“I’m greatly pleased you have seen my sister—really made her acquaintance, I mean.” Brian spoke with an anxiety which was a little comic in view of the extreme youth of the lady he was addressing. Miss Sally Lennox resembled her father too strongly to be called good-looking, and Brian was the only person ever likely to claim that the famous eagle-beak was an ornament to a feminine face. She was very quiet in manner, even demure—an epithet which was not one of reproach in those days. Brian and she were sitting on the steps leading to the ramparts above the General’s house in the Fort, with the charitable purpose of shielding the retreat of her elder sister and Captain Stewart to the battlements overhead, where they were enjoying sweet communion, all unconscious that Sir Harry was demanding his senior aide-de-camp, and Lady Lennox looking for her step-daughter.
“Yes, Mamma gave me permission to spend the day with her. Papa was so kind as to ask her for me.” Miss Sally was invariably proper to the point of primness in her intercourse with her stepmother, which may have accounted for some of the wisdom with which her father credited her.
“And you saw a good deal of her? And—and did you get on?”
The amusement in Sally’s smile was not unmixed with gentle contempt. She not to “get on” with any woman living—or to confess it if she did not! “Oh, I assure you we got on delightfully. Mrs Ambrose was good enough to describe all her adventures to me. How charmingly she talks—so original and vivacious, ain’t she?”
“And did you see Ambrose at all?”
“He came in while I was there. I thought him a very agreeable, gentlemanly person. I adore that dry cool manner.” The merest glint of an upward glance through long eyelashes to observe how Brian received this, which was naturally not with enthusiasm.
“He’s a good fellow, of course. I wonder now—d’ye remember my telling y’at Poonah I was troubled about my sister and Ambrose?—that they didn’t seem quite to hit it off together.”
“I remember it perfectly.” Again the smile. As though any information was ever forgotten that had once been stored away beneath the smooth bands of hair on that knowing little head!
“Well, now, did you notice anything of the kind—that he did not appreciate her as he ought?”
“No, indeed. I thought them a most congenial couple.”