CHAPTER XXXIX.

TURNING THE TABLES.

His sword and helmet cases, his portmanteau and travelling rugs were duly strapped and placed in the stately old entrance-hall in readiness, as Roland was to be off by an early morning train, and never again would he break bread in the home of his forefathers. Every link that bound him to Earlshaugh was broken now, and he felt only a feverish restlessness to be gone!

Ere that came to pass, Roland's eyes were fated to be somewhat roughly opened.

All that day the nervous quivering of his nether lip, his unusual paleness—notwithstanding his apparent calm—showed to his sister that he was deeply agitated, and was suffering from passionate, if suppressed, emotion.

In the deepening dusk of his last evening at Earlshaugh he had, cigar in mouth, strolled forth alone to con over his own bitter thoughts, and nurse his wrath 'to keep it warm,' or inspired by a vague idea that he would sort his mind, which was then in a somewhat chaotic condition.

The evening—one of the last in October—was cool, and the wind wailed sadly in the task of stripping the trees of their withered leaves, though at no time of the year do they look so beautiful in the Scottish woods as in autumn, save, perhaps, when they first burst forth in their emerald greenery.

Round the tall old mansion, down the terraced walks, past the lakelet and through the grounds he wandered till he reached a kind of kiosk or summer-house, built of fantastic, knotty branches, roofed with thatch, and furnished with a rustic seat—a damp and gloomy place just then. He threw himself upon the latter, and, resting his head upon his hand, proceeded to chew the cud of bitter fancy that had no sweet in it.

The period had vanished when existence seemed full of joyous dreams and a course of glowing scenes. The world was still as beautiful, no doubt, but it sparkled no more with light and colour for him; idols had been shattered—ideals had collapsed, and it seemed very cold and empty now.

How long he had been there he scarcely knew—perhaps half an hour—when in the gloom under the half-stripped trees he heard voices, and saw two figures, or made out a male and female lingering near the summer-house, which he dreaded lest they should enter, when he discovered them to be Annot—Annot Drummond, muffled in a cosy white fur cloak of Maude's—and, Heaven above!—of all men on earth—Hawkey Sharpe!

For a moment or two Roland scarcely respired—his heart seemed to stand still. Intensely repugnant to him as it was to act as eavesdropper on the one hand, on the other he was proudly and profoundly reluctant to confront those two. There he remained still, hoping every moment they would move on and leave the pathway clear; but they remained, and thus he heard more than he expected to hear from such a singular pair.

He had now a clue to the reason of Annot's reluctance to leave Earlshaugh, of her protracted visit as the guest of Mrs. Lindsay, and why latterly she had so mysteriously and sedulously cultivated the friendship of that lady.

The question, was it honourable to remain where he was, flashed across Roland's mind! It was not incompatible with honour under the peculiar circumstances, so he heard more.

'That nonsense has surely come to an end, or are you still engaged to him?' said Hawkey, who held her hands in his.

Annot was silent. Could she be temporizing yet?

'Do you think he loves you as well as I do?' urged Hawkey Sharpe, bending over her.

Still she was silent.

'If so, why has he ever left you, even for an hour, to shoot and so forth, as he has often done? Speak, Annot. Surely I may call you Annot now.'

Still there was no reply. It seemed as if she was thinking deeply—thinking how best to reply, to play her cards or to temporize; but to what end, when all was over between her and Roland now?

'You were engaged to him?' said Hawkey again, with a little impatience of manner.

'By a chain of circumstances over which I had no control,' replied Annot in a faltering voice; 'in his uncle's house at Merlwood I was——'

'Was—is it ended?'

'Yes—for ever.'

'Thank God for that! Did you think you loved him?' asked Hawkey with a grin.

'I believe that I did—or ought—I was so silly—so simple—so——'

'There—there—I don't want to worry you.'

'But he loves me, I know that,' said Annot in a low voice—true to her vanity still.

'That I can well believe—who could see you and not love you?' said Hawkey gallantly.

'I could never marry a poor man,' said Annot candidly.

'Well—he is poor enough.'

'And live on, eating my heart out in struggles such as some I have seen,' continued Annot as if to herself.

'Though here in Earlshaugh just now, what is he, this fellow Lindsay, but a penniless pretender!' exclaimed Sharpe, fired with animosity against Roland; who thus heard his name, his position, and the dearest secrets of his heart openly canvassed by this presumptuous and low-born fellow, and with Annot too—she who, till lately—but he could not put his thoughts in words—they seemed to choke him; and the whole situation was degrading—maddening!

'Well,' chuckled Sharpe, 'he is out of the running now; and then you and I understand each other so well, my little golden-haired pet! so true it is that "when a woman of the world and a man of the world meet, whatever the circumstances may be, or the surroundings, in a moment there is rapport between them, and all flows along easily." I thought when Lindsay fell into the Cleugh,' he added, with a coarse laugh, 'that he had betaken himself off to something that suited him better than fighting the Arabs. But it is long ere the deil dies—now he is well and whole again, and looks every inch like the Lindsay in the gallery, with the buff coat and a dish-cover on his head, that led a brigade of horse against the English at Dunbar. Well, the old place has done with that brood now; and after Deb, Earlshaugh must be mine—mine—shall be ours, Annot, for ever and aye!'

The breeze caught the lace of her sleeve, and, lifting it, showed the perfect and lovely contour of her soft white arm, on which Hawkey Sharpe fastened his coarse lips with a fervour there could be no doubting.

Kissed by him? Roland felt perfectly cured. The desecration, the dishonour, seemed complete! It is but too probable that Mr. Hawkey Sharpe felt the exultation of revenge and triumph in every kiss he took, even though he believed them to be unseen.

Though it was now apparent that she had thrown 'dust' in Roland's eyes by using the name of another, and had thus doubly lied to him, the blow did not fall so unexpectedly, yet the degradation of it was complete.

Hoyle was a myth—a blind to throw him off the right track—and he had been discarded, not for that personage, but for Hawkey Sharpe. This was truly to find

'In the lowest deep a lower deep'

of utter humiliation!

At last they passed onward, and he was again alone.

'I have undergone something like the torture of the rack,' said he with a bitter laugh, when he related to Maude and Hester what he had been compelled to overhear in the summer-house, and the latter thought of that eventful evening at Merlwood, when she so unwittingly had in like manner been compelled to lurk in the shrubbery and hear a revelation that crushed her own heart to the dust.

Thus, though he knew it not, the tables were turned on Roland with a vengeance.

Like Hester, he could not agree with Romeo—

'How sweet sound lovers' tongues by night,'

when the said tongues addressed all their sweetness to others.

'She is an ungrateful, selfish, horrible girl—I'll never forgive her—never!' said Maude, almost sobbing with anger.

'How filthy lucre rules the world now!' exclaimed Roland. 'Do such girls as she ever repent the mischief they make—the hearts they have broken?'

'As if hearts break nowadays? she would ask,' said Hester with something of a smile.

