RVEY.

Marjorie had never got on well with her brother's guardian. He was a
bachelor, stern and autocratic, and with no admiration for woman's ways,
and she instinctively felt that he did not understand her.

His love for Miles Weyburne, the son of a brother officer who had fallen
in a skirmish with an Indian frontier tribe thirteen years ago, was a
thing recognised and beyond question.

Even at the age of ten the boy's likeness to his father had been
remarkable. He had the same dark, earnest eyes, the same frank, winning
manner, the same eager enthusiasm; he was soon to develop, to the secret
pride of his guardian, the same keen interest in his profession, with a
soundness of judgment and a fearless self-reliance peculiarly his own.

He had gained his star after scarcely a year's service, and had then got
an exchange into his guardian's regiment.

Colonel Alleson held the command of a midland regimental district. He
had the reputation of being somewhat of a martinet, and was not
altogether popular with his men.

Marjorie generally spent her holidays with her aunt in the town, and the
Colonel occasionally went to see her; but he was nervous and
constrained, with little to say for himself, and Marjorie always did her
best to show to a disadvantage when he was there. "He's such a crabby
old thing," she would say, when Miles grew enthusiastic over the grave,
taciturn officer,--"besides, he hates girls, you know he does, and I'm
not going to knuckle under to him." Her brother had explained that the
Colonel's ideas were old-fashioned, so she sometimes talked slang on
purpose to shock him. She listened to his abrupt, awkward sentences with
a half listless, half criticising air. She was a typical school-girl at
the most characteristic age,--quick to resent, impatient of control,
straightforward almost to rudeness. The Colonel might be a father to her
brother--he never could be to her. She often thought about her father
and mentally contrasted the two: she thought, too, though less often, of
the mother who had died the very day that that father had fallen in
action, when she herself was little more than a year old.

Miles had been spending his leave with his aunt, and the day before his
return to Ireland to rejoin the battalion, he biked over to the barracks
in company with his sister to say good-bye to his guardian.

"I suppose this is another of the Colonel's fads," Marjorie remarked,
glancing at the notice board as