He was probably Mrs Baynes’s best boarder in any case. Without a word she led the way, while “Fanny” dwindled from the scene like a bad dream. We walked through the dining-room, bare of anything but a long table and some dissipated-looking chairs, down a passage, and into a back verandah which had a row of doors facing the sunrise. At the third door she stopped and flung it wide:
“There you are!” she snapped. “Four pounds a week with board—paid in advance. Take it or leave it—I don’t care.”
She flounced away and left me. I went in and gazed about me. I had never been in a more hopelessly impossible room in my life.
One night just as we were straggling into laager, the look-out reported a small party of persons on the horizon, riding very slowly towards the town. It was not time for a change of pickets, neither could it be a patrol returning for there was no patrol out. When these two facts were thoroughly digested every one pranced for their field glasses, and the laager verandah became crowded with very busy people full of curiosity and excitement at the thought of news from the front. Later, as the little group came nearer to us out of the glamour of evening shadows it was seen to consist of three persons, and presently there materialised under our watching eyes two battered-looking troopers, coatless and (of course) extremely dirty, riding one on each side of a dandified slim young man in a suit of khaki of sulphurous shade but of the most precise and fashionable cut. His putties were put on beautifully: not a false fold or a bad line anywhere. His rifle-fittings shone brightly in the sunset glow, and the bandolier slung with debonair carelessness across his breast had not a cartridge missing!
All these details were noted and beheld with breathless interest before we could even see the face of this mysterious Brummel in khaki, for his police hat—the only inartistic thing about him—was pulled well down over his eyes. I think I was the first to see the glint of an amazing shade of golden hair, and the line of a defiant mouth. Some notion of the truth dawned upon me then and a moment after every one knew. Colonel Blow stepped forward and spoke to the troopers, and one of them, who was a sergeant, answered him briefly and to the point:
“The C.O. ordered me to escort this lady back to Fort George, sir.”
At this the slouch hat was pushed back, and Mrs Rookwood’s murky eyes stared defiantly at us all. Then her pretty mirthless laugh rang out.
“It was all that brute Anthony Kinsella’s fault,” she said, addressing herself exclusively to the Commandant. “When he joined the others and found me in his troop with George he immediately told the Doctor and had me sent back. Wasn’t it horrid of him, Colonel? I’m sure I should have made as good a soldier as any one else of them. I’m a first-class shot. You have said so yourself now, haven’t you?”
She was trying to carry her defeat off bravely under the remorseless stare of a number of feminine eyes. Her own were so bright that it was plain she was on the verge of tears, and as she left off speaking her mouth began to quiver. She hadn’t an atom of make-up on and looked almost middle-aged, but nevertheless extremely handsome. It was a difficult moment but Colonel Blow was true blue, and knew the right thing to do. He laughed cheerily and went forward to help her from her saddle.