She knew it was urgent.  And then at the last moment I was thirsty; I overdid it.  No; confound it, I’ll tell you the truth!  I went home drunk, too drunk to sit a horse.  And so she—­she sent me to bed, and went in my place.  That’s the thing she wouldn’t tell you, the thing Hyde knew.  She always hated the man—­always.  She only endured him for my sake.”  He broke off.  Baring was looking at him as if he thought that he were raving.  After a moment Ronnie realized this.  “It’s the truth,” he said.  “I’ve told you the truth.  I never won the cup.  I didn’t know anything more about it till it was over and she told me.  I don’t wonder you find it hard to believe.  But I swear it’s the truth.  Now let me go—­and shoot myself!”

He flung round distractedly, but Baring stopped him.  There was no longer any hardness about him, only compassionate kindness, as he made him sit down, and gravely shut the door.  When he spoke, it was not to utter a word of reproach or blame.

“No, don’t go, boy!” he said, in a tone that Ronnie never forgot.  “We’ll face this thing together.  May God help us both!”

And Ronnie, yielding once more, leaned his head in his hands, and burst into anguished tears.

XVI

THE COMING OF HOPE

How they got through the dragging hours of that awful night neither of them afterwards quite knew.  They spoke very little, and slept not at all.  When morning came at last they were still sitting in silence as if they watched the dead, linked together as brothers by a bond that was sacred.

It was soon after sunrise that a message came for Ronnie from the colonel’s bungalow next door to the effect that the commanding-officer wished to see him.  He looked at Baring as he received it.

“I wish you’d come with me,” he said.

Baring rose at once.  He knew that the boy was depending very largely upon his support just then.  The sunshine seemed to mock them as they went.  It was a day of glorious Indian winter, than which there is nothing more exquisite on earth, save one of English spring.  The colonel met them on his own veranda.  He noted Ronnie’s haggard face with a quick glance of pity.

“I sent for you, my lad,” he said, “because I have just heard a piece of news that I thought I ought to pass on at once.”

“News, sir?” Ronnie echoed the word sharply.

“Yes; news of your sister.”  The colonel gave him a keen look, then went on in a tone of reassuring kindness that both his listeners found maddeningly deliberate.  “She was not, it seems, in the bungalow at the time the dam burst.  She was out on the hillside, and so—­My dear fellow, for Heaven’s sake pull yourself together!  Things are better than you think.  She—­” He did not finish, for Ronnie suddenly sprang past him with a loud cry.  A girl’s figure had appeared in the doorway of the colonel’s drawing-room.  Ronnie plunged in, and it was seen no more.