Page:Quartette - Kipling (1885).djvu/26

 incurable nostalgia. I say incurable, yet I fully believed that a visit to England would do much towards curing it; and she confided to me a scheme, which she had not yet broached to her husband, for going to visit her mother in the summer of next year, and persuading that lady to return with her to Bengal.

Is there any need to explain how it came about that, before long, the memory of the life which I had left with so much regret grew dimmer and dimmer till it almost faded away entirely? How the home letters for whose arrival I had at first cared so much became a matter of indifference to me? By every mail they came with almost a disturbing effect, and I found myself bored by reference to things which, six months before, had interested me intensely. The stir and bustle of English life came to me as a dull and meaningless but irritating murmur.

The hot season came quickly on, and the morning rides which I was now in the habit of taking with Laura had to be shortened. Though we might leave the house at the first faint glimmer of dawn, the sun was scarcely above the horizon when his beams made it necessary for us to return to the cool shelter of the darkened room, and for twelve hours his fury must be endured there as best we might.

One morning in April we were out at sunrise, and as even then it was too hot for any pace but a slow walk, our horses went on at their own will, while Laura and I talked of English spring mornings and of country lanes with hedgerows bright with blossom, and rippling rills flashing like jewels in the cool sunlight; and of woods where lilies, shut in golden buds, were waiting for the wooing breath of summer to display their beauty, and where the ferns slowly unfurled their soft green fronds in the sleepy light made by the shadowing trees.

"There is all this in England now," said Laura wistfully; 'Tis a month before the month of May, and the Spring comes slowly up that way.

I was riding carelessly, the bridle lying loose on my horse's neck—looking at her as she spoke, noting on her lips the faint tremor that shook her voice as she quoted the musical lines with infinite tenderness—when my animal stumbled, and I was thrown to the ground. I do not think that I was hurt by the fall, but unluckily I was flung in front of Laura's horse, and his next