"You are too late in the day, dear child, to practise on me. I am your devoted slave already--bound fast to the wheel of your triumphant car. What more would you have?"
The hotel was reached at last, and the major gave Janet a short quarter of an hour for her toilette. When she got downstairs dinner was on the point of being served, and she found covers laid for three. Before she had time to ask a question, the third person entered the room. He was a tall well-built man of six or seven-and-twenty. He had light-brown hair, closely-cropped but still inclined to curl, and a thick beard and moustache of the same colour. He had blue eyes, and a pleasant smile, and the easy self-possessed manner of one who had seen "the world of men and things." His left sleeve was empty.
Janet did not immediately recognise him, he looked so much older, so different in every way; but at the first sound of his voice she knew who stood before her. He came forward and held out his hand--the one hand that was left him.
"May I venture to call myself an old friend, Miss Holme? and to hope that even after all these years I am not quite forgotten?"
"I recognise you by your voice, not by your face. You are Mr. George Strickland. You it was who saved my life. Whatever else I may have forgotten, I have not forgotten that."
"I am too well pleased to find that I live in your memory at all to cavil with your reason for recollecting me."
"But--but, I never heard--no one ever told me--" Then she stopped with tears in her eyes, and glanced at his empty sleeve.
"That I had left part of myself in India," he said, finishing the sentence for her. "Such, nevertheless, is the case. Uncle there says that the yellow rascals were so fond of me that they could not bear to part from me altogether. For my own part, I think myself fortunate that they did not keep me there _in toto_, in which case I should not have had the pleasure of meeting you here to-day."
He had been holding her hand quite an unnecessary length of time. She now withdrew it gently. Their eyes met for one brief instant, then Janet turned away and seated herself at the table. The flush caused by the surprise of the meeting still lingered on her face, the tear-drops still lingered in her eyes, and as George Strickland sat down opposite to her he thought that he had never seen a sweeter vision nor one that appealed more directly to his imagination and his heart.
Janet Holme at nineteen was very pleasant to look upon. Her face was not one of mere commonplace prettiness, but had an individuality of its own that caused it to linger in the memory like some sweet picture that once seen cannot readily be forgotten. Her eyes were of a tender luminous grey, full of candour and goodness. Her hair was a deep glossy brown; her face was oval, and her nose a delicate aquiline. On ordinary occasions she had little or no colour, yet no one could have taken the clear pallor of her cheek as a token of ill health; it seemed rather a result of the depth and earnestness of the life within her.