"We kept our secret, and came at last to laugh over it heartily when we
were together. Then the subject dropped, and by the end of a year had as
much escaped our minds as any other dream would have done. Three months
after the affair the regiment was ordered down to Allahabad, and the
change of place no doubt helped to erase all memory of the dream. Four
years after we had left Jubbalpore we went to Beerapore. The time is
very marked in my memory, because, the very week we arrived there, your
aunt, then Miss Gardiner, came out from England, to her father, our
colonel. The instant I saw her I was impressed with the idea that I knew
her intimately. I recollected her face, her figure, and the very tone of
her voice, but wherever I had met her I could not conceive. Upon the
occasion of my first introduction to her I could not help telling her
that I was convinced that we had met, and asking her if she did not
remember it. No, she did not remember, but very likely she might have
done so, and she suggested the names of several people at whose houses
we might have met. I did not know any of them. Presently she asked how
long I had been out in India?

"'Six years,' I said.

"'And how old, Mr. Harley,' she said, 'do you take me to be?'

"I saw in one instant my stupidity, and was stammering out an apology,
when she went on:

"'I am very little over eighteen, Mr. Harley, although I evidently look
ever so many years older; but papa can certify to my age; so I was only
twelve when you left England.'

"I tried in vain to clear matters up. Your aunt would insist that I took
her to be forty, and the fun that my blunder made rather drew us
together, and gave me a start over the other fellows at the station,
half of whom fell straightway in love with her. Some months went on, and
when the mutiny broke out we were engaged to be married. It is a proof
of how completely the opium-dreams had passed out of the minds of both
Simmonds and myself, that even when rumors of general disaffection among
the Sepoys began to be current, they never once recurred to us; and
even when the news of the actual mutiny reached us we were just as
confident as were the others of the fidelity of our own regiment. It was
the old story, foolish confidence and black treachery. As at very many
other stations, the mutiny broke out when we were at mess. Our regiment
was dining with the 34th Bengalees. Suddenly, just as dinner was over,
the window was opened, and