"Now you be quiett!" shrieked his mother, "telling such stories! For shame of you!"
"Well, I'd like to know what they call mother?" demanded Dominga, with the face of a fury.
"I'll tell you thatt when we're by ourselves," he answered with a wink. Nicky had a way of investing his insolence with a surprisingly matter-of-fact air.
"Verona, you will make quite a stir, I think," interposed Pussy; "you look so ladylike, and hold your head so high; you are far more genteel than Mrs. Captain Tully or Mrs. Major Barrwell, who won't know us: none of the officers' wives ever call here, although they go to Lepell's, and yet father was an army man, and in the cavalry, too."
"See, now I have an idea," announced Mrs. Chandos suddenly, as if struck with an inspiration; "since last comers call first, why should not Verona make a round of the cantonment? It is quite etiquette, and I can wait outside in the victoria, and then we shall have all the nice people coming out here instead of railway and contractors, and such like trash."
"The army people will never come out here," declared Dominga, "no, not even for Rona; they are a nasty, sneering, low, stuck-up lot, and I hate them."
"Only the women," corrected Nicky, who had finished his meal, and now felt at leisure to converse. "You don't hate the officers. Oh, ho! Dom, you like them! You are awfully keen to go into tennis and badminton and bands and church. Dom,"—addressing himself especially to Verona—"has had no end of cases! She is a tremendous flirt; she even tried her hand on Salwey, but he didn't seem to see it—did he, Dom?"
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." There must have been some tiny grain of truth in Nicky's rude chaff, for the face Dominga turned on him was fiendish in its expression.
"Will you choop? Will you be quiett?" she screamed, half-rising from her chair, her voice choked with rage.
"Now, do not tease your sister, for I will not have it," remonstrated Mrs. Chandos. "Verona does not know that no one minds one single word of what Nicky says. Oh, he is a shocking liar!"