“Nay, you will soon return, Hugh,” she said, with a seeming conviction that his absence would be brief. He shook his head sadly.
“I do not know what are the intentions of my uncle with respect to my future movements,” he answered. “I know only that I am ordered to be in readiness to proceed at a minute’s notice to Southampton, there to await further instructions, and to be prepared for the possibility of having to undertake a far more distant journey.”
“Far more distant journey, Hugh?”
“Helen, I have very powerful reasons for believing that my destination is India.”
An exclamation burst from the lips of the young girl. A thousand thoughts flashed through her brain at the vision of a long separation from him who now addressed her.
Alas! for Hugh—they were not such thoughts as he could have wished to occupy her mind.
She would regret his departure unquestionably: but it brought with it a sense of liberty, a freedom of action, an unquestioned license for listening to soft words from other lips, and for responding to meaning glances from admiring eyes, without the dullness of indifference or a flash of scorn. The suggestion of a protracted separation brought more strongly before her mind the ducal coronet of the young peer, now in her father’s mansion, and the impressive eyes of Lester Vane.
She was silent. Her mind was too busy to permit her to speak a word.
She had involuntarily uttered an exclamation when he revealed his fear that he was about to leave England for a lengthened term, and he attributed her subsequent silence to the grief he presumed she would necessarily feel at the occurrence of an event which, to him, was distracting.
He twined his arms about her waist, and she rested her beautiful face upon his shoulder. He pressed the lips thus offered up to his own, and, with a groan of agony, murmured—