He watched her nimble fingers on the delicate embroidery; he glanced at her quiet face and down-turned eyelids, wondering who she was thinking of.

Suddenly she raised her eyes and caught him in the fact.

You could not swear she blushed; it might only be a trifling reflection from one of the red China roses that hung between her and the sun; yet, when she spoke, it was not quite with her usual self-possession; a little hurriedly perhaps.
"Are you going to be a soldier, as your father was ?" Sam had thought for an instant of saying "yes," and then to prove his words true of going to Sydney, and enlisting in the "Half Hundred." Truth, however, prompting him to say "no," he compromised the matter by saying he had not thought of it.
"I am rather glad of that, do you know," she said.

"Unless in India, now, a man had better be anything than a soldier.

I am afraid my brother Jim will be begging for a commission some day.