Lindsay himself came every afternoon, and Laura made tea, and pressed upon him, solicitously, everything there was to eat.  He found her submissive and wishful to be pleasant.  She sat up straight, and said it was much hotter than they had it this time of year up-country, but nothing at all to complain of yet.  He also discovered her to be practical; she showed him the bills for the muslins, and explained one or two bargains.  She seemed to wish to make it clear to him that it need not be, after all, so very expensive to take a wife.  In the course of a few days one of the costumes was completed, and when he came she had it on, appearing before him for the first time in secular dress.  The stays insisted a little cruelly on the lines of her figure, and the tight bodice betrayed her narrow-chested.  Above its frills her throat protruded unusually, with a curve outward like that of some wading bird’s, and her arms, in their unaccustomed sleeves, hung straight at her sides.  She had put on the hat that matched; it was the kind of pretty disorderly hat with waving flowers that demands the shadow of short hair along the forehead, and she had not thought of that way of making it becoming.  Among these accessories the significance of her face retreated to a point vague and distant, its lightly-pencilled lines seemed half erased.

She made no demand for admiration on this occasion, she seemed sufficiently satisfied with herself; but after a time when they were sitting together on the sofa, and he still pursued the lines of her garment with questioning eyes, she recalled him to the conventionalities of the situation.

“You needn’t be afraid of mussing it,” she said.

The ship she took her departure in sailed from its jetty in the river at six o’clock in the morning.  Preparations for her comfort had been completed over night; indeed she slept on board, and Duff had only the duty and the sentiment of actual parting in the morning.  He found her in a sequestered corner of the fresh swabbed quarter-deck.  She wore her Army clothes—­she had come on board in one of the muslins—­and she was softly crying.  From the jetty on the other side of the ship arose, amid tramping feet and shouted orders and the creaking of the luggage-crane, the over-ruling sound of a hymn.  Ensign Sand and a company had come apparently to pay the last rites to a fellow-officer whom they should no more meet on earth, bearing her heavenly commission.

     “Farewell, faithful friend, we must now bid adieu
      To those joys and pleasures we’ve tasted with you,
      We’ve laboured together, united in heart,
      But now we must close and soon we must part.”