"Yes, but I wish that would stop."
That was the dull and muffled boom of the great guns across the sea. They sat and listened to it in silence.
"There it comes again!" said Joan in a quiet voice. "Oh, I do wish it would stop! What has happened to me, has happened to enough of us."
As Millie had said, she was glad to talk of Harry Luttrell to his friends; and she talked simply and naturally, with a little note of wistfulness heard in all the words.
"We were going to have a small house in London and spend our time between it and the old Manor at Clayford.... Harry had seen the house.... He was always writing that I must watch for it to come into the market.... It had a brass front door. There we should be. We could go out when we wished, and when we wished we could be snug behind our own brass door." Joan laughed simply and lovingly as she spoke. Hillyard had never seen her more beautiful than she was at this moment. If grief had taken from her just the high brilliancy of her beauty, it had added to it a most appealing tenderness.
"After all," she said again, "Harry fulfilled himself. I love to think of that. The ambition of his life—young as he was he saw it realised and helped—more than all others, except perhaps one old Colonel—to realise it. And he left me a son ... to carry on.... There will be no stigma on the Clayfords when my boy gets his commission. Won't I tell him why? Won't I just tell him!"
And the soft October evening closed in upon them as they drove.