'Likely enough—it is her style, no doubt. But can you, Hester, or anyone, explain this cruel duplicity? To me it seems as if I were still in the middle of a horrid dream—a dream from which I must suddenly wake. That she, so winsome and artless apparently—so gentle and loving, should become so cold, so calculating, so mercilessly cruel now!'

'I always mistrusted her,' said Maude bitterly. 'People call her eyes hazel—to me they always seemed a kind of vampire-green.'

Roland made no reply, but he was thinking with Whyte-Melville:

'Who shall account for the fascination exercised by some women upon all who approach their sphere? The peculiar power of the rattlesnake, whose eye is said to lure the conscious victim unresistingly to its doom, and the attractive properties possessed by certain bodies, and by them used with equal recklessness and cruelty, are two arrangements of Nature which make me believe in mesmerism.'

'Well—to-morrow I quit this place without beat of drum!' exclaimed Roland.

'For Edinburgh?'

'Yes—to the Club.'

'And then?'

'For Egypt. There I shall live every day of my life as if there were no to-morrow.'

'Nonsense!' said Jack. 'You'll get over all this in time—a hit in the wing, that is all!'

Old Johnnie Buckle, who had forebodings in the matter of Roland's departure, had tears in his eyes as he drove him in the drag to the railway station next morning, and as he wrung his hand at parting he said—showing that he knew precisely of the double trouble that had fallen on the young Laird:

'Better twa skaiths than ae sorrow, Maister Roland,' meaning that losses can be repaired, but grief may break the heart; 'and mind ye, sir,' he added, as the train started, 'a' the keys o' the country dinna hang at ae man's belt, and ye'll wear your ain bannet yet!'

And on this bouleversement we need scarcely refer to the emotions of those who loved Roland best.

Jack Elliot, as he selected a cigar to smoke and think the situation over, deemed that Roland was well out of the whole affair; Maude, who was preparing for her departure from Earlshaugh, like Hester, was furiously indignant; but, for reasons of her own, the thoughts of the latter were of a somewhat mingled nature.

CHAPTER XL.

THE NEW POSITION.

Though, by her own admission, not entirely ignorant of Annot's secret springs of action, that social buccaneer, Mr. Hawkey Sharpe, was exultantly defiant about his victory over, and revenge on, Roland Lindsay, for such he deemed the new position to be; and in his pale gray eyes, as he thought over it, there gleamed a savage light, such as it is said 'men carry when the thirst for blood possesses them.'

Roland, whom latterly Mrs. Lindsay had learned to like better than was her wont, was now gone, and would nevermore, she was assured, repass the door of Earlshaugh, and she actually felt as much regret for him as it was in her hard, cold nature to feel. He had been kind, her heart said to herself, and his soft, gentle, and polished manners contrasted most favourably with those of the few men she met now, and especially with those of her brother Hawkey.

'The self-contained bearing, the habitual repose of one who mixes in good society, invariably displays,' it is said, 'a striking dissimilarity to those who, immersed in the business of life, have not such opportunities. Women note these things keenly; especially do they regard the carriage of those whom they believe to move in circles above their own.'

With regard to Annot, as one connected by marriage with the Lindsay family, she was not sorry at the turn affairs had taken with regard to that enterprising young lady and her brother, Hawkey Sharpe. Socially, Annot was far beyond, or above, the bride he could ever have hoped to win, and she might be the means of raising him, steadying and curing him of his horsy, low, and gambling propensities, which had made him prove a great anxiety in many ways, with all his usefulness to herself, since, on her husband's death, she became mistress of Earlshaugh.

'Thanks, Deb, old girl,' said he, as he pocketed a cheque of hers for fifty pounds, and thought gloomily over the two thousand that would in time become inexorably due and must be paid, or see him stigmatized as a welsher!

'Little does the outer world know of all I have to put up with from you, Hawkey,' said she, with a sigh, as she locked away her cheque-book, and he surveyed her with a cool and discriminating stare through his eyeglass—the use of which be affected in imitation of others—screwed into his right eye.

'It is too bad of you to talk to me in that way, Deb,' said he, 'when I have cut out and relieved you of the presence of that impudent beggar, Lindsay. Miss Drummond, as an only daughter, must, I suppose, be the heiress to something or other.'

'I thought she would never look with favour on you—but treat you as Maude did,' said Mrs. Lindsay, slowly fanning herself with a large black lace fan.

Hawkey laughed maliciously; then he suddenly set his teeth together and exclaimed:

'Maude! I'll pay her out yet—she and I have not squared our accounts—I shall be even with her before long. As for little Annot not looking at me—by Jove, she has looked and said all I could have wished. She is not so "stand-off" and unapproachable as you may think all her set to be, when a fellow knows the way to go about it—as I rather flatter myself I do,' he added, caressing his straw-coloured and tenderly-fostered moustache, and pulling up his shirt-collar.

'But where have you and she met, since you ceased to occupy your rooms here?'

'Oh—with the hounds—in the park—wherever I wished, in fact. You and she, Deb, will get on excellently together, if we all play our cards well now—I marry one of the family, don't you see? Then, I haven't a doubt that Annot has money.'

'Did she give you reason to suppose she has?'

'N—no—not exactly—well?'

'She will succeed to whatever her mother may have—little, probably.'

'Will have, or may have—shady that! Well, unlike most heiresses, she's a deuced pretty little girl, Deb, and suits my book exactly. So, with your assistance, we shall be all right.'

'My assistance?'

'Of course.'

'Bright, soft, and girlish as she seems, I suspect there is not a more artful damsel in London,' said Mrs. Lindsay shrewdly.

'Oh bosh, Deb! Well, if it be so, two can do the artful game; but does not your own knowledge of human nature lead you to see,' he added sententiously, 'that art and prudence too give place when love comes on the scene?'

'Love—yes—are you quoting a play? Will this fancy of hers last—if fancy it is?'

'Why not?'

'You are not a gentleman in her sense of the word.'

'You are deuced unpleasant, Deb!' said he, contemplating his spiky nails.

'And her sudden quarrel with Roland Lindsay—if quarrel it was—I do not understand.'

'I do. He is a poor beggar—dropped out of the hunt—and I—I am——'

'What?'

'Supposed to be your heir,' said he, putting the suggestion gently; 'long, long may it be only supposition, Deb; but a few thousands yearly—say five—would make us all right, and then we have the run of the house here—what more do we want? So all will be right, even with the county, I say again, if we only play our cards well.'

She had played her cards well in the past time, she thought, as Hawkey, whom conversation always made thirsty, left her in quest of a brandy and soda.

