Eleanora H. Stooke 
Sir Richard’s grandson [EPUB ebook] 

THE intense heat of the Indian day was over, and Captain and Mrs. Gidley, with their little son, Dick, were seated on the verandah of their bungalow, enjoying the comparative coolness of the evening. Captain Gidley was a tall, handsome man, whose spare form and tanned skin told of many years lived beneath an eastern sun; his wife was a very pretty woman, and though she had lost the pink roses from her cheeks which she had brought to India with her as a bride, ten years previously, she had not grown languid and idle, but was as bright and cheerful as she had been in her English home, so that her little son, now eight years old, always had a friend and playmate in the mother, who loved him, next to her husband, better than all the world.

Dick was a handsome little fellow, though pale and delicate. The climate was beginning to have bad effects upon his health, and many were the anxious glances his mother and father cast upon him from time to time, after which they would meet each other’s eyes, and sigh, realizing that they would not be able to keep him with them much longer in India.

Dick loved his parents dearly. He thought his mother sweeter, and prettier, and cleverer than any of the wives of his father’s brother-officers. With the exception of the faithful ayah who had nursed him with the devotion of her class, his mother had been his chief companion during the eight short years of his life; he had never had a thought which he had hidden from her; he had told her all his childish hopes, and she had shared all his pleasures and joys; they had played like two children together, and all the while he had obeyed her slightest wish.

‘Dick, always obey your mother!’ Captain Gidley had been in the habit of telling his son, and Dick had complied with the willingness of perfect confidence and love.