LITMIR.BIZ

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him. He worked his arms hurriedly into his fatigue jacket, trusting to get away to the house and spend a couple of minutes on his adornment; and with any other visitor it might have been accomplished, but Lady Camper disliked sitting alone in a room. She was on the square of lawn as the General stole along the walk. Had she kept her back to him, he might have rounded her like the shadow of a dial, undetected. She was frightfully acute of hearing. She turned while he was in the agony of hesitation, in a queer attitude, one leg on the march, projected by a frenzied tip-toe of the hinder leg, the very fatallest moment she could possibly have selected for unveiling him.

      Of course there was no choice but to surrender on the spot.

      He began to squander his dizzy wits in profuse apologies. Lady Camper simply spoke of the nice little nest of a garden, smelt the flowers, accepted a Niel rose and a Rohan, a Cline, a Falcot, and La France.

      ‘A beautiful rose indeed,’ she said of the latter, ‘only it smells of macassar oil.’

      ‘Really, it never struck me, I say it never struck me before,’ rejoined the General, smelling it as at a pinch of snuff. ‘I was saying, I always ....’ And he tacitly, with the absurdest of smiles, begged permission to leave unterminated a sentence not in itself particularly difficult

      ‘I have a nose,’ observed Lady Camper.

      Like the nobly-bred person she was, according to General Ople’s version of the interview on his estate, when he stood before her in his gardening costume, she put him at his ease, or she exerted herself to do so; and if he underwent considerable anguish, it was the fault of his excessive scrupulousness regarding dress, propriety, appearance.

      He conducted her at her request to the kitchen garden and the handful of paddock, the stables and coach-house, then back to the lawn.

      ‘It is the home for a young couple,’ she said.

      ‘I am no longer young,’ the General bowed, with the sigh peculiar to this confession. ‘I say, I am no longer young, but I call the place a gentlemanly residence. I was saying, I…’

      ‘Yes, yes!’ Lady Camper tossed her head, half closing her eyes, with a contraction of the brows, as if in pain.

      He perceived a similar expression whenever he spoke of his residence.

      Perhaps it recalled happier days to enter such a nest. Perhaps it had been such a home for a young couple that she had entered on her marriage with Sir Scrope Camper, before he inherited his title and estates.

      The General was at a loss to conceive what it was.

      It recurred at another mention of his idea of the nature of the residence. It was almost a paroxysm. He determined not to vex her reminiscences again; and as this resolution directed his mind to his residence, thinking it pre-eminently gentlemanly, his tongue committed the error of repeating it, with ‘gentleman-like’ for a variation.

      Elizabeth was out—he knew not where. The housemaid informed him, that Miss Elizabeth was out rowing on the water.

      ‘Is she alone?’ Lady Camper inquired of him.

      ‘I fancy so,’ the General replied.

      ‘The poor child has no mother.’

      ‘It has been a sad loss to us both, Lady Camper.’

      ‘No doubt. She is too pretty to go out alone.’

      ‘I can trust her.’

      ‘Girls!’

      ‘She has the spirit of a man.’

      ‘That is well. She has a spirit; it will be tried.’

      The General modestly furnished an instance or two of her spiritedness.

      Lady Camper seemed to like this theme; she looked graciously interested.

      ‘Still, you should not suffer her to go out alone,’ she said.

      ‘I place implicit confidence in her,’ said the General; and Lady Camper gave it up.

      She proposed to walk down the lanes to the river-side, to meet Elizabeth returning.

      The General manifested alacrity checked by reluctance. Lady Camper had told him she objected to sit in a strange room by herself; after that, he could hardly leave her to dash upstairs to change his clothes; yet how, attired as he was, in a fatigue jacket, that warned him not to imagine his back view, and held him constantly a little to the rear of Lady Camper, lest she should be troubled by it;—and he knew the habit of the second rank to criticise the front—how consent to face the outer world in such style side by side with the lady he admired?

      ‘Come,’ said she; and he shot forward a step, looking as if he had missed fire.

      ‘Are you not coming, General?’

      He advanced mechanically.

      Not a soul met them down the lanes, except a little one, to whom Lady Camper gave a small silver-piece, because she was a picture.

      The act of charity sank into the General’s heart, as any pretty performance will do upon a warm waxen bed.

      Lady Camper surprised him by answering his thoughts. ‘No; it’s for my own pleasure.’

      Presently she said, ‘Here they are.’

      General Ople beheld his daughter by the river-side at the end of the lane, under escort of Mr. Reginald Rolles.

      It was another picture, and a pleasing one. The young lady and the young gentleman wore boating hats, and were both dressed in white, and standing by or just turning from the outrigger and light skiff they were about to leave in charge of a waterman. Elizabeth stretched a finger at arm’s-length, issuing directions, which Mr. Rolles took up and worded further to the man, for the sake of emphasis; and he, rather than Elizabeth, was guilty of the half-start at sight of the persons who were approaching.

      ‘My nephew, you should know, is intended for a working soldier,’ said Lady Camper; ‘I like that sort of soldier best.’

      General Ople drooped his shoulders at the personal compliment.

      She resumed. ‘His pay is a matter of importance to him. You are aware of the smallness of a subaltern’s pay.

      ‘I,’ said the General, ‘I say I feel my poor half-pay, having always been a working soldier myself, very important, I was saying, very important to me!’

      ‘Why did you retire?’

      Her interest in him seemed promising. He replied conscientiously, ‘Beyond the duties of General of Brigade, I could not, I say I could not, dare to aspire; I can accept and execute orders; I shrink from responsibility!’

      ‘It is a pity,’ said she, ‘that you were not, like my nephew Reginald, entirely dependent on your profession.’

      She laid such stress on her remark, that the General, who had just expressed a very modest estimate of his abilities, was unable to reject the flattery of her assuming him to be a man of some fortune. He coughed, and said, ‘Very little.’ The thought came to him that he might have to make a statement to her in time, and he emphasized, ‘Very little indeed. Sufficient,’ he assured her, ‘for a gentlemanly appearance.’

      ‘I have given you your warning,’ was her inscrutable rejoinder, uttered within earshot of the young people, to whom, especially to Elizabeth, she was gracious. The damsel’s boating uniform was praised, and her sunny flush of exercise and exposure.

      Lady Camper regretted that she could not abandon her parasol: ‘I freckle so easily.’

      The General, puzzling over her strange words about a warning, gazed at the red rose of art on her cheek with an air of profound abstraction.

      ‘I freckle so easily,’ she repeated, dropping her parasol to defend her face from the calculating scrutiny.

      ‘I burn brown,’ said Elizabeth.

      Lady Camper laid the bud of a Falcot rose against the young girl’s cheek, but fetched streams of colour, that overwhelmed the momentary comparison of the sunswarthed skin with the rich dusky yellow of the rose in

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