Seated in her luxurious boudoir, her memory went back to the days of her early life, as an underpaid and hard-worked governess; and then to those when she became the humble and useful companion to Roland's mother, and, after her death, a kind of guardian to Maude on the latter leaving school. Then came the accident that befel the old Laird in the hunting-field at Macbeth's Stank—a wet ditch with a 'yarner' on each side, the terror of the Fife Hunt, but said to have been leapt by the usurper's horse when he returned from Dunnimarle after slaying the family of Macduff; and how necessary she made herself to the suffering invalid; how (artfully) she seemed to anticipate his thoughts, to understand all his wants, his favourite dishes and so forth; and how grateful he became to her, and how she clung to him like a barnacle or octopus, without seeming to do so. How necessary he soon found it to have a clever, sensible, and loving woman—one rather handsome, too—to look after him, when his two sons—especially that spendthrift in the Scots Guards—seemed to regard him as only a factor or banker to draw upon without mercy; and so he married her one morning when the weather was very cold; when the early snow was on the Ochil summits and powdering the Lomonds of Fife, and then she knew that she was the wife of a landed gentleman of old and high descent—Colin Lindsay, Laird of Earlshaugh!

She was, of course, to be a second mother to Maude (who declined to view her as such) and to his two sons if they became careful; and meantime, ere dying, he handed over to her, by will, as stated, beyond all hope of disputing it at law, every wood, acre, and tree he possessed, causing much uplifting of hands and shaking of heads in ominous wonder throughout the county, and more especially in the East Neuk thereof.

But she bore herself well, dressed richly as became her age and new station—kept a handsome carriage with her late husband's arms—the fesse chequy argent and azure for Lindsay—thereon in a lozenge; but was rarely seen in the company of Maude, who did not, would not, and never could, approve of the position so ungenerously assigned to herself and her only surviving brother Roland, who had been much less to blame than his senior of the Household Brigade.

And Mrs. Lindsay was just then beginning to discover that she was likely to have—in the person of her brother, as an intrusive, if sometimes necessary factotum—something of a skeleton in her cupboard at Earlshaugh.

Since the Laird's death, Hawkey Sharpe had loved well to pose as a man of influence and importance—more than all, as the probable and future proprietor of Earlshaugh; and liked to imagine how all would look up to him then and seek his favourable notice.

His sister's secret and deadly ailment was to him a constant source of anxiety that was not borne of affection; he dreaded, also, her 'kirk proclivities,' and the influence possessed over her 'by that old caterpillar, the minister.' 'I'll have to look sharp now after my own interests—old Deb is getting rather long in the tooth for me,' he would think at times.

Treated as she had been by Maude and others of the family since her marriage, she could not have a very kindly feeling to the Lindsay line. 'Blood is warmer than water,' says our Scottish proverb; and Hawkey was the only kinsman she had in the world that she knew of; but, a scapegrace, a spendthrift, and toady to herself, as she knew him to be, some of her sympathies were just then rather more with the disinherited Roland Lindsay than Mr. Hawkey Sharpe would have relished, had he in the least suspected such a thing.

And Annot's thoughts on reviewing her new position were rather of a mingled sort, and something of this kind:

'I am going to marry this man Hawkey Sharpe. Odious man! I cannot pretend, even to myself, to be much in love with him—if at all; yet I am going to marry him—and why? Because I love the splendid patrimony that, in time, will become his; this beautiful estate, this grand old house, the parure of family diamonds, and the settlements that must be made upon me. I always meant to marry the first wealthy man who asked me, and now I am only true to my creed—the creed mamma taught me. Can anyone blame me for that? Of course I would rather a thousand times have had poor Roland with Earlshaugh, because he is a man that any woman might love and be proud of; but failing him, I must put up with the person and name of—Hawkey Sharpe. Can anyone think it very wicked that I—a penniless little creature—should prefer such a well-feathered nest as this to that gloomy and small poky house in South Belgravia, with its one drab of a servant, cold meat, shabby clothes, and all its sordid concomitants? No; give me the ease, the prosperity, the luxury, and the flesh-pots of Earlshaugh, with its manor and lands, wood, hill, and field.'

But it was a considerable relief to her mind—shamelessly selfish though she was—when within twenty-four hours after Roland's departure her two cousins and Jack Elliot (whose faces she cared never to see again) also left for the capital, and she remained behind the guest of—Mrs. Lindsay.

'As for Roland,' Annot thought, 'he will get over our little affair easily. He loved me, no doubt, but love we know to be only a parenthesis in the lives of most men.'

CHAPTER XLI.

THE CAPTIVE.

We must now change the scene to the Soudan—Beled-es-Soudan, or 'The Land of the Blacks,' so called by ancient geographers—whither a single flight of imagination will take us without undergoing a fortnight's voyage by sea to Alexandria, viâ the Bay of Biscay, with its long, heavy swells, and the Mediterranean, which is not always like a mill pond; and then a long and toilsome route across the Lower and Upper Provinces to where the Sheikh Moussa Abu Hagil was journeying towards his remote home, with the luckless Malcolm Skene in his train—a place on the borders of the Nubian Desert, not far from the Nile, in the neighbourhood of the third cataract, and situated about midway between Assouan, the name of which had not, as yet, become a 'household word' with us, and Khartoum, where then the well-nigh despairing Gordon was still waging his desperate defence against the Mahdi.

By this time how weary had the eye—yea, the very soul—of the luckless captive become of the desert scenery, in a land visited only by a few bold travellers, who in times past had accompanied the caravans from one valley to another. There the desert sand is deep and loose, with sharp flinty stones, in some places sprinkled with glistening rock salt, and showing here and there a grove of dwindled acacias or tufts of colocynth and senna, to relieve the awful dreariness of its aspect.

The water in the pools, even in the rainy season, is there black and putrid; hence the Arabs of the district remove with their flocks to better regions, where the higher mountains run from Assouan to Haimaur.

Steering, as it were, unerringly by landmarks known to themselves alone, the Sheikh Moussa Abu Hazil and his followers made progress towards his home—or zereba—in the quarter we have mentioned.

Malcolm Skene had now been conveyed so far inland by his captors that escape seemed hopeless; yet, buoyed up by the secret chance that such might come, he struggled on with the party day by day, ignorant of the fate that awaited him, though he could never forget that of Palmer and his companions on the shore of the Red Sea.

More than once Hassan Abdullah mockingly held before him the pocket compass, which, of course, he had contrived to abstract on some occasion. Its loss did not matter much now, but it was eventually appropriated by the Sheikh Moussa, whether it were efrit or not; and Hassan, who seemed inclined to resent this, received in reward a blow from their leader's lance.

The latter, who, in some respects, was not unlike the published portraits of his kinsman Zebehr, was at the head of a body of Bedouins, not Soudanese. Each tribe of these wild horsemen is considered to have an exclusive property in a district proportioned to the strength and importance of the tribes, but affording room for migration, which is indispensable among a people whose subsistence is derived from cattle, and the spontaneous produce of the sterile regions they inhabit. Thus they often join neighbouring tribes, Emirs and Sheikhs, in the hope of an advantageous change. In this manner were this Bedouin troop under the banner of Sheikh Moussa.

All were thin and hardy men, with the muscles of their limbs more strongly developed than the rest of the body; their strength and activity were great, and their power of abstinence such that, like their own camels, they could travel four or five days without tasting water. Their deep black eyes glared with an intensity never seen in Northern regions, and gave full credence to the marvellous stories Skene had heard of their extraordinary powers of discriminating vision and the acuteness of their other senses.

