Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER THREE THE COLONEL ADVISES CARE Put not your trust in facial expressions. Ninety per cent, of the people who for the first time saw Colonel Edgerton striding up Rector Street to his office, would have said, there goes a stern man. The Colonel carried his head well up in the air and a little to the right; he was tall, with good shoulders and altogether a military figure. He had a fine head of white hair, bushy white eyebrows, and white moustaches and imperial. Sometimes he slipped his right hand across his breast and into the bosom of his coat which he invariably wore buttoned. Always he wore a preoccupied look as though tortured by the responsibilities of some impending judgment. Yes, fully ninety per cent, even of those accustomed to seeing the Colonel would not have hesitated in pronouncing him a stern man; and yet in reality; he was Edith Hampton’s guardian and she was beyond question the commandant of their small post. Edith felt no necessity of striding, scowling, or assuming Napoleonic poses; she placed no reliance upon overawing the enemy; when it came to the actual conflict she would close in and crush him; but in the meantime she would be as sunny and tranquil and smiling as the grassy bank which hides a disappearing gun. The Colonel much preferred an enemy willing to capitulate without a single blow. He never tried to overawe Edith; in fact he had ahabit, as unconscious as it was comical, of lifting his eyes to hers from time to time while a tiny shade of apprehension came upon his firm, soldierly face. He had been a vigorous fighter in the Civil War, a man of action, quick, powerful, certain; but he had assumed the guardianship of Edith shortly after her fourth birthday, and since then he had felt like a corporal commanding a regiment of captains. He …