She sat amidst her darnings, and awaited what was coming, feeling that her time for dreams was over. Captain Despard came lightly up, three steps at a time, after Mrs. O’Shaughnessy had panted to the drawing-room door. He was jaunty and gay as ever, in his well-brushed coat with a rosebud in his button-hole. Few, very few, days were there on which Captain Despard appeared without a flower in his coat. He managed to get them even in winter, no one could tell how. Sometimes a flaming red leaf from the Virginia creeper, answered his purpose, but he was always jaunty, gay, decorated with something or other. He came in behind the large figure of their neighbour, holding out a glove with a hole in the finger reproachfully to Lottie. “See how my child neglects me,” he said. He liked to display himself even to Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, and stood and talked to her while Lottie, with no very good grace, put down her darning and mended his glove. “When I was a young fellow, my dear lady,” he said, “I never wanted for somebody to mend my glove; but a man can’t expect to be as interesting to his daughter as he was in another stage of life.” “Oh, Captain, take me word,” said Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, “the likes of you will always be interesting to one or another. You won’t make me believe that ye find nobody but your daughter to do whatever ye ask them. Tell that--to another branch of the service, Captain Despard, me dear friend.” “You do me a great deal too much honour,” he said with the laugh of flattered vanity; for he was not difficult in the way of compliments. “Alas, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, who would pay any attention to an old married man, the father of a grown-up son and daughter, like me?” “Sure, and you’re much to be pitied, so old as ye are, with one foot in the grave, Captain dear,” the old Irishwoman said; and they both laughed, she enjoying at once her joke, and the pleasure of seeing her victim’s pleased appreciation of the compliment; while he, conscious of being still irresistible, eyed himself in the little glass over the mantelpiece, and was quite unaware of the lurking demon of good-humoured malice and ridicule in her eyes. “Not so bad as that perhaps,” he said, “but bad enough. A man grows old fast in this kind of life. Matins every morning by cockcrow, to a man accustomed to take his ease, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy. The Major grumbles, I make no doubt, as well as I.” “Sure it’s nothing half as bad as morning parade. That’s what O’Shaughnessy says; and he never was used to his ease, Captain. I took better care of him than that. But, Lottie, me honey, here we’re talking of ourselves, and it’s you I’ve come to hear about. How many hearts did ye break? how many scalps have ye got, as we used to say in Canada? It wasn’t for nothing ye put on your finery, and those roses in your hair. The Captain, he’s the one for a flower in his coat; you’re his own daughter, Miss Lottie dear.”