“Yes, it is I myself!” he cried, shaking hands so vigorously as almost to forget to bow. “It’s good to be here again, Mrs Ambrose—I don’t even regret my lost furlough, though my passage home was taken for this week. But the delays in getting back from Bombay! I have been fretting like a war-horse—but not for his reason. I don’t want to plunge into a battle—far from it. My one desire is to prevent fighting. It was a horrid blow to hear at the landing-stage that Sir Henry had actually marched against the Khans, but I trust—I hope—I may yet be in time to put an end to this lamentable adventure. And how are you? but I need not enquire—your looks speak for you. Richard in good health, I trust? but unhappy, I am sure, about this madness of the General’s. Well, we shall put that right, I hope. I must start to-night to catch up the force. Can’t be too thankful I am not a day or two later.”
“Come in, come in!” said Eveleen, when she was allowed to utter a word, and she led the way, not sorry to turn her face from him for a moment. A dreadful suspicion was growing upon her that Colonel Bayard was under a wholly false impression as to the footing on which he stood and the object for which he had been recalled, but she could not dash his hopes by saying so. An Englishwoman might have told him bluntly Sir Harry’s views regarding him, but no Irishwoman could possibly bring herself to do more than hint at things in a roundabout way, leaving him to arrive at the truth for himself, if he could. “After all,” she said, rather nervously, “it might not have made much difference, d’ye think?”
“Every difference, so long as there has been no bloodshed, ma’am. If we can only avoid that, I don’t despair of accommodating the whole matter.”
“Ah, but if you knew the way the Khans have been playing fast and loose! Nothing will hold them to their engagements. How can you reach an accommodation?”
“They are puzzled and irritated by treatment they don’t understand,” he responded eagerly. “But it’s true I don’t know the precise position of affairs at this moment. That’s why I come to you, since I hear you had a letter from Ambrose this afternoon.”
“Ambrose believes Sir Harry will reach Sultankot, though not without loss.”
“But how? and what does he propose to do when he gets there?”
“His plan is to take his whole force to the edge of the desert, so they say, and then to mount five or six hundred men on camels and make a dash across. Two guns he means to carry with him, and they, he believes, will compel surrender. If not, he’ll storm the place.”
“Madness! midsummer madness!” cried Colonel Bayard sorrowfully. “Why, he can have no conception even of the number of camels needed for such a force.”
“There has been difficulty in getting camels, I know. The contractors have been fined for not bringing enough.”