General Mallett saw to it that his youngest daughter early learnt to
ride. Her memories of him were of a big man on a big horse, not
talkative, somewhat stern and sad, becoming companionable only when
they rode out together on the high Downs crowning the old city, and
then he was hardly recognizable as the father who heard her prayers
every night. These two duties of teaching her to ride and of hearing
her pray, and his insistence on her going, as Caroline and Sophia had
done, to a convent school in France, made up, as far as she could
remember, the sum of his interest in her, and when she returned home
from school for the last time, it was to attend his funeral.

She was hardly sorry, she was certainly not glad; she envied the
spontaneous tears of her stepsisters, and she found the lugubriousness
of the occasion much alleviated by the presence of her stepbrother
Reginald. She had hardly seen him since her childhood. Sophia always
spoke of him as she might have spoken of the dead. Caroline sometimes
referred to him in good round terms, sometimes with an indulgent
laugh; and for Rose he had the charm of mystery, the fascination of
the scapegrace. He was handsome, but good looks were a prerogative of
the Malletts; he was married to a wife he had never introduced to his
family and he had a little girl. What his profession was, Rose did not
know. Perhaps his face was his fortune, as certainly his sisters had
been his victims.

After the funeral he had several interviews with Caroline and Sophia,
when Rose could hear the mannish voice of Caroline growing gruff with
indignation and the high tones of Sophia rising to a squeak. He
emerged from these encounters with an angry face and a weak mouth
stubbornly set; but for Rose he had always a gay word or a pretty
speech. She was a real Mallett, he told her; she was more his sister