Unlike the nearly nude warriors of the Mahdi, these Bedouins under their floating burnous wore shirts of coarse cotton with wide and loose sleeves—a garment rarely changed or washed. Over this some had a Turkish gown of mingled cotton and silk, but most of them wore a mantle, called an abba, like a square, loose sack, with slits for the arms, woven of woollen thread and camel's hair, girt by a girdle, and showing broad stripes of many colours; but trousers of all kinds seemed superfluities unknown. Picturesque looking fellows they were, and reminded Skene of the descriptive lines in Grant's 'Arabia':

        'Freedom's fierce unconquered child,
The Bedouin robber, nursling of the wild,
With whirlwind speed he guides his vagrant band,
Fire-eyed and tawny as their subject sand:
On foam-flecked steeds, impetuous all advance,
Whirl the bright sabre, couch the quivering lance,
Or grasping, ruthless, in the savage chase,
The belt-slung carbine and spike-headed mace,
Ardent for plunder, emulate the wind,
Scorn the low level, spurn the world behind;
While the dense dust-cloud rears its giant form,
And, rolled in spires, revealed the threatening storm.'

Malcolm Skene found that he was rather a favourite with these wild fellows from the facility with which he could converse with them in Arabic; and though he knew not the thousand names that language is said to possess for a sword, he could repeat to them the Fatihat, or short opening chapter of the Koran, called that of prayer and thanksgiving; and they accorded him great praise accordingly. And, sooth to say, any Christian may repeat it without evil, as it simply runs thus in English:

'Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures; the Most Merciful; the King of the Day of Judgment! Thee do we worship, and of Thee do we beg assistance. Direct us in the right way of those to whom Thou hast been gracious; not of those against whom Thou art incensed, nor of those who go astray.'

But he knew the hostility of the slimy and savage Greek, Pietro Girolamo, and of the cowardly and false Egyptian, Hassan Abdullah, was undying towards him, and that they only waited for the opportunity to take his life, if possible unknown to the Sheikh, and then achieve their own escape from the latter.

On every occasion that suited they reviled him, spat on him, and hurled pebbles at him; but if their hands wandered instinctively to pistol or poniard he had but to utter the magic words to the Sheikh Moussa, 'Ana dakheilak!' (I am your protected), and the lowering of the lance-head in threat sufficed to send them cowed to the rear.

Moussa now made Skene acquainted with a fact which, though explanatory as to the reason why his life was spared, did not prove very soothing or hopeful; that he meant to retain him at his zereba as a hostage for his kinsman Zebehr Pasha, 'then under detention at Cairo by those sons of dogs the English—Allah bou rou Gehenna!'

Hence, as yet, Malcolm knew that his life was deemed of some value to his captors, who did not then foresee the future deportation of the king of the slave dealers, by Lord Wolseley's orders, to Gibraltar.

To escape, on foot or horseback, or in any way elude the Bedouin guard, seemed to him a greater difficulty than to achieve the same thing from Soudanese, so well were the former mounted, so amply armed, so fleet and active in movement, and every way so acute, eagle-eyed, serpent-like in wile and wisdom and relentless as a tiger in fury and bloodshed.

Even if he could successfully elude them, what lay before him—what behind, the way he must pursue, if ever again he was to reach the world he had been reft from! The desert—the awful, trackless desert he had traversed in their obnoxious company, but could never hope to traverse it alone—the desert, where water is more precious to the traveller than would be the famous Emerald Mountain of Nubia itself! It barred him out from civilization as completely as if it had been the waves of a shoreless sea.

The Sheikh often rode by his side, and asked him many perplexing questions about Europe and the land of the French, of which the inquirer had not the most vague idea, or of how the red soldiers Of the mysterious Queen reached Egypt, or where they came from; of Stamboul, which he thought was in Arabia; of India, which he thought was in Russia—of who were the English, and who the British that always aided them; adding, as he stroked his great beard, that 'it mattered little, as they must all perish—Feh sebil Allah!' (for the cause of God).

He hated them with a bitterness beyond all language, as interferers with the traffic in djellabs, as the slave-dealers term their human wares; and for the losses he had sustained at their hands, like Osman Digna, when some of his dhows were captured on their voyage to Jeddah by British cruisers; and ultimately even Suakim became so closely watched by the latter that his caravan leaders had to deposit their captives by twos and threes at lonely places on the shore of the Red Sea, to transmit them across it when occasion served. Then when he came to speak of the Anglo-Egyptian slave convention, which was the ruin of the traders in human flesh, he gnashed his teeth, his black eye-balls shot fire, and he looked as if with difficulty he restrained himself from pinning Skene to the sand with his lance.

It was the ruin of the Soudan, he declared, as the Christians only wished to liberate all slaves that they might become their property. He had struggled against this, he said, with voice and sword till the summer of 1881, when the Mahdi, Mahommed Achmet Shemseddin, issuing from his cave on the White Nile, proclaimed himself the New Prophet. Then he cast his lot with the latter, and in two years after served with him at the capture of El Obeid, and the slaughter of the armies of Hicks and Baker, when they won together a holy influence and a military reputation, which were greatly enhanced by subsequent conflicts and events.

Such was the stern, unpleasant, and uncompromising individual in whose hands Malcolm Skene found himself retained as a hostage, in a trifling way it seemed, for Zebehr-Rahama-Gymme-Abel, better known as Zebehr Pasha, whilom the friend of General Gordon, but in reality the most slippery, savage, and bitter enemy of Britain in the present time.

And full of the heavy thoughts his entire circumstances forced upon him, somewhere about the first of November he found himself, with his escort, approaching a zereba which had been one of the headquarters of Zebehr, but latterly assigned to his kinsman, Sheikh Moussa, and the very aspect of it made even the stout heart of Malcolm Skene sink within him, as he had been prepared for a tented camp, or wigwam-like village, but not for the place in which he found himself, and which was one of those described by Dr. Schweinfurth, the great German traveller, when he visited Zebehr Pasha a short time before.

CHAPTER XLII.

THE ZEREBA OF SHEIKH MOUSSA.

At some little distance from the Nile, but what distance, whether one or ten shoni, Skene could not then discover, stood the zereba to which the Sheikh had lately fallen possessor after Zebehr (who had been lord of thirty exactly similar), in a strip of green, where a few palms, lupins, and beans grew in an amphitheatre of small mountains—rocky, jagged, volcanic in outline and aspect. A few camels and donkeys grazed spectral-like in the vicinity amid a silence that was intense, and in a district where there were no flights of birds as in Egypt, and no wide reaches of valley covered with green and golden plenty.

Through a gorge in the steep rocky mountains, whose sides were blackened by the sun of unknown ages, and broken into fragments by some great convulsion of nature, the zereba was entered.

It was a group of well-sized huts, enclosed by tall hedges, in the centre of which stood the private residence of Sheikh Moussa, having various apartments, wherein usually armed sentinels, black or swarthy, half-nude, with glowing eyes and bright weapons—swords and spears or Remington rifles—kept guard day and night.

