At last Sir Dugald received another telegram, which said that before resigning his position under Government, Charlie was making a tour of inspection, in company with a high medical official, of the British settlements in the Gulf. The cholera had been stamped out at Bandr Abbas, and when this tour was over, Charlie was going home. The telegram concluded with the words, “Letters all missed,” which seemed to shed a little light on the mystery of the sender’s long silence. No doubt he had written, but in some way or other all his letters had gone astray. It was strange, however, that even after this none arrived. Sir Dugald expressed it as his opinion that Charlie must go about looking for pumps in which to post his letters, under the impression that they were pillar-boxes; but Lady Haigh and Cecil held firmly to the belief that, moving about as he was from place to place, he was too busy to write. In vain did Sir Dugald, who had assumed quite a paternal authority over Cecil since their confidential talk on the Sunday preceding Charlie’s departure, urge her to bring her lover to a sense of his undeserved blessings by suspending her own letters for a time--she felt that this was impossible. The long journal-letters supplied the place to her of the Sunday afternoon talks which she had been accustomed to enjoy. A third telegram informed them that Charlie was going home, and gave his English address very clearly. “Letters still gone wrong,” it said again, and Cecil triumphed over Sir Dugald, although he told her that she was only saving Charlie’s character as a lover at the expense of his common-sense. The news of Dr Egerton’s resignation of his post was now public property, and people began to perceive merits which they had hitherto ignored in the way he had performed his duties. His colleague at Bandr Abbas and the rest of the English community there were loud in their praises of his behaviour during the epidemic, and this caused his former adventurous journeys, undertaken for the purpose of investigating the diffusion of the disease, to be brought to mind. Even the fact of his having been instrumental in checking the spread of a cholera epidemic in his former post,--a success which had been followed, as he had told Cecil bitterly long before, by his enforced resignation,--was recalled, and one or two very hard things were said of the superior who had insisted on his removal. In fact, he was the hero of the hour among a certain set in India, chiefly consisting, it is to be feared, of those who had been disappointed and passed over, like himself, but numbering in their ranks some few who could command a hearing in the Press. The remarks of the Indian papers were balm to the souls of Cecil and Lady Haigh, and they read with avidity all that was said in Charlie’s praise, although Lady Haigh once remarked sadly--