when he hobbled into her drawing-room and saw her without her hat, crowned with the glory of her hair, thick, of silky texture and of baffling colour, now almost black, now gleaming with sombre gold, and her slender figure clad in a blue dress which deepened the magical blue in her eyes, godfrey thought she was more wonderful still. the clasp of her bare hand with its long, capable fingers, thrilled him. her voice had the added caress of welcome to her house. when, later, she reminded him of their promised heart to heart talk about fathers, it was in his heart to say, “the pedantic old bat calls you a type—you, unique among women!” the criticism had buzzed in his head all the week and on occasions he had laughed out loud at its ineptitude. it buzzed in his head while he was being introduced to lady northby, the wife of a distinguished general, and it was with an effort that he cleared his mind enough to say:
“i had the honour of serving under the general in france. oh, a long, long way under, all the time i was out.”
“then you’re friends at once,” cried lady edna. “you’ll join lady northby’s collection.”
“of what, pray?” asked baltazar.
“of sir edward’s officers.”
“i don’t know whether mr. baltazar would like to be collected,” said lady northby. she was a tiny, dark-faced, kind-eyed woman of fifty. her smile of invitation was very pleasant.
“can you doubt it?” replied the young man. “it must be a glorious company. i’m only afraid i’m a poor specimen.”
“won’t you sit down?” she indicated a place on the sofa by her side. and when godfrey had obeyed her, she said in a low voice: “that and that”—with the faintest motion of her hand she indicated decoration and footless leg—“entitle you to a place of honour.” then as if she had touched sensitive ground, she added hastily, almost apologetically: “lady edna always teases me about my collection, as she calls it; but there’s a little truth in it. my husband is very proud of his division, and so am i, and the only way i can try to realize it as a living thing, is to get to know some of his officers.”
“by jove!” cried godfrey, his eyes suddenly sparkling. “that accounts for it.”
“for what?”
“for the division being the most splendid division, bar none, at the front. for the magical influence the general has over it. i’ve only seen him once or twice and then i shook in my boots as he passed by. but there isn’t an officer or man who doesn’t feel that he’s under the tips of his fingers. i never could account for it. now i can.”
she smiled again. “i don’t quite follow you, mr. baltazar.”
suddenly he became aware of his audacity. subalterns in social relations with the wives of their divisional generals were supposed to be the meekest things on earth. he was not sure whether their demeanour was not prescribed in paragraph something or the other of army orders. his fair face blushed ingenuous scarlet. in the meanwhile in her eyes shone amused and kindly enquiry; and, to render confusion worse confounded, lady edna and his father appeared to have suspended their casual talk in order to listen to his reply. there was no help for it. he summoned up his courage, and with an invisible snap of the fingers said:
“it was you behind the division all the time.”
the modest lady blushed too. the boy’s sincerity was manifest. lady edna rose with a laugh, as a servant entered the room.
“the hand that rocks the subaltern rules the division. let us see if we can find something to eat.”
there were only the four of them. at first lady edna donnithorpe had thought of inviting a numerous company to meet baltazar. her young consciousness of power delighted in the homage of the fine flower of london around her table. baltazar’s story (heard before she met him) had fascinated her, he himself had impressed her with a sense of his vitality and vast erudition, and after the dinner party she had been haunted by his personality. here was a great force at a loose end. how could she apply it? people were beginning to talk about him. the new rip van winkle. the freak of the war. it would be a triumph to man?uvre him into the position of a national asset. she had already drawn up a list of the all-important people whom it was essential for him to know—her husband did not count—and was ticking off the guests for the proposed luncheon party when suddenly she tore it up, she scarcely knew why. better perhaps gauge her protégé more accurately before opening her campaign. the son added a complication. a fine pathetic figure of a boy. perhaps she might be able to do something for him, too, if she knew what he wanted. she liked his eyes and the set of his head. besides, the stuffy lot who would be useful to the father would bore the young man to death. she regarded the boredom of a guest in her house as an unimaginable calamity. edgar, her husband, was the only person ever bored in it, and that was his own doing. he had reduced self-boredom in private life to a fine art. she decided that young baltazar should not run the risk of boredom. having tom up her list, she ran across lady northby, dearest of women, the ideal fourth.
at the beginning of lunch, while baltazar happened to be engaged in eager argument with lady northby, she devoted herself to godfrey. in her sympathetic contralto she questioned him, and, under the spell of it, he answered. he would have revealed the inmost secrets of his soul, had she demanded them. as it was, he told her an astonishing lot of things about himself.
presently the talk became general. lady northby, in her gentle way, shed light, from the point of view of a divisional commander’s wife, on many obscure phases of the war. lady edna held a flaming torch over black and abysmal corners of diplomacy. godfrey sat awed by her knowledge of facts and her swift deductions from them. he had never met a woman like her, scarcely dreamed that such a woman existed. she had been in personal touch with all the great ones of the earth, from the kaiser upwards, and she judged them shrewdly and with a neat taste in epigram.
