"The class-war?" asked the Colonel grimly.
"No, sir," answered Ruth. "Classes for learning you learning, I allow. Man from the North, I yeard say. Talks funny—foreign talk I call it."
Just then the Colonel's glance fell on a child, slim as a daisy stalk, and with the healthy pallor of a wood-anemone, hiding behind Ruth's skirt and peeping at the stranger with fearless blue eyes that seemed somehow strangely familiar.
"And what's your name, little Miss Hide-away?" he asked, delighted.
"Little Alice," the child replied, bold and delicate as a robin.
The fact that the child was obviously some four years old while Ernie had not been married half that time did not occur to the Colonel as strange. He glanced at the young mother, noble in outline, and in her black and red beauty of the South so unlike the child.
"She doesn't take after her mother and father," he said, with the reckless indiscretion of his sex.
Then he saw his mistake. Ruth has run up signals of distress. Ernie, who had now joined them, as always at his best in an emergency, came quickly to the rescue.
"Favours her grandmother, sir, I say," he remarked.
"Like my boy," commented the Colonel, recovering himself. "I don't think anybody'd have taken our Jock for his father's son when he joined us at Pindi in 1904—eh, Caspar?"