“Well, you’ll have to be careful,” said Mrs. Sand, as if with severe intent.  “But I don’t say discourage him; I wouldn’t say that.  You may be an influence for good.  It may be His will that you should be pleasant to the young man.  But don’t make free with him.  Don’t, on any account, have him put his arm round your waist.”

“Nobody has done that to me,” Laura replied, austerely, “since I left Putney, and so long as I am in the Army nobody will.  Not that Mr. Lindsay” (she blushed again) “would ever want to.  The class he belongs to look down on it.”

“The class he belongs to do worse things.  The Army doesn’t look down on it.  It’s only nature, and the Army believes in working with nature.  If it was Mr. Harris that wanted such a thing, I wouldn’t say a word—­he marches under the Lord’s banner.”

Captain Filbert listened without confusion; her expression was even slightly complacent.

“Well,” she said, “I told Mr. Harris last evening that the Lieutenant and I couldn’t go on giving him so much of our time, and he seemed to think he’d been keeping company with me.  I had to tell him I hadn’t any such idea.”

“Did he seem much disappointed?”

“He said he thought he would have more of the feeling of belonging to the Army if he was married in it; but I told him he would have to learn to walk alone.”

Mrs. Sand speculatively bit her lip.  Some faint reflection of the interview with Mr. Harris made her, as far as possible, button up her dressing-gown.

“I don’t know but what you did right,” she said.  “By the grace of God you converted him, and he hadn’t ought to ask more of you.  But I have a kind of feeling that Mr. Lindsay’ll be harder to convince.”

“I dare say.”

“It would be splendid, though, to garner him in.  He might be willing to march with us and subscribe half his pay, like poor Captain Corby, of the Queen’s Army, did in Rangoon.”

“He might be proud to.”

“We must all try and bring sin home to him,” Mrs. Sand remarked with rising energy; “and don’t you go saying anything to him hastily.  If he’s gone on you——­”

“Oh, Ensign; let us hope he is thinking of higher things!  Let us both pray for him.  Let Captain Sand pray for him, too, and I’ll ask the Lieutenant.  Now that she’s got Miss Rozario safe into the Kingdom, I don’t think she has any special object.”

“Oh, yes, we’ll pray for him,” Ensign Sand returned, as if that might have gone without saying, “but you——­”

“And give me that precious baby.  You must be completely worn out.  I should enjoy taking care of him; indeed I should.”

“It’s the first—­the very first—­time she ever took that draggin’ child out of my arms for an instant,” the Ensign remarked to her husband and next in command later in the evening, but she resigned the infant without protest at the time.  Laura carried him into her own room with something like gaiety, and there repeated to him more nursery rhymes, dating from secular Putney, than she would have believed she remembered.