Through these, as one who was to be treated, as yet, with hospitality at least, Malcolm Skene was conducted by a couple of handsomely attired slaves (for here the power of the Anglo-Egyptian Convention was nil), who gave him coffee, sherbet, and a tchibouk, all most welcome after the last day's toilsome march; and, throwing himself upon a carpet and some soft skins, he strove to collect his thoughts, to calculate the distance and the perils that lay between him and freedom, and to think what was to be done now!

Meanwhile the Bedouins were grooming their horses outside, laughing, chatting, smoking, and drinking long draughts of bouza from stone jars—a kind of Nubian beer made from dhurra.

'People always meet again,' said Pietro Girolamo with a savage grin, showing all his sharp, white teeth beneath a long and coal-black moustache. 'The world is round, you know, Signor, though the Sheikh thinks it flat—flat as my roulette-table at Cairo. Ah, Christi! we have not forgotten that; sooner or later people always meet again, and so shall we.'

And with these words, which contained a menace, the Greek withdrew to some other part of the zereba, where he seemed to be somewhat at home, as he was—Skene afterwards discovered—father of the third and favourite wife of Sheikh Moussa.

The chambers, or halls—for such they were—seemed silent—save a strange growling and the rasping of iron fetters—and empty now, though there sometimes, in the palmy days of the slave trade, as many as two thousand dealers in djellabs gathered with their chained and wretched victims every year.

'The regal aspect of these halls of State,' says Dr. Schweinfurth, 'was increased by the introduction of some lions, secured, as may be supposed, by sufficiently strong and massive chains.'

It was the rattle of the latter and the growling of the lions that Malcolm Skene heard with more bewilderment than curiosity on the subject.

Here in his favourite abode, Zebehr, says the doctor, was long 'a picturesque figure, tall, spare, excitable, with lions guarding his outer chamber, and his court filled with armed slaves—smart, dapper-looking fellows, supple as antelopes, fierce, unsparing, and the terror of Central Africa; while around him gathered in thousands infernal raiders, whose razzias have depopulated vast territories. Superstitious, too, was Zebehr, for in his campaign against Darfour, he melted down two hundred and fifty thousand dollars into bullets—for no charm can stay a silver bullet—and cruel as death itself! A word from him here raised the Soudan in revolt against Gordon in 1878; and it was only after some fierce righting that Gessi Pasha succeeded in breaking the back of the revolt. After hunting the slave raiders like wild beasts, he captured and shot eleven of their chiefs, including Suleiman, the son of Zebehr. Hence the blood-feud between Gordon and Zebehr which led the latter to refuse to accompany the former to Khartoum. The slave-dealers were slain in hundreds by natives whom they had plundered. Zebehr's letters were found, proving that he had ordered the revolt; but no action was taken against him, and he continued to live in luxurious detention at Cairo.'

When Baker Pasha was organizing his forces to relieve Tokar, he asked that Zebehr might go with him at the head of a Nubian division. Zebehr and Sheikh Moussa Abu Hagil raised the blacks, but the Anti-Slavery Society protested against the employment of the former as improper and in the highest degree perilous. Sir Evelyn Baring pleaded for Zebehr and Moussa, but Lord Granville was inexorable. He wrote: 'The employment of Zebehr Pasha appears to her Majesty's Government inexpedient both politically and as regards the slave trade.'

Thus far some of the history of yesterday, which, nevertheless, may be new to the reader.

On his first entering the zereba Skene had returned the formal welcome or greeting of Sheikh Moussa—touching his forehead, lips, and breast—a symbolic action signifying that in thought, word, and heart he was his.

Pietro Girolamo, the Greek Islesman from Cerigo, was—we have said—the father-in-law (at least one of them) to Moussa Abu Hagil.

Malcolm Skene came to the knowledge of that connection through a stray copy of the now pretty well-known Arabic newspaper, the Mubashir, which he found in the zereba; and the columns of which contained a memoir of that enterprising Sheikh, and in retailing some startling incidents in his life gave a little light on certain habits of the dwellers in the desert.

Girolamo had been the skipper of one of his slave dhows, or armed brigs, in the Red Sea, during the palmy times, when as many as five thousand head of slaves were exposed annually in the market place of Shendy—a traffic in which Moussa, like his kinsmen, Zebehr Pasha, had grown enormously rich; and, for a suitable sum, he bought a daughter of Girolamo, a beautiful Greek girl. She became his third wife, and died in giving birth to a daughter, the inheritor of her pale and picturesque beauty, though shaded somewhat by the Arab mixture in her blood; but in her fourteenth year—a ripe age in those regions of the sun—her charms were said to surpass all that had seen before and had become the exaggerated theme of story-tellers and song-makers, even in the market places and the cafés of Damanhour and Cairo.

The girl was named Isha (or Elizabeth) after her mother, and educated in such accomplishments as were deemed necessary to the wife of a powerful and wealthy Emir, for such Moussa destined her to be, if not perhaps of his friend and leader the Mahdi Achmet when the time came; but the old brigand—for the slave dealer was little better in spirit or habit when not absent fighting, plundering, and raiding in search of djellabs—seemed never happy save when in the society of this daughter, his only one, his other children being sons, four of whom had fallen in battle against Hicks on the field of Kashgate.

Notwithstanding all the care with which the women of the East are secluded in the Kah'ah, or harem, Isha had a lover, a young Bedouin warrior named Khasim Jelalodeen, who, though he had no more hope of winning her to share his humble black tent than of obtaining the moon, loved her with all the wild passion of which his lawless Arab nature was capable.

To have whispered of this passion to the Sheikh Moussa, whom we have described as resembling a mummy of the Pharaohs' time resuscitated, would have ensured the destruction of Khasim, who had only his sword, his rifle, and a horse with all its trappings.

Yet Isha was not ignorant of the love the Bedouin bore her, as he had a sister named Emineh, who was a kind of companion and attendant of the former, and went between the lovers as carefully and subtly as any old Khatbeh, or betrother in the Abdin quarter in Cairo in the present hour—thus freely bouquets, symbolically arranged—the simple and beautiful love-letters of Oriental life, were exchanged between them through the kind agency of Emineh.

Sheikh Moussa loved his brilliant little daughter, but he loved money more; and when a caravan, under an old business friend of his named Ebn al Ajuz (or 'the son of the old woman,' obtained by his mother's prayers in the mosque of Hassan at Cairo) passed en route from Darfour for the capital and Assiout, laden with ivory, gum, and slaves—chiefly women and girls, the dealer, having heard of the beauty of Isha, applied to the Skeikh, and made him an offer which, as both were in the trade, he found himself—filial regard and affection apart—bound to consider.

Moussa, to do him justice, had no great inclination to sell his daughter, the light of his household, though he had remorselessly sold the daughters of others by the thousand; yet he was curious to know her value, as prices had gone down even before the arrival of Gordon at Khartoum, especially when Ebn al Ajuz spoke of the sum he was prepared to give, and that the purse-holder was no other than that generally supposed misogynist, the Khedive himself.

