But they could not forget home, and many a time and oft, where the sun-baked cantonments of Meerut seemed to vibrate under the fierce light of the Indian sun, where the temples of Hurdwar from their steep of marble steps look down upon the Ganges, or where the bungalows of Cawnpore or Etwah, garlanded with fragrant jasmine, stand by the rolling Jumna amid glorious oleanders and baubool trees, with their golden balls loading the air with perfume, while the giant heron stalked by the river's bed, the alligator basked in the ooze, and the Brahmin ducks floated overhead, Flora's sweet voice made Lennard's heart thrill as she sang to him the songs of the land they had resolved never to look upon again, even when that sound so stirring to the most sluggish Scottish breast when far away, the pipes of a Highland regiment, poured their notes on the hot sunny air. At home none seemed to care or think of the discarded son but the worthy lawyer Kenneth Kippilaw, who had loved him as a lad, and could not get his hard fate out of his mind. From time to time, inspired by kindness and curiosity, he watched his name among the captains in the military lists of that thick compendium which no Scottish business establishment is ever without--'Oliver and Boyd's Almanack.' Therein, after a while, the name of Lennard Melfort _disappeared_, but whether he was dead, had sold out, or 'gone to the bad,' the worthy Writer to the Signet could not discover, and he not unnaturally sighed over what he deemed a lost life. And here we end that which is a species of prologue to our story. CHAPTER IV. REVELSTOKE COTTAGE. More than twenty years had elapsed after the episodes we have described, and Lennard and Flora had found a new home, and she, her _last one_, more than four hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies from where Craigengowan looks down on the German Sea. But none that looked on Lennard Melfort now would have recognised in the prematurely aged man the handsome young fellow who in ire and disgust had quitted his native land. In two years after he had gone eastward a dreadful fever, contracted in a place where he had volunteered on a certain duty to gain money for the support of his wife and her little Indian establishment--the Terrai of Nepaul, that miasmatic border of prairie which lies along the great forest of the Himalayas, and has an evil repute even among the natives of the country in the wet season when the leaves are falling. This fever broke Lennard's health completely, and so changed him that his rich brown hair and moustache were grey at six-and-twenty, and ere long he looked like a man of twice his age. 'Can that fellow really be Lennard Melfort of the Fusiliers? Why, he is a veritable Knight of the Rueful Countenance!' exclaimed some old friends who saw him at 'The Rag,' when he came home to seek a place of quiet and seclusion in Devonshire, as it subsequently chanced to be.