“Thine own mild energy bestow,
   And deepen while thou bidst it flow,
   More calm our stream of love."’

Forced to resign herself to her holiday, Albinia did so with a good grace, in imitation of her brother, who assured her that he had brought a bottle of Lethe, and had therein drowned wife, children, and parish.  Mr. Kendal’s spirits, as usual, rose higher every mile from Bayford, and they were a very lively party when they arrived in Mayfair.

The good aunts were delighted to have round them all those whom they called their children; all except Fred, whom the new arrangements had sent to rejoin his regiment in Ireland.

Sinewy, spare, and wiry, with keen gray eyes under straight brows, narrow temples, a sunburnt face, and alert, upright bearing and quick step, William Ferrars was every inch a soldier; but nothing so much struck Mr. and Mrs. Kendal as the likeness to their little Maurice, though it consisted more in air and gesture than in feature.  His speech was brief and to the point, softened into delicately-polished courtesy towards womankind, in the condescension of strength to weakness—­the quality he evidently thought their chief characteristic.

Albinia was amused as she watched him with grown-up eyes, and compared present with past impressions.  She could now imagine that she had been an inconvenient charge to a young soldier brother, and that he had been glad to make her over to the aunts, only petting and indulging her as a child; looking down on her fancies, and smiling at her sauciness when she was an enthusiastic maiden—­treatment which she had so much resented, that she had direfully offended Maurice by pronouncing William a mere martinet, when she was hurt at his neither reading the Curse of Kehama, nor entering into her plans for Fairmead school.

Having herself become a worker, she could better appreciate a man who had seen and acted instead of reading, recollected herself as an emanation of conceit, and felt shy and anxious, even more for her husband than for herself.  How would the scholar and the soldier fare together? and could she and Maurice keep them from wearying of each other?  She had little trust in her own fascinations, though she saw the General’s eye approvingly fixed on her, and believing herself to be a more pleasing object in her womanly bloom than in her unformed girlhood.

‘How does the Montreal affair go on?’ she asked.

‘What affair?’

‘Fred and Miss Kinnaird.’

‘I am sorry to say he has not put it out of his head.’

‘Surely she is a very nice person.’

‘Pshaw!  He has no right to think of a wife these dozen years.’

’Not even think?  When he is not to have one at any rate till he is a field officer!’

’And he is a fool to have one then.  A mere encumbrance to himself and the entire corps.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Albinia, ‘she always gets the best cabin.’