He introduced the merchant to her apartments in order to show her merits and discover the price, of which he could judge, however, by his own business experience.

Her rooms, covered with soft carpets, having luxurious divans, decorated ceilings, and tiled floors, with beautiful brackets supporting finely wrought vessels, and having large windows of lattice work, others of stained glass, representing floral objects, bouquets, and peacocks, Arabic inscriptions and maxims written in letters of gold and green, received no attention from the turbaned and bearded slave-dealer, whose attention was at once arrested by Isha, who had been clad, she knew not why, in her richest apparel, with her eyebrows needlessly blackened and her nails reddened by henna.

Ebn al Ajuz, whom long custom had rendered a dispassionate judge of beauty in all its stages, from the fairest Circassian with golden hair to the dark and full-lipped woman of Nubia, was struck with astonishment by the many attractions of the half-Greek girl.

'Allah Kerim!' he exclaimed. 'With her face, form, and entire appearance I have not the slightest fault to find,' he frankly acknowledged; 'every motion, every attitude, every feature display the most beautiful grace, symmetry, and proportion. Allah! she should be named Ayesha, after the perfect wife of the prophet!'

On hearing this a blush burned in the face of the girl, and she pulled down her yashmac or veil.

The merchant pressed Moussa to name her price, as they sat over their pipes and coffee; and so greatly did avarice exceed affection, that Moussa, who—said the writer in the Mubashir—it was thought would not have exchanged his daughter for the Emerald Mountain itself, was so dazzled by the offer made that he agreed to sell her, and preparations even were at once made for her departure, despite her tears, her entreaties, and her despair.

Khasim Jelalodeen was filled with grief and consternation. Oh for Jinn or Efrits, the spirits born of fire, to aid him!

He had his fleet horse corned, refreshed by a bitter draught of bouza (not water), saddled, and in constant readiness for any emergency; and in the night, well armed, with his heart on fire and his brain in a whirl, he made his way secretly and softly to that part of the zereba in which the Kah'ah, or women's apartments, were situated—an act involving his death if caught, and caught he was by the guards of Moussa, who were about to slay him on the spot; but immemorial usage has established a custom in the Desert that if a person who is in actual danger from another can in anticipation claim his protection, or touch him barehanded, his life is saved.

He passed himself as a Karami, or mere robber, and as such was made a close prisoner, destined to await the pleasure of Moussa, who had just then a good deal to occupy his mind.

Meanwhile Emineh, having ascertained exactly where her rash, bold brother was in durance, contrived to introduce herself there next night with a ball of thread, and tying an end thereof to his right wrist she withdrew, winding it carefully off as she went, till she penetrated to the sleeping apartment of Moussa, and applying the other end to his bosom woke him, saying in Arab fashion:

'Look on me, by the love thou bearest to God and thy own self, for this is under thy protection!'

Then the startled and angry Sheikh arose, took his sword, and followed the clue till it guided him to where Khasim, the supposed Karami, was confined, and he was compelled to declare himself the protector of the latter. His bonds were taken off; the thongs with which his hair, in token of degradation, had been tied were cut with a knife; he was entertained as a newly-arrived guest, and was then set at liberty.

Emineh gave him his horse and arms, and he took his departure from the vicinity of the zereba, but only to watch in the distance.

'In due time the caravan of Ebn al Ajuz came forth from the gates and boundaries of thorny hedge, and the lynx-eyed Arab, Khasim, with his heart beating high, watched it from the concealment of a mimosa thicket, and knew the curtained camel litter which contained the object of his adoration, as the flinty-hearted Moussa was seen to ride beside it for a time.

The love of Khasim was not that of the educated, the cultivated, as it is understood in other parts of the world—the cultivated in music, art, and literature—but of its kind it was a pure, ardent, and passionate one, and in its fiery nature unknown to 'the cold in clime and cold in blood.'

He would bear her away, he thought; she would yet be his bride, won by his spear and horse, like the bride of many an Arab song and story; they would have a home among the fairy-like gardens of Kordofan and beyond the mountains of Haraza. Was he not invulnerable? Had he not an amulet bound to his sword-arm by the Mahdi himself—an amulet before which even the bullets and bayonets of the British had failed?

So the caravan with Isha wound on its way towards the Desert!

How dark the red round sun had suddenly become. Khasim looked up to see if it still shone, and it was setting fast, amid clouds of crimson and gold, throwing long, long purple shadows far across the plain, and there in its sheen the Nile was running swiftly as ever—swift as life runs in the Desert and elsewhere!

Out of the latter arose a cloud of dust, with many a glittering point of steel! The caravan was suddenly attacked, its column broken and pierced by a band of wild Kabbabish Arab horsemen, fifty in number at least, and led by that slippery personage, the Mudir of Dongola, on whom the British Government so grotesquely bestowed the Cross of St. Michael and St. George—a gift ridiculed even by the Karakush, or Egyptian Punch.

A conflict ensued; revolvers and Remington rifles were freely used; saddles were emptied, and sabres flashed in the moonlight. General plunder of everything was the real object of the Mudir and his Kabbabishes; to rescue Isha was the sole object of Khasim, who charged in among them.

Amid the wild hurly-burly of the conflict, the shrieks of the women, their incessant cries of walwalah! the grunting of the camels, the yells of the Arabs, and amid the dense clouds of dust and sand raised by hoofs and feet, Khasim Jelalodeen speedily found the litter in which the daughter of Moussa was placed, and was in the act of drawing forth her slight figure across his saddlebow—horror-stricken though the girl was, albeit she had seen death in more than one form before—when the merchant, Ebn al Ajuz, exasperated to lose her after all the treasure he had spent, shot her dead with his long brass pistol; but ere he could draw another Khasim clove him to the chin, through every fold of the turban, by one stroke of his long and trenchant Arab sword, and, with a wild cry of grief and despair, spurred his horse into the desert and was seen no more, though rumour said he joined the banner of Osman Digna before Suakim.

So this was a brief Arab romance of the nineteenth century as acted out in a part of the world which changes not, though all the world seems to change elsewhere.

Most wearily passed the time of Malcolm Skene's captivity in the zereba of Moussa Abu Hagil. Weeks became months, and the closing days of the year found him still there, and necessitated to be ever watchful, for both Pietro Girolamo and Hassan Abdullah had, he knew, sworn to kill him if an opportunity were given them; and nothing had as yet stayed their hands but the influence of the Sheikh, who protected him for purposes of his own.

Thus his life was in hourly peril; the bondage he endured was maddening, and he could not perceive any end to it or escape from it save death. As for escape, a successful one seemed so hopeless, so difficult to achieve, that it gradually became useless to brood over it—without arms, a horse, money, or a guide.

He knew that he must now be deemed as one of the dead by his regiment, by the authorities, and, more than all, by his widowed mother and dearest friends, and have been mourned by them as such.

