"Of course I did!" she exclaimed. "How father would have loved to meet General Lingard"—there came a touch of keen regret into her voice.
"I expect you'll meet your hero very often before you've done with him, Mabel"—as he said the words he struck a match and lit a cigarette—"for he and Jane Oglander are going to be married."
"General Lingard and Jane Oglander?" Mabel could not keep a measure of extreme surprise and excitement out of her voice, but she was, what her dead father's old soldier servant always described her as being, "a thorough little lady," and after hearing Wantele's quiet word of assent to her involuntary question, she refrained, without any seeming effort, from pursuing the subject.
At last Wantele got up. "Well," he said. "Well, Mabel? This is a queer, 'unked' kind of world, isn't it?"
She nodded her head, and without offering him her hand she unlatched the door.
When she knew him to be well away, she came back and, laying her head on the table, burst into tears. She loved Jane Oglander—she rejoiced in Jane's good fortune—but the contrast was too great between Jane's fate and hers.
But for Athena Maule, but for the spell Athena had cast over Bayworth Kaye, she, Mabel, would probably by now have been Bayworth's wife, on the way to India—India the land of her childish, of her girlish dreams.
CHAPTER V
"Nay, but the maddest gambler throws his heart."