"Well, tell me what she's like, man, can't you? Teddy here can't say anything concerning her appearance, except that he's head over heels in love with her himself.---- And I'm sure that's no recommendation for any girl!" Captain Dorricot added, as an afterthought.
Ted hereupon indulged in an exclamation and gesture expressive of dissent, and of the supreme contempt in which he held his cousin.
"What's that, Ted? You never said anything of the sort? Why, you young bargee, of course you did!" went on the tormentor. "You talked of poisoning Jim's grub, and what not.---- Well, Captain Russell, once more: Are her eyes black, blue, brown, purple, violet, green, yellow, red, or a mixture, or perchance, is she an albino?"
"Oh, I dunno! Something between green and blue, as you seem so anxious to know."
"Peacock-blue, shall we say? That's a pity! Violet is the favourite hue with lady novelists--either violet, or purple, or heliotrope. Did you ever see a woman with eyes of heliotrope hue, young 'un?"
"That's very decided. Now then, Jim, cut along! Eyes, peacock-blue; nose, Roman, Grecian, snub, or what? Grecian? Right. Jot it down. Size? Ted says she's a dwarf. What? Ted a liar? Surely the boy has not been deceiving me who trusted in him?"
"I never said anything of the kind!" interrupted Ted indignantly. "Don't believe a word he says, Jim."
"Oh, Teddy, Teddy, this to your loving cousin? Now, you know that you said she was smaller than you!" Charlie asserted with a show of indignant surprise at the ensign's perfidy.
"Well, we're getting at it slowly," Dorricot continued. "Nose Grecian; peacock-blue eyes; size five feet nothing; hair brown; rides well; shoots mullahs in the _bazar_ for sport, failing partridges; loads rifles with considerable ease--for a woman; sings divinely--isn't that the expression?--"
"Hold on, old man, that's the whole catalogue!" interrupted Jim. "You'll see her some day, I hope. Now what about this present business?"
Captain Russell then proceeded to give an account of their great march, and Dorricot told of the temptations placed before his men.
"As we halted one day on the march down to Meerut," he informed the brothers, "a number of sappers who were on the point of mutiny approached our lads and began to talk earnestly to them. We pretended to take no notice, but when the sappers had left, Reid called a couple of the Gurkhas to him. The little men trotted up, quivering with anger and indignation.