bright eyes.

"Good morning, Mr. Bellew!" she said in response to his salutation, "it
was nice of you to trouble to pick up an old woman's ball of worsted."
As she spoke, she rose, and dropped him a courtesy, and then, as he
looked at her again, he saw that despite her words, and despite her
white hair, she was much younger, and prettier than he had thought.

"I am Miss Anthea's house-keeper," she went on, "I was away when you
arrived, looking after one of Miss Anthea's old ladies,--pray be seated.
Miss Anthea,--bless her dear heart!--calls me her aunt, but I'm not
really--Oh dear no! I'm no relation at all! But I've lived with her long
enough to feel as if I was her aunt, and her uncle, and her father, and
her mother--all rolled into one,--though I should be rather small to be
so many,--shouldn't I?" and she laughed so gaily, and unaffectedly, that
Bellew laughed too.

"I tell you all this," she went on, keeping pace to her flying needle,
"because I have taken a fancy to you--on the spot! I always like, or
dislike a person--on the spot,--first impressions you know! Y-e-e-s,"
she continued, glancing up at him side-ways, "I like you just as much as
I dislike Mr. Cassilis,--heigho! how I do--detest that man! There, now
that's off my mind!"

"And why?" enquired Bellew, smiling.

"Dear me, Mr. Bellew I--how should I know, only I do,--and what's
more--he knows it too! And how," she enquired, changing the subject
abruptly, "how is your bed,--comfortable, mm?"

"Very!"

"You sleep well?"

"Like a top!"

"Any complaints, so far?"

"None whatever," laughed Bellew, shaking his head.

"That is very well. We have never had a boarder before, and Miss
Anthea,--bless her dear soul! was a little nervous about it. And here's
the Sergeant!"

"I--er--beg your pardon--?" said Bellew.

"The Sergeant!" repeated Miss Priscilla, with a prim little nod,
"Sergeant Appleby, late of the Nineteenth Hussars,--a soldier every inch
of him, Mr. Bellew,--with one arm--over there by the peaches." Glancing
in the direction she indicated, Bellew observed a tall figure, very
straight and upright, clad in a tight-fitting blue coat, with extremely
tight trousers strapped beneath the insteps, and with a hat balanced
upon his close-cropped, grizzled head at a perfectly impossible angle
for any save an ex-cavalry-man. Now as he stood examining a peach-tree
that flourished against the opposite wall, Bellew saw that his right
sleeve was empty, s