When her tears were under control, she drew herself up, brushing them from her cheeks and lashes.
"Yes, it has been a strain," she admitted. "And I did so hope this had brought news I could give her, at last. You don't see her as I do, Theo, lying there day after day, so frail and white and patient. Quita patient! Can you picture it? I quite long for a flash of her old perversity. She has almost left off speaking of him. But the eternal question in her eyes haunts me; and I feel half ashamed of my golden time with you, when I see her going through it alone, poor darling; her natural joy in the child shadowed and broken by the anxiety and longing that are eating her heart out, and holding her back from health. Is there nothing I can tell her, that would be truth, yet not all the truth?"
Desmond knitted his brows again, pondering.
"Go to her now," he said. "Tell her we've heard by wire that he is safely over the Darkót, but he may be delayed in getting on to Kashmir, and we hope for more news within the week. If she asks to see the wire, say you're sorry, but I tore it up."
He did so on the spot, dropping the shreds of paper reflectively among the smouldering logs upon the hearth; while Honor hurried to the sick-room, with her fragment of news: the room in which Lenox had almost died of cholera, and in which Quita's ring had been restored to her finger sixteen months before.
She lay in it now, propped up among frilled pillows, an etherealised edition of herself; her hair divided into two plaits, one lying over each shoulder; the sweeping curve of her lashes shadowing her cheek; her eyes resting on a small dark head that nestled in the hollow of her arm. For, to Quita's intense satisfaction, the child had Eldred's black hair, and the clear Northern eyes that held all she knew, or as yet cared to know, of heaven.
Her delight at the inadequate tidings of her husband was greater than Honor had dared to expect. For she could not know how the wakeful night watches, and the hours of enforced quiet, had been haunted by that nightmare dread of the mountains, which Eldred's expurgated accounts of certain vicissitudes had justified rather than dispelled. But now—now he was through the worst of them, within easy distance of Kashmir; and she felt as a prisoner may feel when the doors swing wide, and he finds himself once more lord of light and space.
"Oh, Baby, think of it!" she whispered in ecstasy to the unheeding morsel of life in her arms. "He is coming—actually coming! Nothing can delay him very long now."
But the slow days multiplied into weeks; and still he did not come; and the scanty news from Kashmir was not hopeful enough to be passed on to her—yet. Then, as she grew stronger, and more openly bewildered at the silence and delay, Desmond decided to speak to her himself. And while the tale was still upon his lips, while Quita sat listening to it, white and tearless, his hand grasping her own, a merciful fate brought her an envelope quaveringly addressed in pencil, containing word of definite progress at last, and an assurance that once he could set foot to ground nothing should hold him back.
Ten days later the message, "Starting this morning," flashed through space to Dera Ishmael from Kashmir; and after that each hour brought him nearer. A second flash from Lahore; a third from Jhung; and Desmond, sending on a spare horse, rode down to the Indus to meet his friend, in Oriental fashion, 'at the edge of the carpet.'