She knew all about little Alice, had seen her once, and had recognised her at a glance as Royal's child, the child for which, with her passionate love for the regiment, she felt herself in part responsible. On the same occasion she had seen Ruth's other babies and their grandfather with them—that troubadour who forty years before had swept the harp of her life to sudden and elusive music.
"I think that'll be all right now, Ruth," she said with a re-assuring look. "I'm going to call you that now if I may. I'll come round and let you know directly I know myself."
Ruth retired with haunted eyes. She guessed rather than knew the forces that were gathering against her, and the strength of them.
Outside in the porch she met Lady Augusta with her mane of thick bobbed white hair and rosy face; and on the cliff, as she walked home, other ladies of the Committee and the Reverend Spink.
How hard they looked and how complacent! ...
Mrs. Lewknor put the case before her committee, telling them just as much as she thought it good for them to know.
There was of course the inevitable trouble about little Alice.
"We don't even know for certain that she is the child of the man the mother afterwards married," objected Lady Augusta Willcocks in her worst manner. "She mayn't be a soldier's child at all."
Mrs. Lewknor turned in her lips.
"Our business surely is to support the women and children while the men are away fighting our battles," she said.