After this matters went on quietly, as they will do when one storm has blown over and the next is yet below the horizon. Armstrong settled down to his duties with his two pupils—or rather his three pupils, for Miss Jill made a point of receiving lessons too. Miss Rosalind worked away at her painting, and succeeded in evoking a glimmering interest in art in the Philistine breasts of her two students. The young people divided their leisure between riding, cricket, tennis, and yachting. Mrs Ingleton, as the weeks went by, not only grew more pale, but began to be aware of the attentions of her sympathetic kinsman, and to be sorely perplexed and disturbed thereat. And the Captain himself received his Indian letters regularly by each mail, and confessed to himself that, but for two considerations—one appertaining to love, the other to hate—he had better far have remained in Her Majesty’s service abroad.
Chapter Eight.
Two Ends of a Rope.
The summer passed, and even Captain Oliphant began to grow reconciled to his surroundings. That is to say, he discovered that at present it was his policy to make himself agreeable, even to his co-trustee. Armstrong, with the position he held at Maxfield as Roger’s friend and Mrs Ingleton’s trusted servant, was not to be disposed of quite as easily as the gallant officer had at first anticipated. At the same time, while he remained where he was, the Captain felt himself decidedly embarrassed in the working out of sundry little projects which floated in his ingenious brain. Besides which, time was getting on. Roger would be twenty in November, and a year later—
Captain Oliphant had reached this pleasant stage in his meditations one morning, as he sipped his coffee in his own room, when Raffles entered with the letters.
“Eightpence to pay on this one, please, sir.”
It was a letter with an Indian post-mark, unstamped.
The Captain regarded it with knitted brows; then tossing it on the table, said—