Rumour had said ere he left Cairo that a relieving column was to start for Khartoum. How that might affect his fate he knew not; it might be too late to help him in any way, and to be too late was the order of our affairs in Egypt now.

So time passed on, and he was in darkness as to all that passed in the outer world.

At last there came tidings which made the Sheikh Moussa eye him darkly, dubiously, and with undisguised hostility—tidings which Malcolm Skene heard with no small concern and alarm.

These were the close arrest of Zebehr Pacha as a traitor to the Khedive Tewfik, and his sudden deportation from Cairo beyond the sea to Gibraltar, by order of Lord Wolseley.

This event, thought Skene, must seal his own fate as an enforced and most unwilling hostage now!

The golden grain, the full-eared wheat and bearded barley had been gathered in every field and on every upland slope around his home; the year had deepened into the last days of autumn; the woods and orchards of ancient Dunnimarle were odorous of autumnal fruit and dying leaves; the skies were gray by day and red and gloomy at eve.

White winter had come, and every burn and linn been frozen in its rocky bed; the thundering blasts that swept the bosom of the Forth had rumbled down the wide chimneys of Dunnimarle and swept leaves and even spray against the window panes; while the aged trees in the glen below had shrieked and moaned ominously in the icy winds till winter passed away, and people began hopefully to speak of the coming spring, but still a lone mother mourned for her lost son—her handsome soldier son, ever so good, so tender, and so true to her, now gone—could she doubt it?—to the Land of the Leal!

CHAPTER XLIII.

A MARRIAGE.

While Malcolm Skene was counting the days wearily and anxiously, and, in common parlance, 'eating his heart out,' in that distant zereba, near the Third Cataract of the Nile, time and events did not stand still with some of his friends elsewhere; among these certainly were Roland Lindsay and Hester Maule, and the latter did indeed mourn for the hard and unknown fate of one whose love she never sought but surely won.

Roland did not start immediately for Egypt after turning his back in mortification and disgust on Earlshaugh, but for a brief time took up his quarters at the United Service Club in Edinburgh with Jack Elliot. The speedy marriage of the latter and Maude, who had gone to Merlwood with Hester, was then on the tapis, and fully occupied the attention of all concerned.

It was impossible for anything like love to exist long, after the rude shock—the terrible awakening—Roland had received; yet ever and anon he found himself rehearsing with intense bitterness of spirit the memory of scenes and passages between himself and Annot—drivelling scenes he deemed them now! How had he said to her more than once:

'My darling—my darling! Be true to me; the day when I cease to believe in you will kill me—you are such a child—you know so little of the world, sweet one!'

'So little of the world—a child!' thought he. 'What an ass I was! I am not killed by it, and she has been false as the devil. How came I to say things that seemed so prophetic?'

Thus, as he thought over all the love and blind adoration he had lavished on her, he felt only rage and sickness at his own folly. He saw it all now, when it was too late—too late!

What human heart has not learned the bitterness of these two bitter words, in many ways, through life?

Yet, tantalizingly, she would come before him in dreams, and thus recall him to the words of an old sonnet—

'Half pleading and half petulant she stands;
Her golden hair falls rippling on my hands;
    Her words are whispered in their old sweet tone.
But neither word nor smile can move me now—
There is an unseen shadow on her brow.
    I cannot love, because all trust is gone!'

It was a very awkward subject for Hester to approach, yet, seeing him so moody, so silent and trist, when first again he came to Merlwood, she said to him timidly and softly:

'Forget the past, Roland. She made no real impression on your heart, but affected your imagination only.'

And now he began to think that such was indeed the case; while to Maude it seemed strange indeed that Annot Drummond should be at Earlshaugh, posing as the future mistress thereof, while she and her disinherited brother were a species of outcasts therefrom.

Earlshaugh—the old house of so many family traditions and memories—was very dear to Maude in spite of all the dark and mortifying hours she had lately spent under its roof. What races and frolics and fun had gone on there in the past time, when she, her brothers, and Hester Maule were all happy children, in the long corridors and ghostly old attics, under the steep roofs and pointed turrets where the antique vanes creaked in the wind; and how greater seemed their fun when the rain storms of winter or spring came rattling down on the old stone slates, and they all nestled together under the slope, with a sense of protection and power unknown in future years—so the girl's heart clung to the old roof-tree with a love that nothing in the future could destroy.

There was no use thinking of all these and a thousand other things, as her home was now to be wherever that of Jack Elliot was.

Some of her regrets at times were shared by Roland, for they were a race peculiar to—but not alone in—Scotland, these Lindsays of Earlshaugh.

They had ever been high in pride and strong in self-will, lording it over their neighbours in the Howe and East Neuk of Fife, in the days when many a barbed horse was in stall, and many an armed man, 'boden in effeir of weir,' sat at the Laird's table; proud of their ancient pedigree and many heroic deeds, all unstained by timidity in war, and foreign gold in time of peace—a stain few Scottish noble families are without; proud of the broad lands that had come to them not by labour or talent certainly, but by the undoubted right to be lords of the soil by inheritance, when the soil was not held by a mere sheepskin, but by the sword and knight-service to the Scottish Crown.

And now to return to more prosaic times. We have said that there was a chronic antagonism between Maude and her stepmother, Mrs. Lindsay; then, when Roland hurried to quit Earlshaugh, she and Jack resolved to get married, and married they were, quite quietly, as Roland was in haste to be gone to Egypt, and they were to pass a brief honeymoon ere Jack followed him—as he had inexorably to take his turn of service there too.

Of the Earlshaugh will, and Maude's small inheritance under it, Jack made light indeed.

'What matters it?' said he; 'I am Elliot of Braidielee, and there will be our home-coming, when we have smashed up the Mahdi, and I can return with honour!'

At this marriage Annot Drummond was not present—no invitation was given to her, and Mrs. Lindsay excused herself through illness. Maude laughed at her apology.

'Though we were grown up, and so beyond her reach in some respects, she has been like the typical stepmother of the old fairy tales,' said the girl, who, sunny-haired, blue-eyed, and bright, looked wonderfully beautiful, apart from t lat strange halo which surrounds every bride on her marriage day.

'All weddings are dull affairs, and we are well out of this one—don't you think so?' said Annot coyly to her new lover.

'Perhaps, but ours won't be so,' replied Hawkey Sharpe with a knowing wink. 'I expect it will be rather good fun.'

She shivered a little at his bad style. The visits that are usually paid and received, the letters that are usually written, the choosing of much useless millinery, furniture, plate, and equipages, and the being 'trotted out' for the inspection of mutual friends were all avoided or evaded by the quiet mode in which Jack Elliot and Maude were made one, and their nuptials a fact accomplished; but there was no time for 'doing' Paris, Berlin, the Riviera, or Rome, as Jack was bound for Egypt within a tantalizingly short period, so he secured a charming little villa for his bride in the southern and perhaps most pleasing quarter of the Modern Athens till he could return—if he ever did return—from that land of disease and death, where so many of our young and brave have found their last home.

