“Well, he never came to say good-bye, and I met him yesterday at Manockjee’s buying tinned butter and European stores. He seemed to want to hide. I thought it was because he was ashamed of my seeing him bargaining down the butter and cheese. So I just went after him, to put him at his ease, but somehow I missed him. I think he got away through the verandah, where they keep the old furniture.” “He has gone to the Snows, no doubt,” remarked Mrs. Sladen, exchanging a swift glance with her confederate. “Has he? There is something very queer and sudden about the whole thing. I cannot make it out.” She was not nearly as clever as Mrs. Langrishe, who had “made it out” at a glance, and held her tongue. Indeed, Mrs. Brande was almost the only person in Shirani who did not know that Sir Gloster Sandilands had proposed for her niece the day of the Great Starvation Picnic--and had been refused. CHAPTER XXIII. CAPTAIN WARING’S ALTERNATIVE. Mark Jervis had resisted all Mrs. Brande’s invitations to “take him home and nurse him.” He would be far better, quoth she, in her comfortable spare room, with the best of fresh eggs and new milk, than in that smoky Haddon Hall, at the mercy of his bearer, his meals irregular, and no comforts. She was well accustomed to nursing young men. How many junior civilians, brought to the verge of the grave by India’s new scourge, typhoid, had owed their lives to Sara Brande--young men in her husband’s district, who, just out from home, had scorned such precautions as the purchase of a filter and a cow! What tales, if she had chosen, could Mrs. Brande have related of these same reckless invalids! How, at their first weak, but convalescent and ravenous stage, they had been so happy, so amazed, to find themselves yet in the land of the living, that they had babbled freely to their kind sympathetic nurse, forgetting how often they had laughed at “old Sally Brande.” She seemed an angel, a more than mother to them now. Reclining on sofas and long chairs, in clothes much too large, twilight, or especially moonlight, often found them murmuring experiences and confidences into their nurse’s attentive ear--“of girls at home,” of debts, of scrapes, of good resolutions, of “new leaves” that were about to be turned over;--were not all these things written in the chronicles of Mrs. Brande’s memory? Afterwards, when restored to life and vigour, with a sharpened appetite for life’s enjoyments, these patients marvelled at themselves, their poor weak wagging tongues, their indiscretions! They felt _hot_ as they thought of the secrets which were buried in Mrs. Brande’s bosom; but they were always polite to her, never would suffer a word in her disfavour, and many of them loved her. The cards, letters, and mementoes she received at Christmas were astonishing in variety, and in the difference of post-marks; from Tongoo to Suakim, from Kohat to Galle, these tokens of affectionate