'On the Peshawur frontier,' replied another; 'he is now in luck's way, certainly.'
'They say,' resumed Villiers in his laughing off-hand way, and who really knew nothing of Finella, but was merely ventilating some club gossip, to the intense annoyance of Hammersley; 'they say that she is a coquette from her finger-tips to her tiny balmorals, and would flirt with his Grace of Canterbury if she got a chance; and yet, with all that, she can be most sentimental. There is Gore of ours—a passed practitioner in the art of philandering——'
'Villiers, please to shut up,' said Hammersley impatiently in a sotto voce; 'I know the young lady, and you don't.'
'The deuce you do?'
'Intimately.'
Villiers coloured, and lapsed into silence.
'I always look upon flirtation as playing with fire,' said Gore; 'never attempt it, but I get into some deuced scrape.'
'How much money is muddled up with matrimony in the world nowadays!' said Villiers, thinking probably of the heiress's thousands; 'I suppose it was different in the days of our grandfathers.'
'Not much, I fancy,' said Gore.
Hammersley had now occasion for much and somewhat bitter thought. Finella and this officer were evidently the subjects of club gossip and not very well-bred banter; the conviction galled him.