less to visit her husband than to cure her rheumatism in the balmy
climate of Elvas; and the wife of Captain Ford had just, very
injudiciously, presented him with two little Portuguese, who might
have made very good Englishmen, had they first seen the light in the
right place. If the brigade had suffered heavy loss in the last
campaign, the ladies of the brigade were absolutely _hors de combat_,
and could not furnish Lady Mabel even a sentinel in the shape of a
chaperon. She felt that this was awkward; but, said she to herself,
"If there were any impropriety in my situation here, Papa would not
open his house so freely to the officers of the brigade." For she
loved and admired him far too much to doubt his judgment on such a
point. Now, Lord Strathern had dined the better part of his life at a
regimental mess table; and when promotion at length removed him from
that genial sphere, he felt selfish and solitary, if he took his
dinner and wine without, at least, a corporal's guard of his brother
officers around him. So far from deeming his daughter's arrival a
reason for excluding them, she was a strong ally, and a delightful
addition to his means of entertaining his friends. So she found
herself suddenly the centre of a circle, composed of gentlemen only,
most of them unmarried, young and gay, and admiring her. In short,
Lady Mabel was finishing off her education in a very bad school,
worse, perhaps, than a Frenchified academy, devoted to the education
of the extremities, in the shape of music, dancing and gabbling
French, with a dash of mental and moral training in the development of
the sickly imagination of the head and the empty vanities of the
heart.

For a time the dilapidated condition of kitchen and refectory
restricted the scale of hospitality at headquarters. But Lady Mabel
soon completed her reforms of house and household, in which she found