“My dear, I can’t have poor Mr. Touchett made game of.”

“I won’t make game of him, dear Lady Temple, only make him play a game.”

“But you said Alick did not approve,” said Fanny, with the dimmest possible ideas of what croquet was, and believing it a wicked flirtation trap that figured in “Punch.”

“Oh, that’s fudge on Master Alick’s part!  Just the remains of his old miseries, poor fellow.  What he wants is love!  Now he’ll meet his fate some of these days; and as he can’t meet three Englishwomen without a mallet in hand, love and croquet will come together.”

“Alick is very good,” went on Lady Temple, not answering, but arguing with herself whether this opposition could be right.  “Colonel Hammond gave me such an account of him, so valuable and excellent among the men, and doing all that is possible for their welfare, interesting himself about their library, and the regimental school and all.  The colonel said he wished only that he was a little more easy and popular among the young officers; but so many of his own standing were gone by the time he joined again, that he lives almost too much to himself, reads a good deal, and is most exemplary, but does not quite make his influence as available as it might be.”

“That’s just it,” cried Bessie, eagerly; “the boy is a lazy boy, and wants shaking up, or he’ll get savage and no good.  Can’t you see, by the way he uses his poor little sister, what an awful don Captain Keith must be to a schoolboy of an ensign?  He must be taught toleration and hunted into amiability, or he’ll be the most terrible Turk by the time he is a colonel; and you are the only person that can do it, dear Lady Temple.”

Kachel did not much like this, but it was so prettily and playfully said that the pleasing impression was quite predominant; and when Rachel took leave, it was with a sense of vexation that a person whom she had begun to esteem should be hard upon this bright engaging sister.  Yet it might be well if Fanny took note of the admission that he could be irritable as well as stern, and sometimes mistaken in his judgments.  What would the Colonel say to all this?  The Colonel—­here he was coming back again into her imagination.  Another symptom!

The brother left the field entirely to his sister for the present; he was a good deal occupied after his leave, and other officers being away, he was detained at Avoncester, and meantime Bessie Keith took all hearts by storm with her gay good humour and eager sympathy.  By the end of the first morning she had been to the stable with a swarm of boys, patted, and learnt the names of all the ponies; she was on the warmest terms with the young spaniel, that, to the Curtises’ vexation, one of the officers had given Conrade, and which was always getting into the way; she had won Alison by telling her of Mr. Clare’s recollections of Ermine’s remarkable beauty and intelligence, and charmed Ermine herself