think I could take such an advantage of her,' I said.

They looked at each other, and Mrs. Farnham said that I was plainly worn
out. I mustn't sit up to prayers.

If I had been given anything like reasonable time I might have made
a fight for it, but four weeks--it took a month each way in those
days--was too absurdly little; I could do nothing. But I would not
stay at mamma's. It was more than I would ask of myself, that daily
disappointment under the mask of gratified discovery, for long.

I spent an approving, unnatural week, in my farcical character, bridling
my resentment and hiding my mortification with pretty phrases; and then
I went up to town and drowned my sorrows in the summer sales. I took
John with me. I may have been Cecily's mother in theory, but I was
John's wife in fact.

We went back to the frontier, and the regiment saw a lot of service.
That meant medals and fun for my husband, but economy and anxiety for
me, though I managed to be allowed as close to the firing line as any
woman.

Once the Colonel's wife and I, sitting in Fort Samila, actually heard
the rifles of a punitive expedition cracking on the other side of
the river--that was a bad moment. My man came in after fifteen hours'
fighting, and went sound asleep, sitting before his food with his knife
and fork in his hands. But service makes heavy demands besides those
on your wife's nerves. We had saved two thousand rupees, I remember,
against another run home, and it all went like powder, in the Mirzai
expedition; and the run home diminished to a month in a boarding-house
in the hills.

Meanwhile, however, we had begun to correspond with our daughter, in
large round words of one syllable, behind which, of course, was
plain the patient guiding hand of Aunt Emma. One could hear Aunt Emma
suggesting what would be nice to say, trying to instil a little pale
affection for the far-off papa and mamma. There was so little Cecily and
so much Emma--of course, it could not be otherwise--that I used to take,
I fear, but a perfunctory joy in these letters. When we went home again
I stipulated absolutely that she was to write to us without any sort of
supervision--the child was ten.

'But the spelling!' cried Aunt Emma, with lifted eyebrows.

'Her letters aren't exercises,' I was obliged to retort; 'she will do
the best she can.'

We found her a docile little girl, with nice manners, a thoroughly
unobjectionable child. I saw quite clearly that I c