er a
pretty song, and a rose in black hair over a shell-like ear, to a square
meal. I fear the average Sergeant-Major would have beaten Dolores within
a week of matrimony, but I strove to make loss, discomfort, and
disappointment a discipline,--and music, silk dresses and daintiness an
aesthetic re-training to a barrack-blunted mind.

In justice to Dolores I should make it clear that she was not of the
slatternly, dirty, lazy, half-breed type that pigs in a _peignoir_ from
twelve to twelve and snores again from midnight to midday. She was trim
and dainty, used good perfume or none, rose early and went in the
garden, loathed cheap and showy trash whether in dress, jewellery, or
furniture; and was incapable of wearing fine shoes over holey stockings
or a silk gown over dirty linen. No--there was nothing to offend the
fastidious about Dolores, but there was everything to offend the good
house-keeper and the moralist.

Frequently she would provide no dinner in order that we might be
compelled to dine in public at a restaurant or a hotel, a thing she
loved to do, and she would often send out for costly sweets and pastry,
drink champagne (very moderately, I admit), and generally behave as
though she were the wife of a man of means.

And she was an arrant, incorrigible, shameless flirt.

Well--I do not know that a virtuous vulgar dowd is preferable to a
wicked winsome witch of refined habits and person, and I should probably
have gone quietly on to bankruptcy without any row or rupture, but for
Burker. Having been bred in a "gentle" home I naturally took the
attitude of "as you please, my dear Dolores" and refrained from bullying
when quiet indication of the inevitable end completely failed. Whether
she intended to act in a reasonable manner and show some wifely traits
when my L250 of legacy and savings was quite dissipated I do not know.
Burker came before that consummation.

A number of gentlemen joined the Duri Volunteer Corps and formed a
Mounted Infantry troop, and, though I am a good horseman, I was not
competent to train the troop, as I had never enjoyed any experience of
mounted military work of any kind. So Sergeant Burker, late of the 54th
Lancers, was transferred to Duri as Instructor of the Mounted Infantry
Troop. Naturally I did what I could to make him comfortable and, till
his bungalow was furnished after a fashion, gave him our spare room.

Sergeant Barker was the ideal Cavalryman and the ideal breaker of