The dragoons sprang from their horses, the infantry broke their ranks, and the men of the 13th Light Infantry crowded round the wife of their colonel and the other rescued ladies, holding out their hard brown hands in welcome; eyes were glistening, lips quivering, and many a hurrah was, for a time, half choked by emotion and sympathy, while officers and soldiers again and again shook hands like brothers that had been long parted. Friends now met friends from whom they had been so long and painfully separated; wives threw themselves exultingly and passionately into the arms of their husbands; daughters leaned upon their fathers' breasts and wept. Many there were whose widowed hearts had none to meet them there; and many an orphan child stretched forth its little hands to the ranks wherein its father marched no more, though some might give a kiss or a caress to "Tom Brown's little 'un--Tom that was killed at Ghuznee," or to the "little lass of Corporal Smith--poor Jack that was killed with his missus at Khoord Cabul;" but these sad episodes were soon forgotten amid the general joy. Wheeled round on the mountain slope, the artillery thundered forth a royal salute; muskets and swords were brandished in the sunshine; caps tossed up, to be caught and tossed up again; reiterated English cheers woke the echoes of the hills of Jubeaiz, which seemed to repeat the sounds of joy to the winds again and again. CHAPTER XXIII. THE DURBAR. "Coincidence," saith Ouida, "is a god that greatly influences human affairs;" and the sequel to our story will prove the truth of this trite aphorism, when we now change the scene from Cabul to our cantonment, in the territory between the Sutledge and the Jumna--to the Court Sanatorium of Bengal--the country mansion of the Governor-General at Simla, a beautiful little town of some five hundred houses, built on the slope of the mighty Himalayas, where, amid a veritable forest of oak, evergreens, and rhododendron, and the loveliest flora a temperate zone can produce, surrounded by that wondrous assemblage of snow-covered peaks that rise in every imaginable shape (a portion of those bulwarks of the world, that slope from the left bank of the Indus away to the steppes of Tartary and the marshes of Siberia), the representative of the Queen retires periodically to refresh exhausted nature, and mature the plans of government in those cool and pleasant recesses, where the punkah is no longer requisite; where one may sleep without dread of mosquitos and green bugs, nor welcome cold tea at noon as preferable to iced champagne.