'There,' Sutton said, pointing to a range of hills just visible in the faint horizon, 'there is the Black Mountain, and there lies the pass where we shall be marching in a day or two. It is such a grand, wild place! I have been along it so often, but have never had leisure to paint it. This time, however, I hope to get a sketch.'
'Tell me,' Maud said, 'the sort of expeditions these are, and what happens, and what kind of danger you are all in.'
'I will tell you,' said her companion. 'They are hot, troublesome, inglorious promenades, over country which lames a great many of our horses and harasses our men. We burn some miserable huts, destroy a few acres of mountain crops and drive off such cattle as the people have not had time to drive away themselves, and, in fact, do all that soldiering admits of in the absence of that most important ingredient of a brilliant campaign, an enemy: he, unluckily, is invariably over the hills and far away some hours previous to our arrival.'
Maud felt this account to be on the whole reassuring: 'How soon,' she asked, 'will you come back again?'
'Before you have time to miss me,' said her companion; 'it is an affair literally of days. Besides, Elysium, you will find, is all the pleasanter for having its crowd of soldiers somewhat thinned.'
'It will not be the pleasanter to us,' said Maud, 'for your being gone.'
Her tone took Sutton greatly by surprise.
'You are having a happy time here, are you not?' he asked. 'It seems to me a pleasant sort of life.'
'Yes,' said Maud, emphatically, 'the pleasantest, happiest I have ever known. All life has been bright to me; but there are things in it that hurt one, for all that.'
'Yes?' said Sutton, with a kind inquiry in his tones, for he had never thought of Maud but as the pretty incarnation of enjoyment; 'well, tell me the things which hurt you.'