"A time may come," said he, as they sat in their saddles twisting up cigarettes, and passing a flask of Cabul wine between them, while the syces gave each of their unbitted nags a tobrah of fresh corn, "when these Passes of the Khyber Mountains may be as familiar to the English tourist as those of Glencoe and Killycrankie are now--for there was a day when even the land beyond them was a terra incognita to us; and a time may come when the lines of railway shall extend from Lahore even to Peshawar--ay, and further--perhaps to the gates of Herat--though it may not be our luck to see it; but I can scarcely realise that in our age of the world, an age usually so prosaic and deemed matter-of-fact, men should see and undergo all that we have undergone and seen, and in a space of time so short too!" Would a quiet home, a peaceful life, after a happy marriage, ever be the lot of him and Mabel? Loving her fondly and tenderly, with all the strength that separation, dread, and doubt and sorrow, could add to the secret tie between them, he had almost ceased to have visions of her associated with admonitions and prayer from a lawn-sleeved ecclesiastic; a merry marriage-breakfast; a bride in her white bonnet and delicate laces, and smiling bridesmaids in tulle. Such day-dreams had been his at one time; but amid rapine and slaughter, battle and suffering, they had become dim and indistinct, if not forgotten! "Yes, Waller," replied his companion, after a pause, "a British army--we have actually seen a British army, with all its accessories and appurtenances, exterminated at one fell swoop!" "All this place is full of peculiarly sad memories to me, Sir Richmond." "Doubtless; and, like me, you won't be sorry when we all turn our backs on it for ever, as we shall do soon." "True. See! yonder lie our cantonments, ruined walls and blackened ashes now; beyond them are the hills where, with my company--not one man of which is now surviving, myself excepted--I scoured the fanatical Ghazees from rock to rock, and far over the Cabul river, so victoriously! Here, by that old tomb and ruined musjid, we once had a jolly picnic: half the fellows in the garrison, and all the ladies were there--the band of the poor 44th too. By Jove! I can still see the scattered fragments of broken bottles and chicken bones lying among the grass." "I have felt something of this regret when coming on the remembered scene of an old pig-sticking party or bivouac," replied Sir Richmond, with a half-smile at the unwonted earnestness of Waller, who had seemed to him always a remarkably cool and self-possessed man of the world; but he knew not the deeper cause he had for feeling in these matters. "You may say, as an old poem has it-- 'Now the long tubes no longer wisdom quaff, Or jolly soldiers raise the jocund laugh; The scene is changed, but scattered fragments tell Where Bacchanalian joys were wont to dwell.' Is it not so, Waller?"