"She sails?"
"In the Sutlej, next Wednesday. She's got three months' leave. She really hasn't been well, and her superior officer is an accommodating old sort. She resigns at home, and I'm sending her to some dear old friends of mine. She hasn't any particular people of her own. She's got a notion of taking lessons of some kind—perfectly unnecessary, but if it amuses her—during the summer. And of course she will have to get her outfit together."
"And in December," said Hilda, "she comes out and marries you."
"Not a Calcutta wedding. I meet her in Madras and we come up together."
"Ideal," said Hilda; "and is Calcutta much scandalised?"
"Calcutta doesn't know. If I had had my way in the beginning I fancy I would have trumpeted it. But now I suppose it's wiser—why should one offer her up at their dinner-tables?"
"Especially when they would make so little of her," said Hilda absently.
The coolie-track had led them into the widest part of the Maidan, where it slopes to the south, and the huts of Bowanipore. There was nothing about them but a spreading mellowness and the baked turf under-foot. The cloudy yellow twilight disclosed that a man little way off was a man and not a horse but did hardly more. "I'm tired," Hilda said suddenly, "let us sit down," and sank comfortably on the fragrant grass. Lindsay dropped beside her and they sat for a moment in silence. A cricket chirped noisily a few inches from them. Hilda put out her hand in that direction and it ceased. Sounds wandered across from the encircling city, evening sounds, softened in their vagrancy, and lights came out, topaz points in the level glow.
"She is making a tremendous sacrifice," Lindsay went on; "I seem to see its proportions more clearly now."
Hilda glanced at him with infinite kindness. "You are an awfully good sort, Duff," she said, "I wish you were out of Asia."