“Yes, didn’t you hear that he had got leave from the chief to go and see a friend away at Alibad, to the west of us? They used to work together in the old days, but North had the chance of distinction and got his V.C. and his promotion, and the other man didn’t. I rather like to see North going off in this way to look him up--shows he doesn’t forget old friends, and that sort of thing--and perhaps he is just as glad not to be lionised at the fort. It’s a little hard on us, though.”
“Yes, it is a little suggestive of ‘Hamlet’ with Hamlet left out,” observed Georgia, meditatively, determined that Mr Stratford should not perceive the unreasoning disappointment with which the news had infected her.
“And yet I don’t quite see what he could do for us if he was there, beyond giving us the gratification of beholding him on his native heath, so to speak,” pursued Stratford.
“Oh, well,” said Georgia, carelessly, “I was reckoning on his being able to ride out with us along the way he went, and show us just where his different adventures happened. It would make it seem so much more real, you know.” She was speaking easily and naturally, bent on accounting to herself as well as to Mr Stratford for that absurd sense of disappointment, which was so keen that she feared it must before this have betrayed itself in face or voice. But were Dick’s adventures not real to her? Had she not scanned the papers day by day at the time of the siege as eagerly as Mabel herself? And when at last the full account reached England of the relief of the fort, and of the heroism of the man through whose enterprise it had been accomplished, had she not bowed her head upon the page of the ‘Thunderer’ and cried heartily, out of pure joy in the remembrance that this man had once loved her? Decidedly there was no need that the events attending the relief of Fort Rahmat-Ullah should be rendered more vivid for Georgia; but Stratford seemed struck by the justice of her remark.
“That is quite true, Miss Keeling. North is treating us all very shabbily. I hope you will put it to him at lunch. He leaves us after the mid-day halt, you know.”
But Miss Keeling did not choose to do anything of the kind, and when Sir Dugald appealed to her to join in condemning North’s desertion, she smiled pleasantly as she answered, that no doubt Major North feared lest the attraction of his presence at Fort Rahmat-Ullah should distract the attention of the visitors from the less interesting duties which ought to engross them. The remark was intended to make Dick uncomfortable; and when Georgia saw that he was raging inwardly over the construction she had put upon his motives, absurd though it was, she felt happier, as having in some degree repaid him for the disappointment he had inflicted upon her, although, when he had ridden away, still fuming, she was filled with compunction, and spent some time in solitude and self-reproach, which meant bemoaning her own touchiness and calling herself names.