‘Orderly!’ again; this time much more sharply spoken, and with undoubted petulance. ‘How stupid! Why don’t you come when you’re called?’ and then the owner of the voice appeared. Mahomet had come to the mountain.
A bright-faced beautiful child; a fair golden-haired girl, not yet in her teens, wearing a fresh pink and white frock, with pink ribbons in her sunny locks, and a pink silk handkerchief tied like a shawl over her shoulders and neck. Herbert took it all in at a glance, and remembered the picture for the rest of his life.
A very imperious young person, evidently; she had honest kindly eyes, but her small nose slightly ‘tip tilted,’ and the upward curve of scorn in her lip indicated a proud, haughty nature, and the wilfulness of one who, though still a child, had everything always her own way. An only child, born late in their married life, Edith Prioleau ruled languid mother and doting father with a despotism against which they had neither the inclination nor power to protest.
‘Are you the orderly?’ she asked, almost stamping her foot.
‘Yes.’
‘Yes? Yes—what?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Yes, Miss, you should say when you speak to me. Do you know who I am? I am the colonel’s daughter.’
Whereat Herbert drew himself up, and saluted her formally with hand to cap, as though she were the commander-in-chief.