“if the kaiser and the crown prince had been ordinary middle-class folk,” she said, “they would have been in gaol long ago. the father for swindling the public on a grand scale; the son for stealing milk-cans.”
she had met king constantine, then a thorn in the allied flesh, whose sufferance for so long on the greek throne is still a mystery to the plain briton.
“what a degradation of a name for constantine the great,” said baltazar.
“that’s just it,” she flashed. “his awful wife says ‘in hoc signo vinces,’ and dangles before his eyes the iron cross.”
no. godfrey had never met a woman remotely like her. she was incomparable.
the talk developed quickly from the name of constantine to names in general. the degradation of names. uriah, for instance, that of the most tragic victim of dastardly treachery in history, now brought low by its association with heep.
“i love the old saxon names,” said lady northby, with some irrelevance. “yours, dear, for instance.”
“it’s a beautiful name,” said baltazar, “but it’s not saxon. it’s far older.”
“surely it’s saxon,” said lady edna.
“edna was the wife of raguel and the mother-in-law of tobias, the son of tobit, the delightful young gentleman carrying a fish and accompanied by the angel raphael, whom you see in the italian pictures.”
lady edna was impressed. “i wonder if there’s anything you don’t know?”
he laughed. “i only remember what i’ve read. my early wrestling with chinese, i suppose, has trained my memory for detail. i’m also very fond of the apocrypha. the book of esdras, for instance, is a well of wonderful names. i love hieremoth and carabasion.”
presently she said to godfrey: “your father always makes me feel so humble and ignorant. have you ever read the apocrypha?”
“i’m afraid not.”
“neither have i. if you said you had, i should want to sink under the table. the pair of you would be too much for me.”
her confession of ignorance delighted him as much as her display of knowledge filled him with wonder. it made her deliciously human.
when lunch was over and they went up to the drawing-room she left the elders together and sat for a while apart with him.
“you’ll go and see lady northby, of course,” she said.
“i should just think so,” he replied boyishly. “you see, i’m new army and have never had a chance of meeting a general’s wife. if they’re all like that, no wonder the army’s what it is.”
lady edna smiled indulgently. “she’s a dear. i thought you would fall in love with her.”
“but you couldn’t have known i was in general northby’s division, unless——”
“unless what?”
“unless you’re a witch.”
with a quick glance she read the tribute in his young eyes. it almost persuaded her that she possessed uncanny powers. she looked charmingly mysterious.
“let us leave it at that,” she said. “anyhow,” she added, “lady northby can be very useful indeed to a young officer.”
“useful?” his cheek flushed. “but i couldn’t go to see any lady—socially—with the idea of getting things out of her. it would be awful.”
“why?”
he met her eyes. “it’s obvious.”
she broke into pleasant laughter. “i’m so glad you said that. if you hadn’t, i should have been dreadfully disappointed.”
“but how could you have thought me capable of such a thing?”
his real concern touched her. inured to her world of intrigue which had little in it that was so sensitive on the point of honour, she had taken for granted his appreciation of lady northby’s potential influence. she was too crafty a diplomatist, however, to let him guess her surprise; still less suspect her little pang of realization that his standards might be just a little higher than her own; or her lightning glance back to her girlhood when her standards were just the same. she gave him smilingly to understand that it was a playful trap she had set for him, so that resentment at an implied accusation was instantaneously submerged beneath a wave of wonder at the gracious beauty of her soul. this boy of twenty, instinctive soldier, half-conscious thereof when he came to exercise his power, could play on fifty rough and violent men as on an instrument, and make them do his bidding lovingly in the ease of camp and follow him in battle into the jaws of hell, as they had done, but he was outclassed in his unwitting struggle with the girl of five-and-twenty, instinctive schemer after power, her clear brain as yet undisturbed by any clamourings of the heart.
baltazar, desiring to bring brightness into the boy’s life, had brought it with a vengeance. he had not heard of dorothy. he had no idea of the state of mind of the rosaline-rejected young romeo of a son of his. unconscious of peril, he cast him into the furnace. “an interesting type. a woman of the moment,” commented placid and philosophic fifty. “oh! she doth teach the torches to burn bright!” sang twenty. et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. see the part of romeo passim. away with rosaline! his “love did read by rote and could not spell.” rosaline-dorothy was blotted out of his book of existence for ever.
