"And it'd prejudice my boy's career, Clara."
The sun had set. There was an interval of cold light before the glories of the afterglow. Mrs. Lenoir's face looked wan and hard. "Yes, it would follow them all over the world," she said. "Now a mail ahead of them, now a mail behind—always very close. Yes, the women would chatter and lift their skirts; the old men would snigger and the youngsters make jokes. Is there anything at all to choose between us, Hugh—between you men and us women? Anything at all?"
He would not enter on that. "You don't quite understand. I may think about his interest—well, I'm his father, and he's my eldest. He sees it in the light of his duty to the Service."
"My poor little Winnie!" Gradually the afterglow was coming and seemed to soften the hard lines of her face.
"You know I—why, I fairly love her myself!" His voice trembled for a moment. "Pretty nearly as much, I believe, in the end, as the boy does. But—could I tell him anything different? I'd give a year's pay not to hurt her feelings."
"A year's pay! You old goose, Hugh! You'd give your life—but you wouldn't give one button off the tunic of one of the soldiers in your blessed regiment." She held out her hand to him, smiling under misty eyes. "You men are queer," she ended.
After a stealthy look round, the General raised her hand to his lips. They were friends again, and he was glad. Yet she would not forgo her privilege of ridicule and irony—the last and only weapon of the conquered.
"I don't know that anything need be said——"
"So you two valiant soldiers have decided that I had better say it?" she interrupted.
"How could either of us so much as hint that she—that she was the least interested in our movements?"