Here now, before the divinity so fondly worshiped, Harry Hardwicke lost his soldier’s ready voice. “Say no more! You need rest, Miss Nadine! I shall only call to-morrow to assure myself of your perfect recovery. When your father returns I shall do myself the honor to ask his formal permission to visit you later.” There was a sigh and a sob as Nadine Johnstone took her silent lover’s hands and pressed them in her own, bursting into happy tears.
“I owe you my life—my father shall speak, but in my own heart I shall treasure your splendid bravery forever!” Her tall young knight stooped over the little hands, kissed them, and was turning to go, when the maiden slipped off a sparkling ring. “Wear this always for my sake; I can say no more till we meet again!” And, bending low, Captain Hardwicke stepped backward, as from a queen’s presence, leaving her there, weak, loving, and trembling in a strange delight.
As he rode slowly homeward in the evening’s glow, he passed Major Alan Hawke dashing away to the railway station in a carriage. Traveling luggage told the story of a sudden jaunt. A wave of the hand and the secret-service man was gone. Hawke growled: “Damned young jackanapes, I’ll fool you, too; but what does old Johnstone want?” He was reading a telegram just received: “Come to meet me at Allahabad. Have brought the drafts. Want you for a few days down here.”
At ten o’clock next morning, Simpson, his voice all broken, his old eyes filled with tears, dashed into Captain Hardwicke’s office. “Dead?” cried the young soldier, springing up in a sudden horror. “No. Gone over night—both the women—God knows where, but they left secretly, by the Master’s orders!” And then Hardwicke sank back into his chair with a groan. But, at Allahabad, Major Alan Hawke was raving alone in a helpless rage. There was no Johnstone there, and Ram Lal Singh had telegraphed him: “The daughter and governess went away in the night by the railroad—special train. A man from Calcutta took them away.”
“You shall pay for this, you old hound!” he yelled, “Yes, with your heart’s blood.’”
CHAPTER IX. ALAN HAWKE PLAYS HIS TRUMP CARD.
When the Calcutta train rolled into Allahabad, two days after Harry Hardwicke’s crushing surprise, Major Alan Hawke, the very pink of Anglo-Indian elegance, awaited the dismounting of the returning voyagers. He had passed a whole sleepless night in revolving the various methods to play oft each of his wary employers against each other, and had decided to let Fate make the game.
“The devil of it is, I’m not supposed to know anything of the flitting!” he mused, after digesting Ram Lal Singh’s carefully worded telegrams. All the light in his shadowy mental eclipse was the positive information that a special train had been made up for Bombay at the station, “on government secret service.”