Page:Ralph Connor - The man from Glengarry.djvu/425

  "But isn't it awful, auntie? They might kill him," said Kate. "Yes, dear," said Mrs. Murray, in a soothing voice, "but it sounds worse to us perhaps than it is."

Mrs, Murray had not lived in the Indian Lands for nothing.

"Oh, if anything should happen to him?" said Kate, with sudden agitation.

"We must just trust him to the great Keeper," said Mrs. Murray, quietly, "in Whose keeping all are safe whether there or here."

Then going to her valise, she took out a letter and handed it to Kate, saying: "That's his last to me. You can look at it, Kate."

Kate took the letter and put it in her desk. "I think, perhaps, we had better go down now," she said; "I expect Colonel Thorp has come. I think you will like him. He seems a little rough, but he is a gentleman, and has a true heart," and they went downstairs.

It is the mark of a gentleman to know his kind. He has an instinct for what is fine and offers ready homage to what is worthy. Any one observing Colonel Thorp's manner of receiving Mrs. Murray would have known him at once for a gentleman, for when that little lady came into the drawing-room, dressed in her decent silk gown, with soft white lace at her throat, bearing herself with sweet dignity, and stepping with dainty grace on her toes, after the manner of the fine ladies of the old school, and not after the flat-footed, heel-first modern style, the colonel