'So—he is not killed yet!'
She regarded him with bitter reproach.
'Don't cry, Dulcie!' said Shafto, with a little emotion of shame, 'or you will make me feel like a brute now.'
'I always thought you must have felt like one long ago,' retorted the girl, as she swept disdainfully past him.
As Lord and Lady Fettercairn had no desire to bring the name of Captain Hammersley on the tapis, no reference whatever to the affair of Ginghilovo, or even to the Zulu War, was made in the presence of Finella.
Even if the latter had not been engaged, as she still could not help deeming herself, to Hammersley, and had she not a decided, repugnance to Shafto, her pride and her whole soul must have revolted against a mariage de convenance. She had formed, girl-like, her own conceptions of an ideal man, and beyond all whom she met, in London or elsewhere, Vivian Hammersley was her 'Prince Charming;' and in a day or two her mind was partially set at rest when she read a description of his wound, a flesh one, inflicted by an assegai, and which was then healing fast, but, as she knew, only to enable him to face fresh perils.
To be bartered away to anyone after being grotesquely wooed did not suit her independent views, and ere long her grandparents began to think with annoyance that they had better let her alone; but Lady Fettercairn was impatient and irrepressible.
Not so Shafto.
He had a low opinion of the sex, picked up perhaps in the bar-parlour of the inn at Revelstoke, if not inherent in his own nature. He had read somewhere that 'women love a judicious mixture of hardihood and flattery—the whole secret lies in that;' also, that if their hearts are soft their heads are softer in proportion.
Lady Fettercairn was somewhat perplexed when watching the young folks at Craigengowan.