I have gone back, of course, to my perch at the club, and
Laura is to stay with them until she sails."
"She sails?"
"In the _Sutlej_, next Wednesday. She's got three months' leave. She
really hasn't been well, and her superior officer is an accommodating
old sort. She resigns at home, and I'm sending her to some dear old
friends of mine. She hasn't any particular people of her own. She's got
a notion of taking lessons of some kind--perfectly unnecessary, but if
it amuses her--during the summer. And of course she will have to get her
outfit together."
"And in December," said Hilda, "she comes out and marries you."
"Not a Calcutta wedding. I meet her in Madras and we come up together."
"Ideal," said Hilda; "and is Calcutta much scandalised?"
"Calcutta doesn't know. If I had had my way in the beginning I fancy I
would have trumpeted it. But now I suppose it's wiser--why should one
offer her up at their dinner-tables?"
"Especially when they would make so little of her," said Hilda absently.
The coolie-track had led them into the widest part of the Maidan, where
it slopes to the south, and the huts of Bowanipore. There was nothing
about them but a spreading mellowness and the baked turf under-foot.
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