He was small made, and of late inclined to stoutness which he strove manfully to subdue, and he wore a close little muzzle of a moustache, gray, almost white now, and slight side-whiskers in the style of the late highly-esteemed Prince Consort. But though his moustache and whiskers and hair and eyebrows all showed unmistakable signs of his seventy-eight years, his little figure--except in front--was as straight as ever. He was as full of fire and go as a shrapnel shell, and his voice, on occasion, was as much out of proportion to his size as was that of the clock with the deep Westminster chimes on the breakfast-room mantelpiece at The Red House. He looked a bare sixty-five, but as a youngster he had been through the Crimean campaign and the Indian Mutiny, and in the latter gained the coveted cross “For Valour” by exploding a charge at a rebel fort-gate which had already cost a score of lives and still blocked Britain’s righteous vengeance. He had been on the Abyssinian Expedition and in the Zulu War, and had returned from the latter so punctured with assegai wounds that he vowed he looked like nothing but a da-asht pin-cushion. Then he came into the title, and a very comfortable income, through the death of an uncle, who had made money in the banking business and received his baronetcy as reward for party-services; and after one more campaign--up Nile with Wolseley after Gordon--the Colonel retired on his honors and left the field to younger men. He found his brother, Geoff, just married and vicar of Iver Magnus, went to stop with him for a time, and stopped on--a very acceptable addition to the vicar’s household. When the children came, who so acceptable, and in every way so adequate, a godfather as the Colonel? And, with the very comfortable expectations incorporated in him, how resist his vehement choice of names,--extraordinary as they seemed to the hopeful father and mother? And so he had the eldest girl christened Alma, after his first engagement; and the boy who came next he named Raglan, after his first esteemed commander; and the next girl he was actually going to call Balaclava; but there Mrs. Vicar struck, and nearly wept herself into a fever, until they compounded on Victoria, after Her Majesty. When Vic was five, and Ray ten, and Alma twelve, their father and mother both died in an heroic attempt at combating an epidemic of typhoid, and Uncle Tony shook off the dust and smells of Iver Magnus, bought Oakdene at Willstead, and set up his establishment there, with little Miss Mitten, the sister of his special chum Major Mitten--who had been pin-cushioned by the Zulus at the same time as himself only more so--as vice-reine.