“Where is your mother?” he asked absently, surveying her with a renewed, wary intentness. “Here,” she answered. “Here?” he queried, looking round the room--“where?” “Oh, not here to-night”--she looked away from him and gave a quick, short sigh--“home, I mean. Mother’s quite sick. Sometimes I think she’s very sick.” Her face, which was one of the most flexible mobility, lost all its brightness. Her eyes looked mournfully at him, pleading for a contradiction. “Perhaps,” he said with the rush of pity that he felt for all small feeble things, especially feminine feeble things, “she’s not as sick as you think. When you live with a person who is sick you’re apt to think them worse than outsiders do.” “Well, perhaps so,” she acquiesced, immediately showing symptoms of brightening. “It probably seems queer to you that I should be here to-night when mother’s sick. But she and father and Rosamund insisted on my coming. They wanted me to go to a party for once anyway, and have a good time. But I haven’t had a good time at all. Just before you came I thought I’d go home, I felt so miserable sitting here alone. Only two people have asked me to dance.” “You’ve not been in Foleys very long?” the Colonel suggested, in order to account for this strange lack of gallantry on the part of the country swains. “Three years; nearly four now,” she said, looking at him with raised eyebrows. “Of course, I don’t know as many people as Mitty Bruce does. And then there are some of the men round here mother never liked us to know. They----” She paused, evidently considering that she had better not reveal the reasons why she had been cautioned against certain of the local beaux. But her spirit was weak, and her companion not making any comment, she moved a little nearer to him on the bench and said in a lowered key, “Some of them occasionally get drunk!” “Occasionally,” agreed the Colonel, nodding darkly. “So I don’t know so very many. But I thought I’d know enough to have partners. But you never can tell. And then my hair makes me look such a fright. I might have had more partners if it had been longer.” She passed a small hand, which he noticed was rough and red, over her cropped crown, ruffling the short locks on her forehead. “How--how did it come to be so?” he asked, looking at it with admiration tinged with curiosity. “I’ve been sick. I was very sick last winter with a fever, and so in April when I was getting better they cut it all off. We had a bad winter up here, it was so terribly wet. I never saw anything worse; our house leaked all over.” “It was a wet winter,” he assented. “And I heard it was a good deal worse up here than it was down below.”