With half a world of waters between them, these were hard thoughts for a son to have of his mother; but Lady Wilmot had inspired them herself. Both Dalton and Jerry were in such a bad plight from their wounds, and the latter especially from exposure in the bush, that the doctors doubted much if they would 'pull through' after the embarkation, as they were ever and anon tossing on the troubled tide of a jungle-fever that threatened to bear them both away to the shores of 'the Promised Land,' with a grave in the tropical sea. CHAPTER XI. THE OLD WARNING. Fondly had Alison Cheyne looked forward to her return to Chilcote, as a chance of reunion with Bevil Goring, as the means to a probable end of taking up the link of their love where it had last been dropped; and now she had to content herself with the scanty intelligence gathered by Archie among the soldiers of his regiment, that he was not in the camp--was in London, but none knew in what part thereof. In London, thought Alison, and making apparently no effort to write, or to discover her; but she forgot that he must be utterly ignorant of her movements; whether she was at home or abroad; and that she could now receive letters freely and unquestioned, as her father was all but bed-ridden again. Her bubble seemed to be bursting; and this state of affairs--nothing--was the end of it, after all! Thus they were both in painful ignorance of each other's movements amid all the ready appliances of post and telegraph, while Laura Dalton, who would have been a certain means of communication between them, was gone from Chilcote Grange, Alison knew not where, but, as it eventually proved, to Portsmouth to await the returning expedition from the Gold Coast. So Alison's days were passed in nursing and monotony now, and often she and Mrs. Rebecca Prune had their heads together over a cookery-book, studying the decoction or preparation of something 'for papa'--to tempt his appetite; for often _he_ had one dish and Alison another of a more homely kind, or next to none, and though he might have a dainty spring chicken she dared not kill her hens, they were laying so well just then. Sir Ranald had become, as Lord Cadbury remarked rather unfeelingly to Alison, 'deuced stupid and snoozy now.'