‘Not too old for the cavalry!’
‘He can ride, certainly, and is a tall, good-looking fellow; but I should not have thought him the stuff to make a dragoon. He has always been puling and delicate, unfit for school, wanting force.’
‘Wanting discipline,’ said the General. ‘I have seen a year in a good regiment make an excellent officer of that very stamp of youngster, just wanting a mould to give him substance.’
‘The regiment should be a very good one,’ said Mr. Ferrars; ‘he would be only too easily drawn in by the bad style of subaltern.’
‘Put him into the 25th Lancers,’ said the General, ‘and set Fred to look after him. Rattlepate as he is, he can take excellent care of a lad to whom he takes a fancy, and if Albinia asked him, he would do it with all his heart.’
‘I wish you would propose it, though I am afraid his father will never consent. I would do a great deal to get him away before he has led little Maurice into harm.’
‘This consideration moved the Rector of Fairmead himself to broach the subject, but neither Mr. Kendal nor Albinia could think of venturing their fragile son in the army, though assured that there was little chance that the 25th Lancers would be summoned to the east, and they would only hold out hopes of little Maurice by and by.
Albinia’s martial ardour was revived as she listened with greater grasp of comprehension to subjects familiar in her girlhood. She again met old friends of her father, the lingering glories of the Peninsula and Waterloo, who liked her for her own sake as well as for her father’s, while Maurice looked on, amused by her husband’s silent pride in her, and her hourly progress in the regard of the General, who began to talk of making a long visit to Fairmead, after what he expected would be a slight demonstration on the Danube. He even began to regret the briefness of the time that he could spend in their society.
Much was crowded into that week, but Albinia contrived to find an hour for a call on her little French friend, to whom she had already forwarded the parcels she had brought from home—a great barm-brack from Biddy, and a store of delicate convent confections from Hadminster.
She was set down at a sober old house in the lawyers’ quarter of the world, and conducted to a pretty, though rather littered drawing-room, where she found a delicate-looking young mamma, and various small children.