something of his
look--the same ivory skin, same colour of eyes and hair! Only she was
not severe, like her father, not exactly! And once more there shot
through the Colonel a vague dread, as of a trusteeship neglected. It
disappeared, however, in his bath.

He was out before eight o'clock, a thin upright figure in hard straw hat
and grey flannel clothes, walking with the indescribable loose poise
of the soldier Englishman, with that air, different from the French,
German, what not, because of shoulders ever asserting, through their
drill, the right to put on mufti; with that perfectly quiet and modest
air of knowing that, whatever might be said, there was only one way
of wearing clothes and moving legs. And, as he walked, he smoothed his
drooping grey moustache, considering how best to take his niece out of
herself. He passed along by the Terrace, and stood for a moment looking
down at the sea beyond the pigeon-shooting ground. Then he moved on
round under the Casino into the gardens at the back. A beautiful spot!
Wonderful care they had taken with the plants! It made him think a
little of Tushawore, where his old friend the Rajah--precious old
rascal!--had gardens to his palace rather like these. He paced again
to the front. It was nice and quiet in the early mornings, with the sea
down there, and nobody trying to get the better of anybody else. There
were fellows never happy unless they were doing someone in the eye. He
had known men who would ride at the devil himself, make it a point
of honour to swindle a friend out of a few pounds! Odd place this
'Monte'--sort of a Garden of Eden gone wrong. And all the real, but
quite inarticulate love of Nature, which had supported the Colonel
through deserts and jungles, on transports at sea, and in mountain
camps, awoke in the sweetness of these gardens. His dear mother! He
had never forgotten the words with which she had shown him the sunset
through the coppice down at old Withes Norton, when he was nine years
old: "That is beauty, Jack! Do you feel it, darling?" He had not felt it
at the time--not he; a thick-headed, scampering youngster. Even when
he first went to India he had had no eye for a sunset. The rising
generation were different. That young couple, for instance, under the
pepper-tree, sitting there without a word, just looking at the trees.
How long, he wondered, had they been sitting like that? And suddenly
something in the Colonel leaped; his steel-coloured eye