“Not a bit. Batten 'em down and keep the sentries awake, and they won't do any harm.”
“But Mrs. Vickers and the child?”
“I've thought of that. You take the Ladybird with the prisoners, and leave me to bring up Mrs. Vickers in the Osprey.”
“We might do that. Indeed, it's the best way, I think. I don't like the notion of having Sylvia among those wretches, and yet I don't like to leave her.”
“Well,” says Frere, confident of his own ability to accomplish anything he might undertake, “I'll take the Ladybird, and you the Osprey. Bring up Mrs. Vickers yourself.”
“No, no,” said Vickers, with a touch of his old pomposity, “that won't do. By the King's Regulations—”
“All right,” interjected Frere, “you needn't quote 'em. 'The officer commanding is obliged to place himself in charge'—all right, my dear sir. I've no objection in life.”
“It was Sylvia that I was thinking of,” said Vickers.
“Well, then,” cries the other, as the door of the room inside opened, and a little white figure came through into the broad verandah. “Here she is! Ask her yourself. Well, Miss Sylvia, will you come and shake hands with an old friend?”
The bright-haired baby of the Malabar had become a bright-haired child of some eleven years old, and as she stood in her simple white dress in the glow of the lamplight, even the unaesthetic mind of Mr. Frere was struck by her extreme beauty. Her bright blue eyes were as bright and as blue as ever. Her little figure was as upright and as supple as a willow rod; and her innocent, delicate face was framed in a nimbus of that fine golden hair—dry and electrical, each separate thread shining with a lustre of its own—with which the dreaming painters of the middle ages endowed and glorified their angels.