Yet Beverley did not gain much by the transaction. Ida fell into a chronic state of health so delicate that decline was threatened; the family physicians interposed, and nearly three years passed away without her being able to join her husband in India, where he was then serving with Trevor Chute's regiment, and where he met his death by a terrible accident. Jerry Vane felt deeply and bitterly the loss of the girl he had loved so well; and he would rather that she had gone to India and passed out of his circle, as he was constantly fated to hear of her, and not unfrequently to meet her; for Jerry's heart did not break, and sooth to say, between balls and dinners, croquet and Badminton parties, cricket matches, whist and chess tournaments, rinking, and so forth, his time was pretty well parcelled out, when in town or anywhere else. Trevor Chute and Beverley had been warm friends when with the regiment. Loving Clare still, and treasuring all the tender past, he felt that her brother-in-law was a species of link between them, through whom he could always hear of her welfare, while he half hoped that she might wish to hear of his, and yet be led to take an interest in him. With all this mutual regard, Chute's dearest friend of the two was not the dead man, but Jerry Vane; yet there had been a great community of sentiment between them. This was born of the affection they fostered for the two sisters, and sooth to say, Beverley, while in India, loved his absent wife with a passion that bordered on something beyond either enthusiasm or romance. It became eventually spiritualised and refined, this love for the distant and the ailing, beyond what he could describe or altogether conceive, though times there were when in moments of confidence, over their cheroots and brandy pawnee, he would gravely observe to Trevor Chute that so strong, and yet so tender, was the tie between him and Ida, that, though so many thousand miles apart, they were _en rapport_ with each other, and thus that each thought, or talked, and dreamt of the absent at the same moment. Be all this as it may, a time was to come when Trevor was to recall these strange confidences and apparently wild assertions with something more than terror and anxiety, though now he only thought of the death-bed of his friend in India, the details of all that befell him, and the messages and mementoes which Jack Beverley had charged him to deliver to Ida on his return to England. They had been stationed together, on detachment, at the cantonment of Landour, which is situated on one of the outer ridges of the Himalaya range, immediately above the Valley of the Deyrah Dhoon, where they shared the same bungalow.