He stood beside her, stretching out his hands in the well-remembered fashion, as if something sacred lay in them and before the tenderness in his face, the calmness of hers wavered for an instant. "Did we really go through all that together, Phil?" she asked with a tremble in her voice. "Oh my dear, my dear, how much you have all given me! And I give,--so little. But my pride is, like yours, all broken and gone to bits, and I take everything I can get. You should see how I beg for the hospital."
She turned to the big white building beyond the cottage as if to escape into another subject; and Philip turned also.
"Is it,--is it getting along nicely?" he asked dutifully.
"Yes, dear," she replied, looking at him again with a smile; "but we shall have time to talk of that by and by. You haven't given me half the budget of news. And do you know, Phil, I begin to suspect that in writing you tell all the pleasant things and keep back the disagreeables. Now that isn't fair; as children say, it spoils the game."
"Does it? Well, I won't do it again. Let me see what is the most unpleasant story I have heard for the last few months. Ah--yes! that is about the worst." He paused with a frown.
"Only Shunker Dâs is dead. That isn't very distressful; but you remember Kirpo?"
"Yes, of course, of course; but I was not thinking of that; only of the day when she came out of the coolies' hut with a child in her arms, and told us why he was called Nuttu. Well, it is a horrid story, Belle, but that pitiless old fatalist the Khân, who was my informant, saw the hand of high heaven in it. Shunker got the telegram informing him that he was to be made a _Rai Bahâdur_, and another announcing his son's death by the same messenger. Ghastly, wasn't it? He had a fit, and though he lived for some weeks they never could understand a word he said, though he talked incessantly. One can imagine what he wanted from the sequel. Well, at his funeral-pyre, up turns Kirpo with a strapping boy of about eight years old, and there was an awful scene. She swore it was Shunker's son, and made the child defile the ashes. Do you remember her face that day, and how I said she hated somebody? Great Heavens! there is something perfectly devilish in the idea of such a revenge."