“what are your plans?” asked lady edna, as soon as the little cloud had melted beneath the very eager sunshine.
“as soon as i get a new foot i’ll spend every day at the war office until they give me something to do.”
“you oughtn’t to have any difficulty. there are lots of billets going, i know.”
“yes. but what kind? i’m not going to sit in an office all day filling up forms. i want to get a man’s job. active service again.”
“how splendid of you!”
her commendation was something to live for. after the british way, however, he deprecated claims to splendour.
“not a bit. it’s only that one feels rather rotten doing nothing while other fellows are fighting. they may take me in the flying corps. but i’d sooner go where i belong—to the job i know. perhaps i’m rather an ass to think of it.”
“not at all. where there’s a will there’s a way.”
“i’m going to have a try for it, anyhow,” said he.
he thought vindictively of dorothy’s light patronage, which would have resulted in a soft job. no soft jobs for him. he had had a lucky escape. dorothy and her inconsequence and flapperish immaturity, and the paralysing work that general mackworth would doubtless have found for him—recording issues of bully-beef or keeping stock of dead men’s kits! never in life! in those bright eyes raining influence—no, they were not bright—they were muffled stars—that was the fascination of them—he would make himself something to be considered, respected, admired. he would be the one one-footed man in the british army to arrive at greatness. the splendid end compelled the means. until that moment he had never contemplated an heroic continuance of his military career.
lady edna, pathetically young, in spite of myriad ageing worldlinesses, including a half-humorous, half-repellant marriage of calculation, was caught by his enthusiasm.
“i should love to see you back again!”
“that alone is enough,” said he, “to make me move heaven and earth to get there.”
she flushed beneath his downright eyes and hid a moment’s embarrassment by a laugh.
“that’s a very pretty speech,” she said lightly. “i’m glad to find the army is going back to its old tradition of manners.”
“i perfectly agree with you,” exclaimed baltazar, for her tone had been purposely pitched higher than that of the preceding conversation. “i’ve been greatly struck by it.”
the little intimate talk was over; but enough had been said before father and son took their leave, to make godfrey treasure every one of her beautiful words and repeat them over and over again. especially her last words, spoken in a low voice for him alone: “i don’t want to lose track of you. one so often does in london. if ever you’re at a loose end, come and report progress. ring me up beforehand.” she gave him her number. victoria 9857. a golden number. the figures had a magical significance.
it was not long before he ventured to obey her, and rang up the golden number. he spent with her an enchanted hour, the precursor of many hours which lady edna stole from her manifold activities in order to devote them to the young man’s further enchantment.
in the meanwhile quong ho arrived at godalming. quong ho delighted with himself, in his ready-made suit and soft felt hat, in spite of the loss of his pigtail, which the treatment of his cracked skull had necessitated. baltazar, too, cast an eye of approbation on his european appearance, regarding him somewhat as a creation of his own. his pride, however, was dashed by godfrey, who on being asked, eagerly, after the first interview, what he thought of quong ho, cried:
“for heaven’s sake, sir, get the poor devil a new kit!”
“why—why?” asked baltazar, in his impatient way, “what’s the matter with his clothes?”
“they fit like a flag at the end of a pole in a dead calm,” said godfrey. “or like sails round a mast. you’d have to get a pack of hounds in order to find his arms and legs. and that red and purple tie! it’s awful. ask marcelle.”
baltazar had walked quong ho over to churton towers, and after they had said good-bye at the gates, he had rushed back to put his question, leaving quong ho in the road.
marcelle smiled at his disconcerted face. “it would be scarcely well received at cambridge.”
“give the chap a chance, sir,” said godfrey.
“i want to give him every chance,” exclaimed baltazar. “i want to overwhelm him with chances. if his clothes won’t do, get him some others.”
at his summons the chinaman came up. baltazar caught him by his loose sleeve.
