l born and bred
in a New England college town into a kind of life for which she had had
no preparation; but she adapted herself as readily as she would have
done had she married a Russian prince or a Spanish grandee. In the
effort she made there was a mingling of the matter-of-fact and the _tour
de force_. Regimental life is not unlike that of a large family; it has
the same sort of claims, intimacies, and quarrels, the same sort of
jealousies within, combined with solidarity against the outsider.
Perceiving this quickly, Drusilla proceeded to disarm criticism by being
impeccable in dress and negatively amiable in conduct. "With my
temperament," she said to herself, "I can afford to wait." Following her
husband to Barbados, the Cape, and India, she had just succeeded in
passing all the tests of the troop-ship and the married quarters when he
died. For a while her parents hoped she would make her widowed home in
Boston; but her heart had been given irrevocably to the British army--to
its distinguished correctness, to its sober glories, its world-wide
roving, and its picturesque personal associations. Though she had seen
little of England, except for occasional visits on leave, she had become
English in tastes and at heart. For a year after Gerald's death she
lived with his family at Silchester, in preference to going to her own.
After that she settled in the small house at Southsea, where from time
to time she had her girlhood's companion, Olivia Guion, as a guest.

"Perhaps that'll do us good," Miss Guion ventured, in reply to
Drusilla's observations at her expense. "To see ourselves as others see
us must be much like looking at one's face in a spoon."

"That doesn't do us any good," Rodney Temple corrected, "because we
always blame the spoon."

"Don't you mind them, dear," Mrs. Temple cooed. She was a little,
apple-faced woman, with a figure suggestive of a tea-cozy, and a voice
with a gurgle in it, like a dove's. A nervous, convulsive moment of her
pursed-up little mouth made that organ an uncertain element in her
physiognomy, shifting as it did from one side of her face to the other
with the rapidity of an aurora borealis. "Don't mind them, dear. A woman
can never do more than reflect 'broken lights' of her husband, when she
has a good one. Don't you love that expression?--'broken lights'? 'We
are but broken lights of Thee!' Dear Tennyson! And no word yet from
Madame de Melcourt."

"I don't expect any now," Olivi