Ensign Sand and a company had come
apparently to pay the last rites to a fellow-officer whom they should no
more meet on earth, bearing her heavenly commission.
"Farewell, faithful friend, we must now bid adieu
To those joys and pleasures we've tasted with you.
We've laboured together, united in heart,
But now we must close, and soon we must part."
They had said good-bye to her and God bless you, all of them, but they
evidently meant to sing the ship out of port. Lindsay sat down beside
the victim of the demonstration and quietly took her hand. There was a
consciousness newly guilty in his discomfort, which he owed perhaps to a
ghost of futility that seemed to pace up and down before him, between
the ranks of the steamer-chairs. Nevertheless, as she presently turned a
calmed face to him with her pale apology, he had the sensation of a
rebound toward the ideal that had finally perished in the spotted
muslin, and when a little later he watched the long backward trail of
smoke as the steamer moved down the clear morning river, he remembered
that it was a satisfaction to have prevailed.
The _Sutlej_ had gone far on her tranquil course by the evening of a
dinner in Middleton street, at which the guests, it was understood, were
to proceed later to a party given at Government House by his Excellency
the Viceroy.
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