How well she was wearing her age to be sure, Mrs. Crawford thought. It is not many young ladies who, after ten years' campaigning, can be called sad little pusses; but Miss Vincent still looked quite juvenile--in fact, _plus Arabe qu'en Arabie_--more juvenile than a juvenile. Everyone knew her and talked of her in various degrees of familiarity; it was generally understood that an acquaintanceship of twenty-four hours' duration was sufficient to entitle any field officer to call her by the abbreviated form of her first name, while a week was the space allowed to subalterns. END OF THE FIRST VOLUME. CHAPTER XXIII. I have heard of your paintings too. _Hamlet_. His form and cause conjoined, preaching to stones, Would make them capable. Do not look upon me, Lest... what I have to do Will want true colour.... Do you see nothing there? _Queen_. No, nothing but ourselves. _Hamlet_. Why, look you there... Look, where he goes, even now, out at the portal. _Hamlet._ |I AM so glad to be beside some one who can tell me all I want to know' said Lottie, looking up to Colonel Gerald's bronzed face when Mrs. Crawford and Markham had walked on. 'My dear Lottie, you know very well that you know as much as I do,' he answered, smiling down at her. 'Oh, Colonel Gerald, how can you say such a thing?' she cried innocently. 'You know I am always getting into scrapes through my simplicity.' 'You have managed to get out of a good many in your time, my dear. Is it by the same means you got out of them, Lottie-your simplicity?' 'Oh, you are as amusing as ever,' laughed the young thing. 'But you must not be hard upon poor little me, now that I want to ask you so much. Will you tell me, like a dear good colonel--I know you can if you choose--what is the mystery about this Mr. Markham?' 'Mystery? I don't hear of any mystery about him.' 'Why, all your friends came out in the some steamer as he did. They must have told you. Everybody here is talking about him. That's why I want him for our theatricals: everyone will come to see him.' 'Well, if the mystery, whatever it may be, remains unrevealed up to the night of the performance, you will have a house all the more crowded.' 'But I want to know all about it for myself. Is it really true that he had fallen overboard from another ship, and was picked up after being several weeks at sea?' 'You would be justified in calling that a mystery, at any rate,' said Colonel Gerald. 'That is what some people here are saying, I can assure you,' she cried quickly. 'Others say that he was merely taken aboard the steamer at St. Helena, after having been wrecked; but that is far too unromantic.' 'Oh, yes, far too unromantic.'