e
moment to his friend.

One thing Desmond missed beyond all else--the sound of music in the
house. Since the terrible evening of his home-coming, the piano had
not been opened; and his recent experience of the effect Honor's music
could produce on him made him chary of asking her to play.

He saw very little of her in these days. Now and then she would come
and read to him; but their former open-hearted intercourse seemed
irrevocably a thing of the past. With the return of the troops,
however, interests multiplied. Desmond's hold on the hearts of all who
knew him had seldom been so practically proven; and the man was moved
beyond measure at that which he could not fail to perceive. His small
study was rarely empty, and often overcrowded with men--Sikhs,
Gunners, Sappers, and, above all, his own brother officers, who
filled the place with tobacco-smoke, the cheerful clink of ice against
long tumblers, and frequent explosions of deep-chested laughter; while
Desmond threw himself whole-heartedly into the good minute and enjoyed
it to the full.

To Evelyn this new state of things was a little disconcerting. During
Theo's illness she, as his wife, had enjoyed special attention and
consideration; and since her incomprehensible refusal of his offer to
throw up the Frontier, had even regarded herself as something of a
heroine, if an unwilling one. Now, all of a sudden, she felt deserted,
unimportant, and more or less "out of it all." The past fortnight
seemed an uplifted dream, from which she had awakened to find herself
sitting among the dust and stones of prose and hard facts. Yet she
could not complain definitely of anything or any one. Honor and Theo
were kind and tender, as always; but the one was temporarily busy, and
the other very naturally enjoying a reversion to masculine society.
Nobody seemed to want her. There seemed no particular use for her any
more.

To make matters worse, the whole station wore a subdued air. The Club
compound was practically deserted; and Evelyn's first outing in that
direction left her with no desire to repeat the experiment for the
present. The Sikhs had lost a popular captain; while a Gunner
subaltern, who had returned seriously wounded, was being nursed by Mrs
Conolly and the only woman in the battery.

This sort of thing was, as Theo had said, "part and parcel" of life on
the Frontier; it was to this that she had condemned herself for the
next twenty years at least; by which time