“I will tell mother,” said Dora Glynde, purposely ignoring Arthur Agar, whose name was always dragged sooner or later into every conversation. “Fancy Jem in a helmet, or a turban, with his face blacked! All the same, if I were a man I should be a soldier. When does he go--to join his regiment?” “Oh, almost at once.” The girl winced, quietly, between herself and the blind-cord. “And in the meantime,” she said lightly, “I suppose he is fully engaged in buying swords and guns and bomb-shells, or whatever the Goorkhas use in warfare.” “He is coming home to-morrow for Sunday,” replied Jem Agar's stepmother absently. She was thinking of her own son, and therefore did not hear the quick sigh which was almost a gasp; did not note the sudden light in the girl's eyes. Dora Glynde was rather a solitary-minded young person. The only child of elderly parents, she had never learnt in the nursery to indulge in the indiscretions of confiding girlhood. She had the good fortune to be without a bosom-friend who related her most sacred secrets to other bosom friends and so on, as is the way of maidens. From her father she had inherited a discriminating mind and a most admirable habit of reserve. She was quite happy when alone, which, according to La Bruyère, is a great safeguard against all evil. She wanted to be alone now, and therefore passed out of the open window with a non-committing “Good-bye, Aunt Anna!” “Good-bye, dear,” replied the lady, awaking suddenly from a reverie. But by the time she had turned round in her chair, the girl was gone. Dora crossed the lawn, passing between the sentinel pines and crossing the moat by the narrow footbridge. She climbed the railing with all the ease of nineteen years and struck a bee-line across the park. She never raised her eyes from the ground, never paused in her swinging gait, until she reached the brown hush of the beechwood which divided the Rectory garden from the southern extremity of the park. Having climbed the railing again she sat on a mossy mound at the foot of a huge beech tree. Her manner of doing so subtly indicated that she did not only know the spot, but was in the habit of sitting there, possibly to think. A youthful privilege of doubtful value, for, as we get busier in life we have to do the thinking as we go along. “Oh!” she muttered, “oh, how awful!” A new expression had come over her face. She looked older, and all the vivacity had suddenly left her lips. While she was still sitting there the crisp sound of footsteps on the fallen leaves approached through the wood. Looking up she saw her father, following the winding path through the spinney towards his home. A grave man was the Rector of Stagholme in his declining years; hopelessly, wisely pessimistic, with sudden youthful returns of interest in matters literary and theological. As he came he read a book.