“godfrey doesn’t approve of garments not made to the precise measurements of the individual human figure. he’ll take you to his tailor and hosier and hatter and rig you out properly. he knows what’s right and i don’t. when can you do it? the sooner the better.”
“i’ll see what my engagements are,” said godfrey stiffly.
“that’s right,” cried baltazar. “telephone me this evening. his time’s yours. get him all he wants. brushes, combs, shirts, pyjamas, boots. you know.”
he wrung his hand, waved his hat to marcelle and marched off with quong ho.
godfrey regarded the retreating figures speechless. then he turned to marcelle.
“of all the cool cheek! without by your leave or with your leave! i’m to cart this infernal chinee about bond street. my god! my tailor will have a fit.”
“so long as quong ho gets one, it doesn’t matter,” laughed marcelle.
but he was in no humour for pleasantry. he dug his crutch viciously in the ground as he walked.
“he takes it for granted that i’d love to be saddled with this scarecrow of a chinaman. don’t you see? it’s preposterous. my god! i’ve a jolly good mind to set him up regardless, like a pre-war nut—with solid silver boot-trees and the rest to correspond. it would serve j. b. right.”
said marcelle with a sidelong glance—in her sister’s uniform she looked very demure—
“why didn’t you refuse?”
he fumed. “how could i? i couldn’t hurt the poor chap’s feelings. besides——”
“besides what?”
“this father of mine—his big gestures, his ugly mouth—and his infernal dancing eyes—and behind them something so pathetic and appealing—i don’t know. sometimes i think i loathe the sight of him, and, at others, i feel that i’d be a beast if i shut my heart against him. and always i feel just like a rabbit before a boa-constrictor. i’m not a little boy. i’ve seen life naked. i’m on my own. i object to being bossed. in the army it’s different—it’s part of the game; but outside—no!”
he limped along to the house full of his grievance. it was not so much the clothing of quong ho that annoyed him, though he could well have spared himself the irritating embarrassment, as the sense of his gradual subordination to a dominating personality. the disconnected dynamo was hitching itself on to him, and he resented the process.
“how you’ve escaped being married out of hand, i don’t know,” said he.
marcelle flushed. “the moment he realizes other people’s feelings,” she replied, “he becomes the gentlest creature on earth.”
“i wish to goodness he’d begin to realize mine,” growled the young man.
when they reached the front steps of churton towers, marcelle said:
“i wonder whether i could be of any help to you in your shopping?”
“you? why——” he beamed suddenly on her.
“i’m free on friday. i could go up to town with you.”
“you’re an angel!” he declared. “a winged angel from heaven.” the boy in him broke out sunnily. “that’ll make all the difference. what a dear you are. won’t we have a time! i’ll love to see you choosing the beast’s pyjamas.”
“they shall be stout and sober flannel,” said marcelle.
“no. silk. green, red, yellow and violet. the sort of thing the chameleon committed suicide on.”
“who’s going to run the show—you or i?”
“oh you. you all the time.”
he laughed and hobbled up the steps in high good humour.
marcelle went off to her duties smiling pensively. what a happy woman would be the right woman for godfrey. wax in her hands—but wax of the purest. she was astonished at the transformation from cloud to sunshine which she, elderly spinster nearly double his age, had effected, and her nerves tingled with a sense of feminine power. her thoughts switched off from son to father. they were so much alike—from the feminine point of view, basically children. were not her fears groundless? could she not play upon the man as she played upon the boy? recent experience answered yes.
but then she faced the root difference. to the boy she surrendered nothing. to the man she would have to pay for any measure of domination the price of an indurated habit of existence, the change of which was fraught with intolerable fear. no. she could take, take all that she wanted. but she could not give. there was nothing in her to give. better this beautiful autumn friendship than a false recrudescence of spring, in which lay disaster and misery and disillusion.
as for the boy, god was good to have brought him into her life.
meanwhile, baltazar walked home to godalming with quong ho in gay spirits. it was just like the modern young englishman to shy at the depths and attack the surface. and, after all, as a more alert glance assured him, the surface of quong ho deserved the censure of any reasonable being. one could almost hear his garments flap in the autumn wind.
“i fear,” said quong ho apologetically, “that my care in selecting this costume was not sufficiently meticulous.”
