Anna Lombard | Page 3

contract for the lumma road and never meant to build it, never meant to, I say; the service is rotten, rotten through and through, and if the Government don't take some steps about it well I don't claim any particular brilliance of intellect; I don't suppose my brain is more acute or my vision clearer than the ordinary man's "
Here he seemed to pause, as if he would like some interruption, and so I gratified him with a murmured:
"I don't know about that, colonel."
When he proceeded, happily:
"And, therefore, what I can see others can see. If I know these things are going on, why, others know it. Now, I am proud of my country, I am proud of "
I am afraid I lost what else furnished him with a cause of pride, for my attention wandered. Somehow I did not seem to care if the service were rotten or if Brentwood had contracted to build fifty roads and then backed out of it. My former interlocutor was right; I was queer, I suppose, since none of these vital matters interested me.
I really had an engagement for the coming dance, so when I had listened respectfully to the whole speech, and the colonel stopped to take breath for a moment, I said:
"You must excuse me, colonel; I have to look for my partner for this waltz."
"Very good, my boy, very good," he replied, genially, having at last, as he hoped, impressed some one with a sense of Brentwood's enormities. "I don't grudge you the dance or the girl. I like to see boys enjoy them.' selves."
With which comforting assurance in my ears I started listlessly to find my partner.
That young lady I soon discovered sitting on afauteuiL
"I thought you had forgotten our dance!" she exclaimed the moment I came up, and she looked at me with an arch expression that told me very clearly she thought such a thing would be an utter impossibility.
She was slight and round, very well-dressed, with a pretty face, frivolous expression, and a mouth that was always laughing. I assured her that the dance was what I had been waiting for all the evening, and we started together. She talked the whole time. She told me how the last man she danced with had held her so tightly the flowers at her breast had all been crushed and broken; wasn't he a wretch? Not but what she liked to be held tightly, she exclaimed, as, involuntarily my arm round her loosened, but not, of course, so as to crush her flowers: but they were all dead now, and it didn't matter. A hateful girl, too, had trodden on her train; they trains were a bore of course in dancing, but didn't I think they made you look more graceful yes, well, she thought so too, and was glad I thought so; and, fancy, that ugly little Miss Johnson was going to marry Captain Grant of the Eleventh, and wasn't it wonderful what he could see in her, and didn't I think she was ugly? Not know her by sight? why, of course I must know her. She sat three pews behind me and in the left aisle at church, and when the congregation turned to the east to say the Creed I could certainly see her.
While this was being poured into my ear, I had to keep my eyes well on the alert to guard against possible collision, as the room was very crowded, and just as we passed a corner my gaze fell suddenly on a figure in white silk sitting alone on a fauteuil. I don't know why, but something in the figure caught and held my eye; perhaps it was only, in the first place, that it was alone and therefore possibly disassociated with all this crowd, with which I myself felt so out of tune.
"Do you know the name of that girl in white we have just passed?" I asked my companion, breaking in, I anr afraid, rather abruptly upon more confidences.
"That?" she replied, looking back over my shoulder "Why, you must know her, surely; she's the general's daughter Anna Lombard."
"Anna Lombard," I repeated. "It's a curious nama, It sounds somehow to me medieval, a Middle Age sort of name."
"Oh, Anna's not middle-aged," returned inconsequent ly my rather flighty companion. "She was twenty-ono yesterday, and just out from England, where she was kept at study and things regular lessons, you know. Don't you think it a shame to keep a girl studying so long? It's made Iher Iso serious. She says it made her serious, made her feel and think a lot, and see things in life, I mean more than most people I don't know how to express it exactly but you feel she's different from other people. Of course, sometimes