Elizabeth wondered and was piqued at the coldness of the women towards her. She made faint, ineffectual attempts at intimacy with the Colonel’s daughters and the wives of various subalterns, but it was of no avail. She was the daughter of the regiment as far as the officers were concerned, but by no means a sister of the regiment to the ladies. Pelham was surprised that the tongue of scandal passed her by, but with innocence on Elizabeth’s part, and a couple of able–bodied men like Pelham and Darrell to stand by her, the gossips found it safe to let Mrs. Darrell alone. Elizabeth was for a time quite happy in her new life, her only sorrow being the separation from her father. She wrote him passionate letters imploring him to come to see her; but it costs money to get from Washington to Embira in the Punjaub, and General Brandon was chronically hard up. And so her life moved on, almost as closely linked with Pelham’s as with Darrell’s, for two years. It was, however, moving in a direction which Elizabeth only dimly foresaw and understood. By Pelham’s tact and judgment rather than her own there never was a breath of scandal concerning their deep and obvious intimacy. Pelham was a man to be feared as well as respected, and such people are tolerably safe from criticism. Every day of these two years found Pelham more and more deeply and hopelessly in love with Elizabeth, with the knightly love which would guard her not only against the whole world but against himself and herself; for in those two years Elizabeth’s mind, ripening and developing, perceived that she had married a man with every grace and virtue joined to a tiresome and amiable commonplaceness. It frightened her sometimes when she discovered how bored she grew by her husband’s conversation, and she was still more frightened at the prospect which sometimes occurred to her of being separated from Pelham, on whom she had learned to depend as other women depend upon a brother or a father or even a husband. But she was not unhappy, although she gradually found her way out of the lover’s paradise into which she had embarked with Darrell. For Darrell himself she never lost the slightest respect. He was as truthful and honorable and truly unselfish as Pelham himself was. Nevertheless, at the end of two years came the beginning of a crisis. A beautiful boy was born to Elizabeth, a child of fairness and of delightful temper. “The jolliest little chap I ever saw,” swore Darrell at the club, when the baby was less than a week old.