nd Robin, of course, and it would hurt them: they would be
angry with her. She was going to make a scandal, a nine days' wonder.
Her father would be grieved--angry, too, perhaps; but that could not be
helped either.

And then--some resentment stirred in her heart against him for the first
time during all the years in which they had been together. He had kept
her in ignorance of her lover's peril. She was not a child that she
should have been kept in ignorance. For the moment she had no tender
excuses for him. If he had been candid with her, then all this trouble
about Robin might have been spared, for she could never have promised
herself as wife to another man while the one she loved was in daily and
hourly danger.

She went into the house with a look of stern accusation on her young
face. The dogs came shrieking down the stairs in vociferous welcome as
usual, but she took no notice of them. Being old dogs and wise, they
recognised a forbidding mood in her, and retired with deprecating
wrigglings of their bodies.

She asked Pat if there were a visitor in the drawing-room.

"No, then, Miss, only the master. I can't make out what came over him at
all to be comin' home in a hansom."

He was minded to tell her that the General was not looking himself, to
give her an affectionate, intimate warning; but she passed him by. He
stood watching her, holding the door open in his hand till she took the
bend of the staircase that hid her from his sight.

"Bedad, the Dowager couldn't have done it better," he said, "shweepin'
by me without a 'By your l'ave, Pat'; and the master, callin' me
'Murphy' to my face, what he's never done since he left the rig'ment. I
wonder what's the matter with Pat. 'Twill be 'Corporal' next."

Nelly looked into the drawing-room. Her father was not there. She turned
the handle of another door, the door of the General's own particular
den, and going in she found him.

She never thought of asking herself how he came to be there at this hour
of the day, he who lived by rule, the click of whose latch-key had
sounded in the hall-door every evening at a quarter to seven as long as
she could remember. The clock on the mantelpiece pointed to ten minutes
to five.

The General was sitting in an armchair by the fireplace as though he had
dropped into it on his entering the room. He was doing absolutely
nothing, and that was an alarming thing enough, if but she had noticed
it. A green evening paper was crum