Sidney laughed merrily and gave her a sudden embrace. "I can't help it," she said, "you're such a darling. Well, he's a Captain in the Grenadier Guards, and his name is Noel Chancellor."
"That's the regiment that Harry was to have gone into," said Jane. "His father and grandfather belonged to it."
"Did they?" said Sidney. "Some of Noel's people were in it too. It sounds all right, but as a matter of fact Noel was a schoolmaster when the war broke out. He's the son of our vicar at home. When the war is over he is going to be a schoolmaster again. So you see how it is."
In her general ignorance of the world outside the immediate parish of Royd, Jane didn't quite see how it was. She asked kindly after Noel Chancellor and was given a pleasing impression of a handsome athletic young man, who had played cricket for Marlborough and Oxford and Notts, and had been happily engaged at a health resort on the East Coast of Kent, when the war broke out, in teaching thirty or so delightful boys under the age of fourteen to play cricket as it ought to be played, and to wrestle with the elements of Greek and Latin in their spare time.
"Considering that all the people who think themselves somebody send their children to be educated in schools like Noel was in," said Sidney. "I should have thought a person like me would have been just the touch that was wanted to make it still more of a success. But of course mother doesn't see it in that light. It's all very trying."
Jane's affectionate heart went out to this tale of crossed love, the first that had ever come within her ken outside the pages of her father's novels, which she read dutifully but without much interest. She thought it quite natural that Lady Avalon should want Sidney to marry Harry, as both of them had titles, but did not say this for fear of being laughed at. She wanted to be a real help and comfort to her new friend.
"I am sure it will come all right in the end," she said. "Perhaps when we tell Harry he will be able to do something."
CHAPTER XXII
THE RETURN
Harry came home a few days after Lady Avalon and Sidney had come to Royd, and two days before they had been going away. But they were persuaded, without much difficulty, to stay a little longer. At least, Lady Avalon accepted Lady Brent's invitation to prolong their visit, and informed Sidney that she had done so. "You see how it is," said Sidney to Jane, with whom she was now fast friends, much to the maturing of Jane's behaviour, but not to the spoiling of her, as her parents gratefully remarked.