"Dear good aunt, she got into trouble with all the family for our sake;
and when she was gone no one would give me any tidings of you."
"It was her last disappointment that you were not sent home on sick
leave. Did you get well too fast?"
"Not exactly; but my father, or rather, I believe, my brother, intimated
that I should be welcome only if I had laid aside a certain foolish
fancy, and as lying on my back had not conduced to that end, I could
only say I would stay where I was."
"And was it worse for you? I am sure, in spite of all that tanned skin,
that your health has suffered. Ought you to have come home?"
"No, I do not know that London surgeons could have got at the ball,"
he said, putting his hand on his chest, "and it gives me no trouble in
general. I was such a spectacle when I returned to duty, that good old
Sir Stephen Temple, always a proverb for making his staff a refuge for
the infirm, made me his aide-de-camp, and was like a father to me."
"Now I see why I never could find your name in any list of the officers
in the moves of the regiment! I gave you quite up when I saw no Keith
among those that came home from India. I did believe then that you were
the Colonel Alexander Keith whose death I had seen mentioned, though
I had long trusted to his not being honourable, nor having your first
name."
"Ah! he succeeded to the command after Lady Temple's father. A kind
friend to me he was, and he left me in charge of his son and daughter.
A very good and gallant fellow is that young Alick. I must bring him to
see you some day--"
"Oh! I saw his name; I remember! I gloried in the doings of a Keith; but
I was afraid he had died, as there was no such name with the regiment
when it came home."
"No, he was almost shattered to pieces; but Sir Stephen sent him up the
hills to be nursed by Lady Temple and her mother, and he was sent home
as soon as he could be moved. I was astonished to see how entirely he
had recovered."
"Then you went through all that Indian war?"
"Yes; with Sir Stephen."
"You must show me all your medals! How much you have to tell me! And
then--?"
"Just when the regiment was coming home, my dear old chief was appointed
to the command in Australia, and insisted on my coming with him as
military secretary. He had come to depend on me so much that I could not
well leave him; and in five years there was the way to promotion and to
claiming you at once. We were just settled there, when what I heard made
me long to have decided otherwise, but I could not break with him then.
I wrote to Edward, but had my letter returned to me."