“I shall be very glad, I’m sure,” said the lady. “There look at her. I suppose that’s the last conquest!”
“Whom do you mean?” said the doctor, drowsily, for he had just settled himself for a nap in the yielding cane chair.
“That great, tall young officer, who came on board at Colombo.”
“Oh, Chumbley,” said the doctor, looking up and following his wife’s eyes to where a great broad-shouldered fellow was bending down talking to Helen Perowne, who seemed to be listening eagerly to his words, as if on purpose to annoy the half-dozen gentlemen forming her court.
He was a fine, well-set-up young fellow, looking like a lifeguardsman picked from among a selection of fair, curly-haired Saxons, and, evidently flattered by the lady’s notice, he was doing his best to make himself agreeable.
“You may call it what you like,” said Mrs Doctor. “I call it scandalous! Here’s the very last arrival in the ship.”
“Regularly subjugated,” laughed the doctor.
“It is nothing to laugh at,” said the lady, indignantly. “I declare I have a good mind to go and interfere.”
“No, no, don’t,” said the doctor earnestly. “She means no harm, and you may only make a breach between you.”
“I don’t care, Henry; it is for the girl’s sake that I should interfere; and as to the breach, she utterly detests me as it is for what I have said. I think she hates me as much as I do her.”