aying the
most tender things. She had been very popular in the service, because
she was the type of philandering woman who required no beating about the
bush; her neighbour at the dinner-table, even if he had not seen her
before, need never have hesitated to tell her with the soup that she was
the handsomest creature he had ever seen, and with the _entree_ that he
adored her.

On coming in, Mrs. Clibborn for a moment looked at James, quite
speechless, her head on one side and her eyes screwing into the corner
of the room.

"Oh, how wonderful!" she said, at last "I suppose I mustn't call you
Jamie now." She spoke very slowly, and every word sounded like a caress.
Then she looked at James again in silent ecstasy. "Colonel Parsons, how
proud you must be! And when I think that soon he will be my son! How
thin you look, James!"

"And how well you look, dear lady!"

It was understood that everyone must make compliments to Mrs. Clibborn;
otherwise she grew cross, and when she was cross she was horrid.

She smiled to show her really beautiful teeth.

"I should like to kiss you, James. May I, Mrs. Parsons?"

"Certainly," replied Jamie's mother, who didn't approve of Mrs. Clibborn
at all.

She turned her cheek to James, and assumed a seraphic expression while
he lightly touched it with his lips.

"I'm only an old woman," she murmured to the company in general.

She seldom made more than one remark at a time, and at the end of each
assumed an appropriate attitude--coy, Madonna-like, resigned, as the
circumstances might require. Mr. Jackson came forward to shake hands,
and she turned her languishing glance on him.

"Oh, Mr. Jackson, how beautiful your sermon was!"

* * *

They sat down to dinner, and ate their ox-tail soup. It is terrible to
think of the subtlety with which the Evil One can insinuate himself
among the most pious; for soup at middle-day is one of his most
dangerous wiles, and it is precisely with the simple-minded inhabitants
of the country and of the suburbs that this vice is most prevalent.

James was sitting next to Mrs. Clibborn, and presently she looked at him
with the melancholy smile which had always seemed to her so effective.

"We want you to tell us how you won your Victoria Cross, Jamie."

The others, eager to hear the story from the hero's lips, had been,
notwithstanding, too tactful to ask; but they were willing to take
advantage of Mrs. Clibborn's lack of that quality.

"We've all