Eustace was the head of the
family, and he and Isabel had been all in all to each other. He felt her
going more than I can possibly tell you, and scarcely a week after the
news came he got his things together and went off in the yacht to South
America to get over it by himself. I stayed on at Oxford, but I made up
my mind to go out to her in the vacation. A few days after his going, I
had a cable to say they were married. A week after that, there came
another cable to say that Everard was dead."
"Oh!" Dinah drew a short, hard breath. "Poor Isabel!" she whispered.
"Yes." Scott's pale eyes were gazing straight ahead. "He was killed two
days after the marriage. They had gone up to the Hills, to a place he
knew of right in the wilds on the side of a mountain, and pitched camp
there. There were only themselves, a handful of Pathan coolies with
mules, and a _shikari_. The day after they got there, he took her up the
mountain to show her some of the beauties of the place, and they lunched
on a ledge about a couple of hundred feet above a great lonely tarn. It
was a wonderful place but very savage, horribly desolate. They rested
after the meal, and then, Isabel being still tired, he left her to bask
in the sunshine while he went a little further. He told her to wait for
him. He was only going round the corner. There was a great bastion of
rock jutting on to the ledge.
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