slow," commented Eustace. "You're so infernally deliberate
always. You talk as if it were your life-work."

Scott's eyes shone with a whimsical light. "I begin to think it is," he
said. "Have you finished? Suppose we go." He gathered up the sheaf of
papers at his elbow and rose. "I will attend to these at once."

Eustace strode down the long room looking neither to right nor left,
moving with a free, British arrogance that served to emphasize somewhat
cruelly the meagreness and infirmity of the man behind him. Yet it was
upon the latter's slight, halting figure that Dinah's eyes dwelt till it
finally limped out of sight, and in her look were wonder and a vagrant
admiration. There was an undeniable attraction about Scott that affected
her very curiously, but wherein it lay she could not possibly have said.
She was furious when a murmured comment and laugh from some girls at the
next table reached her.

"What a dear little lap-dog!" said one.

"Yes, I've been wanting to pat its head for a long time," said another.

"Warranted not to bite," laughed a third. "Can it really be full-grown?"

"Oh, no doubt, my dear! Look at its pretty little whiskers! It's just a
toy, you know, nothing but a toy."

Dinah turned in her chair, and gazed scathingly upon the group of
critics. Then, aware of the Colonel's eyes upon her, she turned back and
gave him a swift look of apology.

He shook his head at her repressively, his whole air magisterial and
condemnatory. "You may go if you wish," he said, in the tone of one
dismissing an offender. "But be good enough to bear in mind what I have
said to you!"

Billy leapt to his feet. "Can I go too, sir?" he asked eagerly.

The Colonel signified majestic assent. His mood was very far from genial
that morning, and he had not the smallest desire to detain either of
them. In fact, if he could have dismissed his two young charges
altogether, he would have done so with alacrity. But that unfortunately
was out of the question--unless by their behaviour they provoked him to
fulfil the very definite threat that he had pronounced to Dinah in the
privacy of his wife's room an hour before.

He was very seriously displeased with Dinah, more displeased than he had
been with anyone since his soldiering days, and he had expressed himself
with corresponding severity. If she could not conduct herself becomingly
and obediently, he would take them both straight home again and thus put
a summary end to te