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“Then she can’t come.”

“Oh, Major Keeling! And if I had said she was engaged, you would have said that the man would be always wasting his time dangling round her.”

“But as she isn’t, the whole force would waste their time dangling round her,” was the crushing reply. “No, Lady Haigh, we have no use for young ladies on the frontier. It will be work, not play.”

“Play! Do you think a girl with that face wants to spend her life in playing?” demanded Lady Haigh, very much in the tone with which she had once been wont to crush her family. “Look there!”

She drew him to the open window of the drawing-room and made him look through the reed curtain. The light fell full on Penelope’s face as she sang, and Lady Haigh felt that the beholder was impressed.

“What’s that she’s singing?” he growled. “‘County Guy’? Scott? There’s some good in her, at any rate.”

Lady Haigh forbore to resent the slighting imputation, and Major Keeling remained watching the singer through the curtain. Penelope’s contemporaries considered her tall and queenly, though she would now be thought decidedly under middle height. Her dark hair was dressed in a graceful old fashion which had almost gone out before the combined assault of bands and ringlets,—raised high on the head, divided in front, and slightly waved on the temples,—a style which by rights demanded an oval face and classical features as its complement. Judged by this standard, Penelope might have been found wanting, for her features were at once stronger and less regular than the classical ideal; but the grey eyes beneath the broad low brow disarmed criticism, they were so large and deep and calm, save when they were lighted, as now, by the fire of the ballad she was singing. Those were days when a white dress and coloured ribbons were considered the only evening wear for a young girl; and Penelope wore a vivid scarlet sash, with knots of scarlet catching up her airy white draperies, and a scarlet flower in her hair. As Major Keeling stood looking at her, Lady Haigh caught a murmur which at once astonished and delighted her.