Cecil asked Horace for a cigar, and struck a fusee, and puffed away into the frosty air like the wildest young Cantab at Trinity. It didn't make her sick, for she and Blanche had had two Queens out of Vivian's case, and smoked them to the last ash for fun only the day before; and she drove us at a mad gallop into Deerhurst Park, past the dark trees and the gleaming water and the trooping deer, and pulled up before the hall door just as the moon came out on Christmas-eve.
We were all rather fast at Deerhurst, so Blanche got no scolding from her mamma (who, like a sensible woman, never put into their heads that things done in the glad innocency of the heart were "wrong"); and Cecil, as soon as she had sprung down, snatched her hand from Cos, and went up to her own room.
The Colonel's lips were pressed close together, and his forehead had the dark frown that Guy wears in his portrait.
It had been done with another, so it was all wrong; but oh! Syd, my friend, if the "dry" that was drunk, and the drag that was tooled, and the weed that was smoked, had been yours, wouldn't it have been the most charming caprice of the most charming woman!
That night, at dinner, a letter by the afternoon's post came to the Colonel. It was "On her Majesty's Service," and his mother asked him anxiously what it was.
"Only to tell me to join soon," said he, carelessly, giving me a sign to keep the contents of a similar letter I had just received to myself; which I should have done anyhow, as I had reason to hope that the disclosure of them would have quenched the light in some bright eyes beside me.
"Ordered off at last, thank God!" said Syd, handing his father the letter as soon as the ladies were gone. "There's a train starts at 12.40, isn't there, for town? You and I, Ned, had better go to-night. You don't look so charmed, old fellow, as you did when you went out to Scinde. I say, don't tell my sisters; there is no need to make a row in the house. Governor, you'll prepare my mother; I must bid her good-by."
I did not view the Crimea with the unmingled, devil-me-care delight with which I had gone out under "fighting Napier" nine years before, for Blanche's sunshiny face had made life fairer to me; and to obey Syd, and go without a farewell of her, was really too great a sacrifice to friendship. But he and I went to the drawing-rooms, chatted, and took coffee as if nothing had chanced, till he could no longer stand seeing Cecil, still excited, singing chansons to Cos, who was leaning enraptured over the instrument, and he went off to his own room. The other girls and men were busy playing the Race game; Blanche and I were sitting in the back drawing-room beside the fire, and the words that decided my destiny were so few, that I cite them as a useful lesson to those novelists who are in the habit of making their heroes, while waiting breathless to hear their fate, recite off at a cool canter four pages of the neatest-turned sentences without a single break-down or a single pull-up, to see how the lady takes it.
"Blanche, I must bid you good-by to-night." Blanche turned to me in bewildered anxiety. "I must join my troop: perhaps I may be sent to the Crimea. I could go happily if I thought you would regret me?"
Brutally selfish that was to be sure, but she did not take it so. She looked as if she was going to faint, and for fear she should, trusting to the engrossing nature of the Race game in the further apartment, I drew nearer to her. "Will you promise to give yourself to nobody else while I am away, my darling?" Blanche's eyes did promise me through their tears, and this brief scene, occupying the space of two minutes, twisted our fates into one on that eventful Christmas-eve.