“godfrey’ll soon put that right,” laughed baltazar. “anyhow, it’s the man inside the clothes that matters.”
and when he came to think of it, he perceived that the man inside had had little opportunity of revealing himself, he, baltazar, having done the talking for the two of them. quong ho had comported himself very ceremoniously. his manners, though somewhat florid in english eyes, had been unexceptionable, devoid of self-consciousness and awkward attempts at imitation. he had responded politely to the conventional questions of marcelle and godfrey, but there his conversation had stopped. of the rare gem presented to them they had no notion. never mind. once let quong ho give them a taste of his quality, and they could not choose but take him to their bosoms.
which, by the end of the friday shopping excursion, was an accomplished fact.
now that marcelle had assumed responsibility, godfrey, after the way of man, regarded the attiring of quong ho as a glorious jest. his bright influence melted quong ho’s oriental reserve. encouraged to talk, he gave them sidelights on the life at spendale farm which neither had suspected. his description, in his formal, unhumorous english, of the boxing lessons, delighted godfrey.
“the old man must be a good sport,” he remarked to marcelle.
“ah!” said quong ho, bending forward—they were in the train—“a ‘sport’ is a term of which i have long desired to know the significance. will you have the gracious kindness to expound it?”
“lord! that’s rather a teaser,” said godfrey. “i suppose a sport is a chap that can do everything and says nothing, and doesn’t care a damn for anything.”
quong ho nodded sagely. “that is most illuminating. i regret that i have not my notebook with me. but i shall remember. incidentally, you have summed up exactly the character of your honourable father and my most venerated patron.”
“he’s a joy,” godfrey whispered to marcelle as they left the train. “i could listen to him all day long. he talks like the books my grandmother used to read when she was a kid. mr. ho,” said he, as they proceeded up the platform to the gates, “you have now a unique opportunity of studying the western woman. miss baring is going shopping. you see in her eye the sign that she is going to have the time of her life.”
“madam,” said quong ho, taking off his hat, to the surprise not only of godfrey but of the scurrying passengers, “that is also the superlative achievement of the ladies of my country.”
they shopped, they lunched merrily in a select little restaurant off shaftesbury avenue, they shopped again. godfrey stood aloof and gave advice; sketched the programme in broad outlines; marcelle filled in the details and became responsible for the selection of the various articles; quong ho smiled politely and submitted the various parts of his body, to be measured. only once did he venture to interfere, and that was when marcelle was matching ties and socks in the bond street hosier’s.
“i beg most humbly your pardon,” said he, picking out a tie other than the one selected, “but this shade is the more exact.”
“surely it’s the same,” exclaimed marcelle, putting the ties together.
“the gentleman is right, madam,” said the shopman. “but not one person out of ten thousand could tell the difference. i couldn’t, myself, if i hadn’t been trained at lyons. i wonder, madam, whether you would allow me to try a little experiment?”
he disappeared into a back room and returned with a pinkish mass of silk threads.
“this is a colour test. there are twenty different shades. can you sort them?”
godfrey, amused, took half the mass, and for several minutes he and marcelle laboriously sorted the threads. presently the shopman turned to quong ho.
“now you, sir.”
quong ho, without hesitation, made havoc of the piles and swiftly arranged the twenty groups in an ascending scale of red.
“there’s not another man in london who could have done that under an hour,” said the shopman admiringly.
“when did you learn it?” asked godfrey.
“vain boasting, sir,” replied quong ho, “is far from my habits, but to me these differences are as obvious as black from white. it is only a matter of informative astonishment that they are not perceptible both to you and”—he took off his hat again—“to the most accomplished madam.”
“look here, old chap,” said godfrey, “what i want to know is this. how could you, with your exquisite colour sense, go about in that awful red and purple tie?”
“to assume the perfection of english pink,” replied quong ho, “i would make any sacrifice. at the same time, it gives me infinite satisfaction to discover that the taste of water end is not that of the metropolis. non omnes arbusta juvant humilesque myricae.”
“i beg your pardon?” cried godfrey, with a start, almost, upsetting the high counter chair on which he was sitting.
quong ho, perched between godfrey and marcelle, turned with a smile.
“it is the latin poet virgilius.”
“yes, i know that.”
“he says that shrubs and other bucolic appurtenances do not please everybody—by which he means the sophisticated inhabitants of capital cities, who prefer such delectable harmonies of colour”—he waved a hand to the pile of shirts, socks, ties and pyjamas on the counter—“to the red and purple atrocities which form the delight of the rural population.”
godfrey, elbow on counter and head on hand, regarded him wonderingly.
