"Oh, Phil, Phil!" she cried brokenly. "You understand--what this is to me--how I love him--how I love him! Bring him back to me! Promise, Phil, promise!"
And Phil bent till his lips touched the hands he held.
"I will do it," he said with reverence--"so help me, God!"
All through the day and the night that followed Audrey watched and waited.
She spent the terrible hours at the Raleighs' bungalow, scarcely conscious of her surroundings in her anguish of suspense. It possessed her like a raging fever, and she could not rest. At times it almost seemed to suffocate her, and then she would pace to and fro, to and fro, hardly knowing what she did.
Mrs. Raleigh never left her, caring for her with a maternal tenderness that never flagged. But for her Audrey would almost certainly have collapsed under the strain.
"If he had only known! If he had only known!" she kept repeating. "But how could he know? for I never showed him. How could he even guess? And now he never can know. It's too late, too late!"
Futile, bitter regret! All through the night it followed her, and when morning came the haggard misery it had wrought upon her face had robbed it of all its youth.
Mrs. Raleigh tried to comfort her with hopeful words, but she did not seem so much as to hear them. She was listening, listening intently, for every sound.
It was about noon that young Travers raced in, hot and breathless, but he stopped short in evident dismay when he saw Audrey. He would have withdrawn as precipitately as he had entered, but she sprang after him and caught him by the arms.
"You have news!" she cried wildly. "What is it? Oh, what is it? Tell me quickly!"
He hesitated and glanced nervously at Mrs. Raleigh.
"Yes, tell her," the latter said. "It is better than suspense."
And so briefly, jerkily, the boy blurted on his news:
"Phil's back again; but they haven't got the major. The fort was deserted, except for one old man, and they have brought him along. They are over at the colonel's bungalow now."
He paused, shocked by the awful look his tidings had brought into Audrey's eyes.
The next instant she had sprung past him to the open door and was gone, bareheaded and distraught, into the blazing sunshine.
How she covered the distance of the long, white road to the colonel's bungalow, Audrey never remembered afterwards. Her agony of mind was too great for her brain to register any impression of physical stress. She only knew that she ran and ran as one runs in a nightmare, till suddenly she was on the veranda of the colonel's bungalow, stumbling, breathless, crying hoarsely for "Phil! Phil!"