“Miss Keeling! Is it possible?” Dick met the gaze of a pair of frank dark eyes, which were scanning his face with a look of friendly interest, and his thoughts flew back to the time which had elapsed between his leaving Sandhurst and obtaining his appointment to the Indian Staff Corps years ago. He had spent some months at home, to the great disgust of his uncle, the general, who vowed that this spell of idleness would ruin him for life, but he did nothing worse than fall in love with his sister’s greatest friend. Georgia lived only a few doors off, and she and Mabel always walked to the high school together, a fact of which Dick was fully aware when he took it into his head to offer Mabel his escort morning by morning. The offer was accepted with some hesitation, for both Mabel and Georgia had reached what might be called the age of pure reason, and objected on principle to “boys and nonsense,” but Dick was useful in carrying their books, and they could always snub him if he talked too much. Mabel was not without pride in the effect produced on the other girls by Dick’s attendance, but Georgia was absolutely indifferent to the honour conferred upon her, and Dick left England at last with the rueful conviction that the lady of his love was still quite heart-whole, and never regarded him in any other light than that of Mabel’s brother. Now he saw her again, and her eyes met his as calmly and freely as of old.
“Miss Keeling! Is it possible?”
“You have not forgotten the old days, then?” she said, pleasantly.
“I am afraid you haven’t,” he answered. “I must have bored you horribly. I know you and Mab always wanted to discuss your lessons, or the methods of the different masters, and momentous subjects of that kind, whereas I used to try to intrude my own little frivolous interests, which were invariably frowned down. It served me right.”
Poor Dick! He had not spoken so lightly when he bade Georgia farewell, after a vain attempt to obtain from her a flower, a glove, anything she had touched, as a keepsake. She had looked him through with her clear eyes and observed chillingly that she disliked foolishness, and he broke away from her with a heart full of pain and anger, and on his lips the Disraelian prophecy, “Some day I will make you listen to me!” To work for Georgia, to make himself more worthy of Georgia, had been his ruling impulse during his early years in India, and there was always before his eyes the faint possibility that when he returned home great and famous, his stubborn lady’s heart might be touched at last. And now he had returned, not only famous, but also free from the trammels of his early and hopeless adoration—and Georgia was not at all affected by the fact. Years of unremitting work had turned Dick’s thoughts into a different channel. He was a soldier now, and his professional instincts were paramount, but still, he would have liked Georgia to recognise the change. She did not appear to notice anything, and he had a lurking suspicion that if she had done so, the realisation would not have troubled her.
“And so you are going to India, like all the young ladies in these days?” he said, carelessly, recalling what he had just heard from Mrs Wake, not without some idea of piquing Miss Keeling by the suggestion that her latest development had not surprised him in the least.
“No, not to India,” she answered. “I am going to Kubbet-ul-Haj.”
“What, with Sir Dugald Haigh’s Ethiopian Mission? So am I.”
“Yes, Mabel has told me. What a pity she can’t come too!”