"As my life for the last few years has been spent in India among my brother officers, I need scarcely tell you that the man of whom I speak is an officer. He is, like myself, the son of a rich man; and his military career has been unusually successful. When he joined his regiment he was one of the most thoughtless and impulsive fellows in the universe. He had been spoiled by indulgent friends, and had never in his life had occasion to think for himself. You may bring up a lad in a garden of roses to be a very well-mannered, agreeable fellow, I dare say; but I doubt if the rose-garden education will ever make a great or a wise man. That sort of animal must be reared upon the moorlands, amidst the free winds of heaven. As my friend was thoughtless and impulsive, it was scarcely strange that, when he found himself so idle as to want amusement, he should join in the first tiger-hunt that took place in his neighbourhood, nor was it strange that he should contrive to get seriously wounded by the animal. The wonder was that he escaped alive. He owed the life which his own reckless folly had hazarded to the cool daring of a friend and comrade; and when he woke from the swoon into which he had fallen immediately after feeling the tiger's claws planted in his thigh, he found himself in the coolest and shadiest room of his friend's house in Calcutta. He still felt the tiger's claws; but it was pleasant to know that the sensation was only imaginary, and that the animal had been shot through the head by the brave young civilian--for his friend was a civilian, and a resident in Calcutta. He had just enough sense to murmur some inarticulate expression of gratitude--just enough strength to grasp his preserver's honest hand; and then he grew delirious from the pain of his wounds, and then he had fever, and altogether a very hard time of it. "I think you can guess what is coming now, Lady Cecil. In all the history of the world there never surely was the record of man's sorrow or sickness that was not linked with a story of woman's devotion. When my friend was well enough to know what tender nursing was, he knew that the hands which had administered his medicine and smoothed his pillow from the first hour of his delirium belonged to the civilian's sister; a girl whom he had known only as the best waltzer in Calcutta, but whom he had reason to know now as an angel of pity and tenderness. "Her attendance upon him was as quiet and unobtrusive as it was watchful and untiring; and on the day on which his medical attendants pronounced him out of danger, she left his room, after a few half-tearful words of congratulation, never to enter it again. But she had watched by him long enough to give him ample time for watching her, and he fancied that he had reason to believe he was beloved for the first time in his life.