“mr. ho,” said he, “you’re immense. do tell me. i don’t mean to be impertinent. but for a chinaman to quote virgil—pat—how do you manage to do it?”
“during my convalescence,” replied quong ho, with his engaging smile, “i read through the works of the poet with considerable interest. dr. rewsby was kind enough to obtain for me the edition in the series of the oxford pocket classics, p. virgilii maronis opera omnia. oxonii. mdccccxiii, from which date i concluded that i was reading the most authoritative text known to english scholarship.”
“in the meanwhile,” said marcelle, “mr. ho is in need of winter underclothing.”
not the least noteworthy of the day’s incidents was the meeting between quong ho and lady edna, who, proceeding on foot to a war committee in grosvenor street, and wearing the blue serge coat and skirt of serious affairs, ran into them as they waited for a taxi on the bond street kerb. she stopped, with outstretched hand.
“why, godfrey, i didn’t know you were in town to-day.”
then, suddenly catching marcelle’s curious glance, she became conscious of his companions and her cheek flushed. he hastened to explain.
“we’re on outfit duty—indenting for clothing for mr. ho, who was badly bombed, if you remember, with my father.”
he performed the introductions.
“i have heard about you, mr. ho,” she said graciously. “you’re a great mathematician.”
godfrey wondered at her royal memory. quong ho, bare-headed, said:
“i but follow painfully in the footsteps of my illustrious master.”
she laughed. “you must let mr. godfrey bring you round to see me one of these days.”
“madam,” replied quong ho, with a low bow. “as the italians say, it will be a thousand years until i have the honour to avail myself of so precious a privilege.”
“we must fix something up soon, then—one day next week.”
she shook hands with marcelle, nodded to the others, and went away wreathed in smiles. quong ho followed her with his eyes; then to godfrey:
“i have never seen a more beauteous and worshipful lady. one might say she was one of the goddesses so vividly described by publius virgilius maro.”
“your taste seems to be impeccable, sir,” replied godfrey.
in the train, on the homeward journey, marcelle, who was sitting by godfrey’s side—quong ho sat opposite reading an evening paper—said to him:
“you seem to be great friends with lady edna donnithorpe.”
“the best,” said he.
“do you usually let her know when you’re coming up to town?”
godfrey reflected for the fraction of a second. lady edna had certainly committed the unprecedented act of giving herself away. frankness was therefore the best policy.
“sometimes i do,” he replied innocently. “on the off chance of her being able to give me a cup of tea. it’s only once in a blue moon that she can, for she’s always all over the place.”
“she’s a very beautiful woman, my dear.”
“your taste is as perfect as quong ho’s.”
quong ho, hearing his name, looked with enquiring politeness over the top of his newspaper.
“miss baring and i were talking of lady edna.”
“ah!” said quong ho, with a very large smile.
before they parted, on reaching churton towers, marcelle put her hand on godfrey’s shoulder.
“perhaps i oughtn’t to have asked you that question in the train—i had no right——”
he interrupted her with his boyish laugh.
“you dear old thing! you have every right to cross-question me on my wicked doings. haven’t i adopted you as a sort of young mother? iolanthe. or the paphian one which quong ho was gassing about. now, look here. you just come to me in a rosy cloud whenever you like, and i’ll tell you everything.”
“swear it?”
“i swear it.”
he kissed her finger-tips, and she went away half-reassured. but she was sufficiently in the confidence of the baltazars, father and son, to know that, for both of them, lady edna donnithorpe was but a recent acquaintance. and to her the boy was “godfrey,” and his presence in london without her knowledge a matter of surprise.
a few days later came the order for godfrey to be transferred to an orthop?dic hospital, where he should learn the new art of walking with an artificial foot. he parted from her with reiterated vows of undying affection. from his iolanthe mother the secrets of his heart would never be hidden. if she wanted a real good time, she would chuck the nursing—heaven knew she had done her bit in the war—and come and be a real mother and keep house for him. she smiled through her tears. “preposterous child!” she called him.
“you seem to forget,” said he, “that you’re the only female thing associated with my family i’ve ever cared a hang about. i’ve adopted you, and don’t you forget it. when i’ve got my foot, i’ll march in like a regimental sergeant-major and take you by the scruff of your sister’s cap, and off you come.”
she laughed, trying to attune herself to his gay spirits; but when she lost the last faint sound on the gravel-path of the motor-cab that took him away, she went up to her room and cried foolishly, as she had not cried for years.
