Mary stood with her hands clasped, and her breath coming quickly. The blush had quite faded out, and left her unusually pale. But Edward Arundel did not see this: young gentlemen of four-and-twenty are not very attentive to every change of expression in little girls of thirteen.
"Oh, is it you, Mr. Arundel? Is it really you?"
She spoke in a low voice, and it was almost difficult to keep the rushing tears back while she did so. She had pictured him so often in peril, in famine, in sickness, in death, that to see him here, well, happy, light-hearted, cordial, handsome, and brave, as she had seen him four-and-a-half years before in the two-pair back in Oakley Street, was almost too much for her to bear without the relief of tears. But she controlled her emotion as bravely as if she had been a woman of twenty.
"I am so glad to see you," she said quietly; "and papa will be so glad too! It is the only thing we want, now we are rich; to have you with us. We have talked of you so often; and I--we--have been so unhappy sometimes, thinking that----"
"Yes; or wounded very, very badly. The battles in India have been dreadful, have they not?"
"They have not been exactly child's play," he said, shaking back his chesnut hair and smoothing his thick moustache. He was a man now, and a very handsome one; something of that type which is known in this year of grace as "swell"; but brave and chivalrous withal, and not afflicted with any impediment in his speech. "The men who talk of the Affghans as a chicken-hearted set of fellows are rather out of their reckoning. The Indians can fight, Miss Mary, and fight like the devil; but we can lick 'em!"
He walked over to the fireplace, where--upon this chilly wet day, there was a fire burning--and began to shake himself dry. Mary, following him with her eyes, wondered if there was such another soldier in all Her Majesty's dominions, and how soon he would be made General-in-Chief of the Army of the Indus.
"Then you've not been wounded at all, Mr. Arundel?" she said, after a pause.
"Oh, yes, I've been wounded; I got a bullet in my shoulder from an Affghan musket, and I'm home on sick-leave."
This time he saw the expression of her face, and interpreted her look of alarm.