Mr. Hawkey Sharpe at Earlshaugh laughed viciously when he read the announcement of the marriage in the newspapers. It was not a pleasant laugh, even Annot thought, and boded ill to some one.

Maude seemed beyond his reach now, so far as he seemed concerned; but there remained to him still hatred and revenge, as we may have to show.

CHAPTER XLIV.

THE TROOPSHIP.

So while Jack and Maude were absent on their brief honeymoon Roland bade adieu to Hester, his old uncle Sir Harry, and to pleasant Merlwood ere turning his steps to the East.

As he looked on the refined face of the girl, with her long-lashed gentle eyes, for the last time, something of the old tenderness that Annot had clouded, warped, or won away, came into his heart again, and he longed to take her kindly in his arms ere he went, but stifled the desire, and simply held forth his hand when she proffered her pale and half-averted cheek. He dared not kiss away the quiver he saw upon her lips.

'Good-bye, dear Hester,' said he. 'Have you not a word or two that I may take with me—such as a dear sister might give?'

But her still quivering lips were voiceless; the forced smile on them was gone, and the soft light of her violet-blue eyes was quenched as if by recent tears; sweet eyes they were, dreamy and languid, their white lids fringed by lashes long and dark.

Roland noted this with a heavy heart, and thought his gentle cousin never looked so beautiful or attractive as then, when her little hand, which trembled, was clasped for the last time in his, and she withdrew to the end of the room.

'Good-bye, nephew,' said Sir Harry, propping himself on a stout Indian cane. 'God keep you from harm, and may every good attend you; but,' he added, his keen eyes glistening angrily through the film that spread over them, 'does your conscience quite absolve you?'

'In what, uncle?'

'What? Why, your conduct to my girl—your cousin Hester,' said Sir Harry, in a low voice.

'Uncle?'

'Did you make no effort when last at Merlwood here to win her admiration, her regard, her love? Did you not simply play with her heart, and deem it perhaps flirting?—hateful word! In all her anguish—and I have seen it—she has never had a word of reproach for you, whatever her thoughts, poor child, may be; but please to think another time, Roland, and not attempt your powers of fascination and to act the lady-killer, lest you crush a heart that might be a happy one.'

Roland felt himself grow pale as he listened wistfully, half mournfully, to these merited but most unexpected remarks from the abrupt old gentleman, to whom he was sincerely attached. Knowing their truth, an emotion of shame, with much of reproach or compunction, gathered in his heart, and he muttered something apologetic—that he had no longer the position or prospects he once had—that Earlshaugh was no longer his—and felt in some haste to be gone, though he was shocked to see that the old man appeared to be suddenly and sorely broken down in health. The Jhansi bullet had worked its way out at last, but left a wound that would neither heal nor close; and hence, perhaps, the irrepressible irritability that led to these reproaches, some part of which reached the ear of Hester, and covered her with the deepest confusion, and made her welcome the moment of Roland's final departure; and then she said:

'Oh, papa, how could you speak as you did? Roland made me no proposal, asked me for no regard, and I gave him—no promise. I have known him, you are aware, all my life, and I do love him very dearly—but as a brother—nothing more,' added poor Hester with a very unmistakable sob in her slender throat. 'You do him injustice—he has not wronged me; but you know well how others have wronged him.'

But her father only resumed the amber mouthpiece of his. hookah, and continued to smoke in uncomfortable silence.

So Roland was gone, and apparently out of her life more than ever now.

Notwithstanding that he certainly had not treated her well at Merlwood, Hester was for a time quietly inconsolable for his departure, which he had taken in a mood of mind rendered so stern and reckless by the episode of Annot, that she pitied him.

He would, she knew, court danger and wounds; seek perhaps every chance of being killed—dying far away from friends and kindred—dying a soldier's death without getting, perchance, even a grave in the hot sands of the desert.

He would, she feared, rush on his fate; 'but men often make their own fate; they are weak who are blindly guided by circumstances,' she had read. 'It is given us to distinguish right from wrong; and if men persist in wrong when the right is before them, then be the consequences on their own head.'

The necklet—the gift he had given her at Merlwood—was clasped lovingly round her throat now, and its pendant nestled in her breast.

'The future is vague!' thought Hester; 'but one thing is sure, we shall never be as we have been—what we were to each other at one time—he and I. Shall we ever meet again—who can say? The sea is treacherous with its storms and other perils—the war is too dreadful to think of! We may never, never see each other more, and the last hour he passed here may have been the last we shall have spent together in this world.'

If he survived everything and came back again, could she be like the Agnes of 'David Copperfield'? She feared not. Therein she had read the story of a noble woman who had secretly loved a man all her life—even as she had loved Roland, and who yet showed no sign of sorrow when he married another woman. Agnes was David's counseller and friend until he was nearing middle age, and it was only when he asked her to be his wife that she made the simple confession of her lifelong love.

She pondered over all these things as she wandered alone by the wooded Esk, the placid murmur of whose flow as it lapped among the pebbles was the only sound that broke the silence of the rocky glen, while at the same hour Roland was amid a very different scene—one of high excitement, noise, and bustle, almost uproar.

Alongside a great jetty in Portsmouth Harbour H.M. troopships Bannockburn and Boyne were taking troops and stores on board for Alexandria, and on the poop of the former, a floating castle of 6,300 tons, Roland stood amid a group of officers, whose numbers were augmenting every few minutes, and the interest and excitement were increasing fast, as it was known that when the great white-hulled trooper cleared out the Queen had sent special orders that the ship was to keep well to the westward, that she might meet her in her own yacht and pay farewell to the troops on board, mustering about six hundred men of various arms of the service, and a host of staff and other officers, including some of Roland's regiment.

A handsome fellow the latter looked in his blue braided patrol-jacket, and white tropical helmet, with his sword clattering by his side.

'When shall I be again in mufti?' thought he with a laugh (using that now familiar term that came back from Egypt of old with the soldiers of Abercrombie), and hearty greetings met him on every hand.

'Lindsay—it is! I didn't know you were rejoining,' exclaimed a brother officer, whose wounded arm was still in a sling. 'I thought your leave was not up till March.'

'I have resigned more than two months of it, Wilton,' replied Roland.

'What an enthusiast, by Jove!'

'Not more than yourself, whose wound must be green yet.'

'Welcome—Roland,' cried another, a cheery young sub. with a hairless chin like an apple; 'you are just the man we want for the work before us.'

'That is right—jolly to see you again!' said a third.

'We missed you awfully, old fellow!' exclaimed a fourth.

Flattering were the greetings on every side as he stood amid the circle of Hussars, Lancers, Artillery, and others, neither perhaps the handsomest nor the tallest amid that merry and handsome group, but looking a soldier every inch in his somewhat frayed and faded fighting kit, which had seen service enough a short time before.

'Here comes Mostyn of ours,' said Wilton, as a very devil-may-care-looking young fellow, in the new khakee uniform, with a field-glass slung over his shoulder, came up. 'How goes it, Dick?—heard you had committed matrimony.'