And hence, perhaps, he had lingered at Merlwood, where his uncle, Sir Harry, who hated, defied, and utterly failed to understand anything of the 'outs and ins' of law or lawyers, including wills and bequests, etc., etc., fed his natural indignation by anathematizing the artful Jezebel of a step-mother; and declaring that he never did and never would believe in her; and adjusting himself as well as that cursed 'Jhansi bullet' would allow him, while lounging back in his long, low, and spacious Singapore chair, he would suck his hookah viciously, and roundly assert, as a crowning iniquity, that he was certain she had 'at least four annas to the rupee in her blood!' CHAPTER III. KASHGATE--A RETROSPECT. It was pretty clear, on the whole, to Hester, that her cousin, Roland Lindsay, thought but little of the past, and perhaps, as a general rule, cared for it even less. While she had been living on the memory of these dear days, especially since this--his last return home--he had allowed other events to obliterate it from his mind. Let us take a little retrospect. In contrast to the apparently languid and _blasé_ smoker, swinging in his net hammock, enjoying the balmy evening breeze by the wooded Esk, and dallying with a girl of more than ordinary loveliness, let us imagine him in a dusty and blood-stained tunic, with a battered tropical helmet, a beard unshaven for many a day, haggard in visage, wild-eyed and full of soldierly enthusiasm, one of the leading actors in a scene like the following, at the fatal and most disastrous battle of Kashgate. It was the evening of the 3rd November in an arid waste of the Soudan--sand, sand everywhere--not a well to yield a drop of brackish water, not a tree to give the slightest shade. The heat was awful, beyond all parallel and all European conception, well-nigh beyond endurance, and the doomed soldiers of General Hicks--known as Hicks Pasha--a veteran of the famous old Bombay Fusiliers who had served at Magdala, and to whose staff Roland Lindsay, then a subaltern, was attached, toiled on, over the dry and arid desert steppe that lies between El Duem and El Obeid, in search of the troops of the ubiquitous Mahdi--the gallant Hicks and his few British officers training their loosely and hastily constituted Egyptian army to operations in the field, even while advancing against one, said to be three hundred thousand strong--doubtless an Oriental exaggeration--but strong enough nevertheless, as the event proved, to sweep their miserable soldiers off the face of the earth, in that battle, the details of which will never be known till the Last Day, as only one or two escaped.