'Of course I am going,' she laughed, 'although, personally, I don't like the Army.'
'Not like the Army, Norah!' It was the other girl who spoke, and who thus drew my attention to her.
I was not much impressed by Lorna Bolivick when I had been first introduced to her, but a second glance showed me that she was by far the more interesting of the two. In one sense, she looked only a child, and I judged her to be about nineteen or twenty years of age. She had all a child's innocence, and naïveté, too; I thought she seemed as free from care as the lambs I had seen sporting in the meadows, or the birds singing among the trees. I judged her to be just a happy-go-lucky child of nature, who had lived among the shoals of life, and had never realized its depths. Her brown eyes were full of laughter and fun. Her frank, untrammelled ways suggested a creature of impulse.
'That girl never had a care in her life,' I reflected; 'she's just a happy kid who, although nearly a woman in years, is not grown up.'
I soon found myself mistaken, however. Something was said, I have forgotten what, which evidently moved her, and her face changed as if by magic. The look of carelessness left her in a moment, her great brown eyes burned with a new light, her face revealed possibilities which I had not dreamt of. I knew then that Lorna Bolivick could feel deeply, that she was one who heard voices, and had plumbed the depths of life which were unknown to the other.
She was not handsome, a passing observer would not even call her pretty, but she had a wondrous face.
'Do you like my name, Captain Luscombe?' she asked.
'It is one of the most musical I know,' I replied.
'I don't like it,' she laughed. 'You see, in a way it gives me such a lot to live up to. I suppose dad was reading Blackmore's great novel when I was born, and so, although all the family protested, he insisted on my being called Lorna. But I'm not a bit like her. She was gentle, and winsome, and beautiful, and I am not a bit gentle, I am not a bit winsome, and I am as ugly as sin,—my brothers all tell me so. Besides, in spite of the people who talk so much about Lorna Doone, I think she was insipid,—a sort of wax doll.'
Just then we heard the tooting of a motor horn, and turning, saw a car approaching the house.