'Oh, heaven,' she thought, 'if such should be the case with Allan--not in Egypt, for that was very unlikely, but at Gibraltar or Malta, where English ladies were to be met with.'
'Even if married, I fear you would never win the Dunmow Flitch,' Lady Aberfeldie had said to her angrily on one occasion.
'My unfortunate money has been the cause of all this,' replied Olive. 'It excited the cunning and cupidity of that unfortunate man, Holcroft, and has led to the saddest misconceptions and misconstructions from the first between dear Allan and myself,' she added, in tears.
Olive knew that the doubtful position in which she had been placed with reference to Allan had, as she thought, been fully explained away in writing by his mother, and his father too; but from Allan there came no letter to herself.
What did his silence mean? Even anger were better than nothing.
'My unfortunate money,' she repeated: 'my golden chains have proved a curse to us both. He has ceased to love me now, and, loving him as I do, what can my life be to me? And how shall I live on through all the months and years of it without him? What if we never meet again! He may fall in this war as his friend Cameron fell--oh, my love--not you--not you--not _that_.'
Yes--it was all true--too true; the gay, handsome, and usually light-hearted Laird of Stratherroch, one of the most popular fellows in the Black Watch--he who had won the V.C. in battle with his good claymore--he whom Eveline had known in the heyday of his life, when the world seemed so fresh and fair to both, whom she had last seen as a despairing and broken-hearted lover, was gone--struck down by a bullet of some nameless Egyptian savage, buried in the desert, and she would never see him more, though the poignancy of his farewell would haunt her for many a day.
A band of Bedouins had been hovering in the vicinity of Matarieh, plundering and looting. These Allan, after a consultation with Cameron, resolved to make a demonstration against, and with Farquharson, his sergeant, and thirty picked men, in light marching order, they quitted the village, and about an hour before sunrise took their way towards the desert.
The light of the coming day shone along the latter, a sandy waste, overlooked by Jebel Mokattam, a chain of rocks abrupt and barren that extends from Cairo to the cataracts. They are generally flat, with beetling summits, while below, on the face which fronts the Nile, they are furrowed as if water-worn by the rain of ages.