r Rachel and her mother, close to an open window, for it was so warm
that even Mrs. Curtis enjoyed the air; and perhaps because that watching
the colonel had made Rachel's discourses somewhat less ready than usual,
he actually obtained an interval in which to speak! He was going the
next day to Bishops Worthy, there to attend his cousin's wedding, and at
the end of a fortnight to bring his sister for her visit to Lady Temple.
This sister was evidently his great care, and it needed but little
leading to make him tell a good deal about her. She had, it seemed, been
sent home from the Cape at about ten years old, when the regiment went
to India, and her brother who had been at school, then was with her for
a short time before going out to join the regiment.

"Why," said Rachel, recovering her usual manner, "you have not been ten
years in the army!"

"I had my commission at sixteen," he answered.

"You are not six-and-twenty!" she exclaimed.

"You are as right as usual," was the reply, with his odd little smile;
"at least till the 1st of August."

"My dear!" said her mother, more alive than Rachel to his amusement at
her daughter's knowing his age better than he did himself, but adding,
politely, "you are hardly come to the time of life for liking to hear
that your looks deceived us."

"Boys are tolerated," he said, with a quick glance at Rachel; but at
that moment something many-legged and tickling flitted into the light,
and dashed over her face. Mrs. Curtis was by no means a strong-minded
woman in the matter of moths and crane-flies, disliking almost equally
their sudden personal attentions and their suicidal propensities,
and Rachel dutifully started up at once to give chase to the
father-long-legs, and put it out of window before it had succeeded in
deranging her mother's equanimity either by bouncing into her face, or
suspending itself by two or three legs in the wax of the candle. Mr.
Keith seconded her efforts, but the insect was both lively and
cunning, eluding them with a dexterity wonderful in such an apparently
over-limbed creature, until at last it kindly rested for a moment with
its wooden peg of a body sloping, and most of its thread-like
members prone upon a newspaper, where Rachel descended on it with her
pocket-handkerchief, and Mr. Keith tried to inclose it with his hands at
the same moment. To have crushed the fly would have been melancholy, to
have come down on the young soldier's fingers, awkward