‘You’re only a recruit, I suppose?’ She spoke quite contemptuously. ‘I never saw you before. I don’t like strangers. I shall speak to Mr. Wheeler about it. How long have you been dismissed drill?’
Herbert smiled at her intimate acquaintance with military details, and the smile seemed to give her fresh annoyance.
‘You’re a rude soldier. You shan’t come as orderly again. But here’—she remembered what she wanted—‘take this list to the barrack library; be quick, please, and bring me all those books. I want them at once, please, all. You understand? At once, and all; and when you come back bring them in to me—there in the back room.’
‘Edith!’ said another voice just then, faintly and querulously, ‘you are losing the whole morning. Your French—’
‘Oh, bother!’ cried Edith, and retired, dragging one foot after the other, as though loth to return to her studies.
Herbert executed his commission promptly enough, and presently returned laden with books—some, but not all, of those for which Edith had sent. He carried them straight into the back room.
‘I am sorry to say, miss, that the “Loss of the Wager” is out, and so is Maxwell’s “Stories of Waterloo,” but I have brought you “Thaddeus of Warsaw” and the “Romance of War.”’
Then he stopped short, for he saw that the young lady was not attending to him in the least. Her head was buried in her hands, and when she eventually looked up her eyes were suffused with tears.
‘Oh, dear, it is so hard. I can’t make head or tail of it.’