and puts that damask upon your skin."
"Now you flatter. But 'pon my word it is a good thing. It makes you brown as a berry in March, red as a rose in June, and blue as a plum in November."
"I thought it was the wind that did the first as well as the last," he said, watching her ever-changing face.