“Oh Lord!” Hilda exclaimed, and bit her lip. “Where is Miss Filbert now?”
“At Number Ten, Middleton Street.”
“With the Livingstones?”
“Is it so astonishing? Miss Livingstone has been most practical in her kindness. I have gone back, of course, to my perch at the club, and Laura is to stay with them until she sails.”
“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?”