Trevelyan continued to fight passionately against the orders until the hour of sailing.
Cary went down with the family to see the transport off, and when Trevelyan caught his last glimpse of her she was standing out distinctly from the background of the faint fog that had arisen, with Stewart at her side.
He turned his face away sharply and gripped at the ship's rail. Then a sudden pressure came against his throat and breast as though the strength was being crushed from him. He swallowed hard.
For once, Fate had conquered Trevelyan.
* * * * *
He wrote to Cary just one time that year—on the voyage out—a letter that a man does not often write more than once in his life. In it were the passion and the love; the strength and weakness of his nature. On one page he stripped his heart for her, that she might know its faults, and fairly judge. On the next, he tried to vindicate his failings.
"I would be as clay in your hands," he wrote toward the close, "You could do with me what you would. I love you more than it is generally given to a man to love—more than an English officer should. I would desert for you, for I love you more than England and more than my honor—" and then there came a blot upon the page, that half covered the last word. The letter ended as a child's struggle ends—brokenly: and he asked her in a few disjointed sentences to be his wife.
Weeks later when the letter was delivered, Cary was out with John. On her return she sat far into the night to answer it, that her reply might go back to him by the next Indian mail.
"Your love frightens me," she said in part, "and I cannot bind myself through time and distance. If I loved you as I should—and as I could love a man—I would say 'yes'—as it is, I must say 'no.' It lies with you if my answer ever changes. I do not demand love that would prove disloyal to an officer's vow of courage in the service. I do not want such love. I am an army woman, and army women, all the world over, have one code of allegiance—which is absolute. You cheapen me when you suggest I would be satisfied with anything less. As for moulding you—a man moulds himself into the perfect and complete, or he breaks the clay with his own hands. When I marry it shall be a man whose nature is stronger than my own. It is the way of women."
And Trevelyan had been gone a year.