as a matter of course. They of course disapproved of the lady, but finding her so young, thought it might be possible to have their own way nearly as much as in the more favourable "old times." Ida had often a very heavy handful with them, but nothing was further from her thoughts than to urge Arthur to get rid of them. The wish to efface herself, and work for him, which was the outward rendering of that strange loyalty and confidence of which I have spoken, came out in matters small as well as great, and made her take a pride in working her household her own way through, and in spite of, these old servants.

When the first hot season had come, and Colonel Craven had hesitated whether he should risk his young wife among the feverish swamps and rivulets when the autumn sun turned their exhalations to poison, she had again felt like herself and active, and resisted Arthur's suggestions that she should go to Murree, begged and implored him not to

send her away, saying, "You don't want me to leave you, Arthur. What could I possibly do up there by myself?" until he yielded, thinking that she was rather young to live alone, hoping that this might mean that she loved him. She stayed, and was tended Arthur, when

none the worse of it; a short, sharp turn of fever knocked him down; was bright, capable, and tender, a ministering angel of a most practical type. Her watchful anxiety and womanly tenderness made this week of fever a very happy time to him; and it was with something like pain when this illness was past, that he noticed her again become childish and submissive, repressing herself, and losing much by it.

As far as there was any secret in this, it was that Ida was vaguely conscious of a want of union and mutual comprehension between Arthur and herself; and, haunted above all things by a dread of losing his love, which seemed to her to be all that her world was built on, and losing that, life would

become a simple fight with no hope in it. So being fanciful and romantic, not a reasoning woman, but just a dreamy, odd child, and much humbler, too, than was to be expected from any side of her we have seen-she accused herself of being too selfish, too frivolous, too wilful, too a good many thingsit mattered very little what the adjectives were. But she set herself to work to be good, to live Arthur's life, not her own, except in the particular directions in which she felt she was acting for him. She manfully tried the impossible, to become some one else, and not herself, and very nearly wrecked both their lives in the effort.

CHAPTER VIII.

IDA'S GARDEN.

It was an early April morning, 1863. The heat in the Peshawur valley had not yet become oppressive, but the Europeans at the station were fast getting into hot-weather habits, and many of the ladies had already gone off to the hills. It was about seven o'clock, and Ida was sitting in a low cane-chair, in a verandah of her home, with "chota hazri," the early, small breakfast of Indian life on a table beside her. She was in her riding-habit, having only just returned from a refreshing scamper among the peach-gardens, which were at that season luxuriant, though the blossoms had fallen, and given place to miserable little hard green balls, later to ripen to the famous peaches of the Peshawur valley. It had been refreshing and pleasant, but she was a little weary now. She had been alone. Arthur

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had ridden off very early to a conference with the general commanding the division about some official matters, looking somewhat grave over a letter that had been brought him from military head quarters, before he was awake; and Ida had had her exercise by herself, enjoying it and it and the peach-gardens after a sort, but with a certain listlessness that was becoming not uncommon with her now. She had lost her love for being alone with her contentment with herself and her own thoughts, and had got nothing in its place that was any help to her. She was contemptuous of her past, and dissatisfied with her present. If life was to be always like this, was it quite worth while to live? Yet she lacked nothing that any one could give her, hoped for nothing tangible, feared nothing that she had words to express. At the moment she was a little vaguely uneasy as to what this new political trouble might mean though deeper under the disease ran a current in a different direction.