“No, I haven’t met you,” said Mrs. Lauriston hastily, looking at him with open aversion and turning to take her husband’s arm as if she considered the hardly-formed acquaintance already too long. “Then my memory is better than yours, I am sure,” said he, with a ghastly attempt to assume his usual society manner. “What was Mrs. Lauriston’s maiden name?” he asked, turning to the young lieutenant. “Miss Weston, Nouna Weston,” answered George, with growing curiosity and interest. The Colonel’s face remained impassive as wood. “Ah! Any relation to Sir Edward Weston, the architect?” “Are you, Nouna?” “I never heard of him,” said the girl, while her eyes remained fixed, with the fascination of repulsion, on the Colonel’s hard, lined face. “My father was Captain Weston, and he died in India; I don’t know anything else.” “You came here this morning to see your husband drill?” “Yes.” “Ah!” The Colonel seemed to be revolving something in his mind, and he looked again at Nouna for a moment doubtfully, as if uncertain whether to ask her another question. However, he refrained from doing so, and only said, still coldly but with a perceptible diminution of harshness: “I must apologise for detaining you, Mrs. Lauriston, but your husband is such an old friend of mine that I could not resist the temptation of making your acquaintance on the first opportunity.” With a formal salute the Colonel retreated, and George hastened up stairs to his rooms with his wife to take off his uniform. At any other time Nouna would have found great delight in immediately trying on his sash and drawing his sword; but the encounter with the Colonel, while it had one good result in averting her husband’s displeasure with her for following him to the barracks, had damped her spirits in a very marked fashion. “George, how could you say that the Colonel was nice?” she asked almost before the gentleman in question was out of earshot. “I think he is the most horribly cold, hard man I ever met. It is quite right for him to be a soldier; he looked as if he wished I were the enemy and he could hack at me.” “Nonsense, child,” said George. “He thought he had met you before, that’s all. And you looked at him in the same way. Are you sure you never saw him until to-day?” he asked curiously; for he had been struck by the puzzled interchange of scrutinizing looks, and was still rather anxiously in the dark as to the circumstances of his wife’s life before he met her. “Quite sure,” said Nouna slowly, looking straight before her and trying to pierce the gloom of old memories. “I seem to have seen somebody a little like him, I don’t know when and I don’t know where, but I am sure I have never before to-day seen him himself. Why, George, he is too horrid to forget!” And with a start and a little shiver of dislike, she dismissed the subject and bounded across the room to play like a kitten with the ends of her husband’s sash. CHAPTER XV.