"Just come up for a look round before turning in, me and my wife, sir," the other answered. "Ruth," he called, "it's the Colonel."
A young woman with an orange scarf about her hair issued from the shadow of the coast-guard station and came forward slowly.
"I've heard a lot about you from Ern, sir," she said in a deep voice that hummed like a top in the silvery silence. "When you commanded his battalion in India and all."
The Colonel, standing in the dusk, listened with a deep content as to familiar music, the player unseen; and was aware that his senses were stirred by a beauty felt rather than seen...... Then he dropped down the hill to the hostel twinkling solitary in the coombe beneath.
"Your friend Caspar's married," he told his wife on joining her in the loggia. The little lady scoffed.
"Married!" she cried. "He's been married nearly a year. They spent their honeymoon on the hill at the back last autumn. I could see them from my room."
"Why ever didn't you tell me?" asked the Colonel. "I'd have run em in for vagrancy."
"No, you wouldn't," answered Mrs. Lewknor.
"Why not?"
"Because, my Jocko, she's a peasant Madonna. You couldn't stand up against her. No man could."