“Sister Cecilia,” went on the elder lady, “seems to know all about it.”
It is useless to attempt concealment of the fact that at this juncture Dora Glynde made a face—an honest schoolgirl behind-your-back Face—indicative of supreme scorn for some person or persons unspecified.
Hers was a countenance which lent itself admirably to the purpose, with lips full of humour, and capable, as such lips are, of expressing a great and wonderful tenderness. The face, du reste, was that of a healthy, fair-skinned English girl, liable to honest change from pale to pink, according to the dictates of an arbitrary climate. Her eyes were of a dark grey-blue, straightforward and steady, with a shadow of thought in them which made wise people respect her presence. She was not painfully beautiful, like the heroine of a novel—nor abnormally plain, like the antitype who has found her way into fiction, and there (alone) brings all hearts to her feet.
“Is Jem glad?” she asked cheerfully. “Is he thirsting for gore and glory?”
“Oh, delighted! Arthur will be so pleased too. Dear boy, he is so interested in soldiers, but of course he could not go into the army! He is too delicate—besides, the life is rough, and the risks are very great.”
Mrs. Agar was speaking with her head slightly inclined to one side, and she never raised her adoring eyes from the photograph of the insipid young man. Had she done so she would have seen a look of patient, if comic, resignation come over the face of her youthful companion at the mention of her son's name.
“I will tell mother,” said Dora Glynde, purposely ignoring Arthur Agar, whose name was always dragged sooner or later into every conversation. “Fancy Jem in a helmet, or a turban, with his face blacked! All the same, if I were a man I should be a soldier. When does he go—to join his regiment?”
“Oh, almost at once.”
The girl winced, quietly, between herself and the blind-cord.
“And in the meantime,” she said lightly, “I suppose he is fully engaged in buying swords and guns and bomb-shells, or whatever the Goorkhas use in warfare.”