“She is absurdly like you, General,” said Sir Dugald, disapproval of what he had just heard making itself felt in his tone, in spite of himself, while Missy rubbed her rough head against her father’s sleeve like a young colt. “Horribly like me,” returned General Keeling emphatically. “Run away and play, Missy. I can scarcely see a trace of her mother in her,” he went on, with something of apology in his voice. “You know what my wife was--that she couldn’t bear me out of her sight. I changed the arrangement of this room, you remember, because she liked to be able to see me through the open doors from where she sat, so that I could look up and nod to her now and then. But Missy is almost like a doll, that you can put away when you don’t want it, she’s so quiet in that corner of hers. No; there is one thing in which she is like her mother. If you say a hasty word to her, she will go away and break her heart over it in her corner, instead of flaring up as I should do----” “Or writing furious letters?” suggested Sir Dugald slily. General Keeling smiled, but refused to be turned from his own train of thought. “Haigh,” he said earnestly, “take care of your wife while you have her. Mine took half my life with her when she went. If you could imagine for one moment the difference--the awful difference--it makes, you would go down on your knees and implore your wife’s pardon for everything you had ever done or said that could possibly have hurt her, and beg her not to leave you.” “Oh, we rub along all right,” said Sir Dugald hastily, in mortal fear that the Chief was going to be sentimental. “Elma takes everything in good part. She understands things almost as well as a man.” General Keeling smiled again, rather pityingly. Perhaps he had some idea of the lofty tolerance with which Lady Haigh would have heard the utterance of this handsome testimony. “My little Missy and I understand one another better than that,” he said. “Do you think of taking her home soon?” asked Sir Dugald. “Not of taking her home. My home is here. I suppose I must send her home some day--not yet, happily. If there was only her present happiness and mine to consider, I would never part from her, but dress her in boy’s clothes and take her about with me wherever I went.” “Heaven forbid!” said Sir Dugald devoutly. “Don’t be an old woman, Haigh,” was the crushing rejoinder. “What harm could come to her where I was--and when the whole regiment would die before a hair of her head should be touched? But Tarleton thinks it would tell against the girl when she grew up, and I remember my own youth too well to subject her to the same sort of thing. No, I shall get your wife or some other good woman to take her home and hand her over to her mother’s friend, Miss Marian Arbuthnot. You must have heard Lady Haigh speak of her? They all studied together at that College of theirs, and now Miss Arbuthnot has a school or seminary, or whatever they call it, of her own.”