a joke between the two friends, not the less
relished because it was somewhat old.

"I am looking everywhere for the counterpart
of Annie," Sir John used to write after he
got home, "but have not yet succeeded in finding
her; when I do, she shall be packed up and
sent out overland to your address. But, in
order to console you in your bachelorhood, I
have sent by Southampton a newly invented
breech-loading rifle, which the Bishop of
Bondstreet has just brought out, and which, unless
the hand and eye of the man who killed the
tiger just twenty-four years ago this month at
the Jussulpore ghaut have lost their cunning,
ought to do much execution, after the cold
weather is over, in the Terrai jungles. The
present is from Annie, who sends her love, and
hopes still that your next Christmas dinner will
be eaten in this house, and that you will give
up what really seems to be your intention, of
dying in harness. Seriously speaking, or rather
seriously writing, do, my dear Laber, come
home before you get too old to enjoy life in
England. You are now entitled to your
pension, which, with off-reckonings, will give you one
thousand two hundred pounds a year. You
must have saved a few thousand rupees, quite
enough to purchase and furnish a box
somewhere in the country, where you can rent good
shooting. In the season you can come up to
London, and I need hardly say that if you would
eat seven dinners a week in our house, it would
please us more than if you ate six, and that for
the six we shall be more thankful than for five.
I will get your name put up for the Senior and
the Oriental, at both of which places you will
meet a host of old friends. You will be quite
well enough off not to deny yourself a park cob
in the season, and a month at Homburg or
Vichy when that is over. Surely such a life is
in every way preferable to soldiering at your
age, particularly when you have no special
object—so far as I can see—for saving money
You must be tired of India. The country has
entirely changed since we soldiered together at
Cabul, and since the days of the mutiny a curse
seems to have descended upon the service.
What pleasure can you have in field-days, in
blowing up young subalterns for not being
more regular at the riding-school, or in sitting as
a magistrate in the orderly-room, and in awarding
punish drill to drunken gunners? Be advised,
old friend, and come home; send in your papers
on receipt of this letter, and write me to
welcome you at Marseilles, at Malta, or even at
Alexandria. Annie says she would like nothing
better than a trip to the latter place, and that we
will both be delighted to meet you there, go all
together by the French steamer to Jaffa, visit
Jerusalem, thence by Damascus into Syria, spend
a couple of months on the Lebanon, and come
home by Constantinople and the Danube. Say
the word, be up and doing, and you will find us
as good as our word."

In due time, some seventy days or so, there
came a reply to this letter, but not such a one
as Sir John hoped for, and, in the most important
particular, by no means what he had
expected, as the following extract— comprising
the chief part of the letter—will show:

"I only wish, my dear Milson, that I could follow
your advice, leave the service, and go home at
once. But, as you will see before you finish this
letter, I cannot do so until I have scraped together
few more of those rupees which we all despise so
much whilst we are young, but find so absolutely
necessary when we get older. And this leads me at
once to the pith of my tale, which for many years I
have wished to tell you, but somehow, when the
moment came, never dared to speak of until now I
am obliged to do so. You have often joked me
about having a skeleton in my closet, and I have as
often denied the imputation; but I did not speak
the truth. I have a skeleton in my closet, and,
what is more, I am about to send it home ere long
to be placed in your keeping, whilst I remain out
there to work some years longer for what will make
it independent when I am gone. My large pay and
allowances out here, and the very economical way I
live (for I don't spend more than the junior second
lieutenant in the regiment), has enabled me to insure
my life very heavily, so that if I die before I leave
the service, my heir will be able to claim ten
thousand pounds. In the mean time, I am rolling up
my savings in the best and safest investments, and,
so soon as I can write myself down as worth that
amount in hard cash, I will consider my labour for
others at an end, and betake myself to the ease and
dignity of a retired Anglo-Indian in an arm-chair
at the Oriental Club.

But, before I go further, my dear Milson, in this
my confession, I do exact a promise from you, which
I am quite sure you will give, for the sake of old days
when we both went out as griffins together, and in
remembrance of a friendship and an intimacy which
has now spread over a great part of half a century.
The promise I want you to make is this—that
you will not reveal to a soul—not even to your wife
—what I now tell you, and that you will keep the
secret religiously until, if ever, I release you from
observing it. I shall take no further steps in the
matter until I hear from you in reply to this letter;
and when I do hear, as I expect, promising secresy
and accepting the trust, I will at once carry out my
intentions.

"You will be surprised to hear that I have two
daughters, of nineteen and eighteen years respectively.
Their mother was what in this country we call a
Portuguese, which, as you know, means a half-caste
descendant of the old conquerors of India. I met her,
and was married to her according to the rites of the
Roman Church, when I was on leave at Goa, about
twenty-five years ago. Unfortunately, the marriage,
owing to some want of formality about the papers I
ought to have submitted, was not legal according to
the Portuguese law; had it been so, it would have
been also legal in England, and my daughters would
have been entitled to the usual allowance from the
military fund at my death. Very soon after our
marriage I was sent, as you may remember, to Burmah,
where I had a political appointment. My wife
followed me there in due time, and, as I was the only
English officer at the station, the fact of my wife
being dark was not observed. I never mentioned
the fact of my marriage to you, for, like all Anglo-
Indians, I felt somewhat ashamed at my wife being a
half-caste. I always intended to tell you of it some
day, and, had we ever been at the same station
together during my wife's lifetime, I should of course
have made a clean breast of it. She lived seven years
after our marriage, and, curiously enough, these
were exactly the seven years in which you and I