rrative that
forgiveness, diluted out of all knowledge, left its perpetrator free
to refuse ever to see its victim again. But she would pray for her.
A subdiaconal application would receive attention; that was the
suggestion between the lines.

The kind-hearted old soldier pooh-poohed her first letters. She would
come round in time. Her natural good-feeling would get the better of
her when she had had her religious fling. He didn't put it so--a
strict old Puritan of the old school--but that was Miss Graythorpe's
gloss in her own mind on what he did say. However, her mother never
did come round. She cherished her condemnation of her daughter to the
end, forgiving her again _more suo_, if anything with increased
asperity, on her death-bed.

This Colonel Lund is (have we mentioned this before?) the "old fossil"
whom we have seen at Krakatoa Villa. He was usually called "the Major"
there, from early association. He continued to foster and shelter his
_protegee_ during the year following the arrival of our own particular
young Sally on the scene, saw her safely through her divorce
proceedings, and then, when he finally retired from his post as deputy
commissioner for the Umritsur district, arranged that she herself,
with her encumbrance and an ayah, should accompany him to England. His
companion travelled as Mrs. Graythorpe, and Sally junior as Mrs.
Graythorpe's baby. She was excessively popular on the voyage; Sally
was not suffering from sea-sickness, or feeling apparently the least
embarrassed by the recent bar-sinister in her family. She courted
Society, seizing it by its whiskers or its curls, and holding on like
grim death. She endeavoured successively to get into the Indian Ocean,
the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic,
but failed in every attempt, and was finally landed at Southampton in
safety, after a resolute effort to drag the captain, who was six feet
three high and weighed twenty stone, ashore by his beard. She was
greatly missed on the remainder of the voyage (to Bremen--the boat was
a German boat) by a family of Vons, who fortunately never guessed at
the flaw in Sally's extraction, or there's no knowing what might not
have happened.

But the arrival was too late for her poor mother to utilise her
services towards a reconciliation with her own offended parent. A
sudden attack of influenza, followed by low diet on high principles,
and uncombated by timely port wine and tonics, had