He saw very little of her in these days. Now and then she would come and read to him; but their former open-hearted intercourse seemed irrevocably a thing of the past. With the return of the troops, however, interests multiplied. Desmond's hold on the hearts of all who knew him had seldom been so practically proven; and the man was moved beyond measure at that which he could not fail to perceive. His small study was rarely empty, and often overcrowded with men—Sikhs, Gunners, Sappers, and, above all, his own brother officers, who filled the place with tobacco-smoke, the cheerful clink of ice against long tumblers, and frequent explosions of deep-chested laughter; while Desmond threw himself whole-heartedly into the good minute and enjoyed it to the full.
To Evelyn this new state of things was a little disconcerting. During Theo's illness she, as his wife, had enjoyed special attention and consideration; and since her incomprehensible refusal of his offer to throw up the Frontier, had even regarded herself as something of a heroine, if an unwilling one. Now, all of a sudden, she felt deserted, unimportant, and more or less "out of it all." The past fortnight seemed an uplifted dream, from which she had awakened to find herself sitting among the dust and stones of prose and hard facts. Yet she could not complain definitely of anything or any one. Honor and Theo were kind and tender, as always; but the one was temporarily busy, and the other very naturally enjoying a reversion to masculine society. Nobody seemed to want her. There seemed no particular use for her any more.
To make matters worse, the whole station wore a subdued air. The Club compound was practically deserted; and Evelyn's first outing in that direction left her with no desire to repeat the experiment for the present. The Sikhs had lost a popular captain; while a Gunner subaltern, who had returned seriously wounded, was being nursed by Mrs Conolly and the only woman in the battery.
This sort of thing was, as Theo had said, "part and parcel" of life on the Frontier; it was to this that she had condemned herself for the next twenty years at least; by which time she supposed she would be far too old to care for the frivolities of life at all! If only Theo would be generous and give her a second chance, she would not let it slip this time—she would not indeed!
Altogether the aspect of things in general was sufficiently depressing. Then one afternoon she met Owen Kresney; and all at once life seemed to take on a new complexion. Here, at least, was some one who wanted her, when every one else seemed only to want Theo; some one who was really glad to see her—rather too emphatically glad, perhaps; but the eagerness of his greeting flattered her, and she had overlooked the rest. She had been returning in her jhampan from her melancholy outing to the Club, when he had caught sight of her in the distance, and cantering up to her side, had dismounted, and shaken hands as though they had not met for a year.
"How awfully white and pulled down you look!" he had said with low-toned sympathy. "They must have been working you too hard. They forget that you are not a strapping woman like Miss Meredith."
"No one has worked me too hard," she answered, flushing at the veiled implication against her husband. "I wanted to do as much as the others."
"Of course you did. But you are too delicate to work like that, and it isn't fair to take advantage of your unselfishness. I hope you're going off to the Hills very soon, now that Desmond is better?"
"Yes, I hope so too."