She too had her hours of storm and stress as the long, hot hours wore on. The terrible tension arising from the suspense was now at an end. Her weak, erring husband had gone to another Bar than the earthly one she had so dreaded for him. Her brief married life lay in ruins, and though love was dead, its spectre haunted her at every turn. Now it was the beautiful face, the impassioned eyes of the almost unknown suitor in the Woodglade arbour that rose before her. Again, it was one incident after another disclosing his disordered heart; scenes before which she had learnt to quail in fear--not for herself, she soon learnt to outlive that--but for the restless, unhappy one to whom she had pledged her wedded troth. Sometimes it was the recollection of that morning on which he had spoken such insulting words to his own father that sprang into her mind. And as she vividly recalled the scene, she began to wonder if, all along, Alfred could have had some subconscious glimmering of the close relationship between him and the noble-hearted man he was spurning which goaded him to a sense of desperation. Then the memory of her happy morning ride with Mark Cheveril came to her mind. How kind, how comforting, how high-toned and self-restrained he had ever proved, and yet, for her sake, he had to endure taunts which, had they been flung at him by any other than her husband, she felt sure would have been dealt with very differently. Yet it had been that friend who had smoothed the dying pillow of her disgraced husband! Deeply grateful as she was to Mark Cheveril for all that he had been to her, she felt no desire to meet him on this dark day, and was thankful that Mr. Morpeth, and not he, had been the messenger of the evil tidings. Perhaps Mark and she would never meet again in this world; yet between them she felt there would ever be the bond forged during these eventful months when faith and honour and fealty had called her to turn from the true man to him whom she had too late awakened to find deeply false, although he was the husband of her youth. Even the thought of the home-going--that thought so thrilling to the hearts of Anglo-Indians--brought no lightening to Hester's load of pain that day, nor for many a succeeding one. CHAPTER XXXVIII. Mr. Morpeth returned to Clive's Road in the evening as he had promised, to tell Hester all he thought needful for her to hear, withholding much which might have added to her pain. He had already secured a passage for her on the first homeward bound steamer, and for her ayah, who he insisted should accompany her. He had also arranged his own sad journey to Calcutta for the same morning.