If the fates favored Major Alan Hawke upon this eventful day, for as he was contentedly awaiting the news of Ram Lal’s departure for Allahabad, the card of Captain Harry Hardwicke, A. D. C., and of the Engineers, was sent up to him. With a neat bit of Indian art, old Ram Lal had sent the carriage around to report, as a mute signal of his own departure. It was a flood tide of good fortune! In ten minutes, the Major and his welcome guest were spinning along in the cool of the evening, toward the deserted ruins of the old city of Delhi! As they passed through the Lahore gate, Hardwicke’s pith helmet was doffed with a jerk, as a superb carriage passed them, proceeding in a stately swing. Major Alan Hawke bowed low as he caught the cold eye of the would-be Sir Hugh Johnstone. “Who are the ladies, Hardwicke?” laughed the Major, as he saw the young officer’s face suddenly crimson. “For a man who won the V. C. in your dashing style, you seem to be a bit beauty-shy!” They were hardly settled yet for their cozy chat. Hardwicke lit a cheroot to cover his evident confusion. “I know” he slowly answered, “that one of them is Miss or Madame Delande, old Fraser’s house duenna--I will still call him Fraser, you see--the other is the mystery of Delhi. Popularly supposed to be the old boy’s daughter, and his sole heiress, Miss Nadine,” concluded the young aid-de-camp. “The old curmudgeon keeps her judiciously veiled from mortal ken. No man but General Willoughby has ever exchanged a word with her. The dear old boy--his memory does not go back beyond his last B. and S.--he can’t even sketch her beauty in words. And she is as hazy, even to the Madam-General--our secret commanding officer. There is a continuous affront to society in this old monomaniac’s treatment of that girl.” “You would like to storm the Castle Perilous, and awaken the Sleeping Beauty?” archly said Hawke, as they rolled along under a huge alley of banyan trees. “Not at all,” gravely said Hardwicke. “She is only a girl, like other girls, I presume; but, this old fool is only fit for the old days, when the kings of Oude flew kites and hunted with the cheetah; or, half drunken, dozed, lolling away their lives in these marble-screened zenanas, with the automatic beauties of the seraglio. Our English cannon have knocked all that nonsense silly. Here is a high-spirited, Christian English girl, shut up like a slave. It’s only the unfairness of the thing that strikes me.” Hawke eyed the blue-eyed, rosy young fellow of twenty-six with an evident interest. Stalwart and symmetrical in figure, Hardwicke’s frank, manly face glowed in indignation.