Worthy, there to attend his cousin’s wedding, and at the end of a fortnight to bring his sister for her visit to Lady Temple.  This sister was evidently his great care, and it needed but little leading to make him tell a good deal about her.  She had, it seemed, been sent home from the Cape at about ten years old, when the regiment went to India, and her brother who had been at school, then was with her for a short time before going out to join the regiment.

“Why,” said Rachel, recovering her usual manner, “you have not been ten years in the army!”

“I had my commission at sixteen,” he answered.

“You are not six-and-twenty!” she exclaimed.

“You are as right as usual,” was the reply, with his odd little smile; “at least till the 1st of August.”

“My dear!” said her mother, more alive than Rachel to his amusement at her daughter’s knowing his age better than he did himself, but adding, politely, “you are hardly come to the time of life for liking to hear that your looks deceived us.”

“Boys are tolerated,” he said, with a quick glance at Rachel; but at that moment something many-legged and tickling flitted into the light, and dashed over her face.  Mrs. Curtis was by no means a strong-minded woman in the matter of moths and crane-flies, disliking almost equally their sudden personal attentions and their suicidal propensities, and Rachel dutifully started up at once to give chase to the father-long-legs, and put it out of window before it had succeeded in deranging her mother’s equanimity either by bouncing into her face, or suspending itself by two or three legs in the wax of the candle.  Mr. Keith seconded her efforts, but the insect was both lively and cunning, eluding them with a dexterity wonderful in such an apparently over-limbed creature, until at last it kindly rested for a moment with its wooden peg of a body sloping, and most of its thread-like members prone upon a newspaper, where Rachel descended on it with her pocket-handkerchief, and Mr. Keith tried to inclose it with his hands at the same moment.  To have crushed the fly would have been melancholy, to have come down on the young soldier’s fingers, awkward; but Rachel did what was even more shocking—­her hands did descend on, what should have been fingers, but they gave way under her—­she felt only the leather of the glove between her and the newspaper.  She jumped and very nearly cried out, looking up with an astonishment and horror only half reassured by his extremely amused smile.  “I beg your pardon; I’m so sorry—­” she gasped confused.

“Inferior animals can dispense with a member more or less,” he replied, giving her the other corner of the paper, on which they bore their capture to the window, and shook it till it took wing, with various legs streaming behind it.  “That venerable animal is apparently indifferent to having left a third of two legs behind him,” and as he spoke he removed the already half drawn-off left-hand glove, and let Rachel see for a moment that it had only covered the thumb, forefinger, two joints of the middle, and one of the third; the little finger was gone, and the whole hand much scarred.  She was still so much dismayed that she gasped out the first question she had ever asked him—­