The pace that season
was too good to inquire; and meddling with another man's folly is always
thankless work.
Pluffles' Colonel should have ordered him back to his regiment when he heard
how things were going. But Pluffles had got himself engaged to a girl in
England the last time he went home; and if there was one thing more than
another which the Colonel detested, it was a married subaltern. He chuckled
when he heard of the education of Pluffles, and said it was "good training for
the boy." But it was not good training in the least. It led him into spending
money beyond his means, which were good: above that, the education spoilt an
average boy and made it a tenth-rate man of an objectionable kind. He wandered
into a bad set, and his little bill at Hamilton's was a thing to wonder at.
Then Mrs. Hauksbee rose to the occasion. She played her game alone, knowing
what people would say of her; and she played it for the sake of a girl she had
never seen. Pluffles' fiancee was to come out, under the chaperonage of an
aunt, in October, to be married to Pluffles.
At the beginning of August, Mrs. Hauksbee discovered that it was time to
interfere. A man who rides much knows exactly what a horse is going to do next
before he does it.
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