The Colonel’s face remained impassive as wood.
“Ah! Any relation to Sir Edward Weston, the architect?”
“Are you, Nouna?”
“I never heard of him,” said the girl, while her eyes remained fixed, with the fascination of repulsion, on the Colonel’s hard, lined face. “My father was Captain Weston, and he died in India; I don’t know anything else.”
“You came here this morning to see your husband drill?”
“Yes.”
“Ah!” The Colonel seemed to be revolving something in his mind, and he looked again at Nouna for a moment doubtfully, as if uncertain whether to ask her another question. However, he refrained from doing so, and only said, still coldly but with a perceptible diminution of harshness: “I must apologise for detaining you, Mrs. Lauriston, but your husband is such an old friend of mine that I could not resist the temptation of making your acquaintance on the first opportunity.”
With a formal salute the Colonel retreated, and George hastened up stairs to his rooms with his wife to take off his uniform. At any other time Nouna would have found great delight in immediately trying on his sash and drawing his sword; but the encounter with the Colonel, while it had one good result in averting her husband’s displeasure with her for following him to the barracks, had damped her spirits in a very marked fashion.
“George, how could you say that the Colonel was nice?” she asked almost before the gentleman in question was out of earshot. “I think he is the most horribly cold, hard man I ever met. It is quite right for him to be a soldier; he looked as if he wished I were the enemy and he could hack at me.”
“Nonsense, child,” said George. “He thought he had met you before, that’s all. And you looked at him in the same way. Are you sure you never saw him until to-day?” he asked curiously; for he had been struck by the puzzled interchange of scrutinizing looks, and was still rather anxiously in the dark as to the circumstances of his wife’s life before he met her.