“Oh, so he is here, is he?” she remarked over her shoulder, as she swept into the smoking-room.
“Is that Lancelot Lumley you are talking of?” enquired Colonel Fenchurch, who was reading. “I suppose he bicycled over to spend Christmas—they find it hatefully dull without Mabel. You’d better ask him up to lunch, or something.”
“I think at this time of the year, when one has so much to do,” and Mrs. Fenchurch shot a glance at her husband, and then at Letty, “people don’t expect to be entertained.”
“Of course not,” agreed the Colonel; “I expect Lumley to entertain me—you forget that he is in my old regiment. I want to hear how the old corps is getting along. To think that a boy who joined a few years before I left, is commanding them now!”
“Oh, very well, Tom, then do as you like—ask him up to lunch or dinner.”
“He is an awfully good sort,” Colonel Fenchurch explained to Letty; “one of my favourites—none of your ‘haw-haw’ chaps. His father is a poor parson, and this boy has worked himself on—getting scholarships; he passed first out of Sandhurst. I believe he scarcely cost old Lumley a ten-pound note—he’s the hope of the family—such a good——”
“There—there, Tom,” interrupted his wife, “that’s quite enough about young Lumley! He doesn’t interest Letty, or me. Now, Letty, I can’t have you standing idle, run away, take off your things, and go out into the laundry and help Fletcher to ticket the things for the Christmas Tree.”
It is extraordinary the amount of intimacy that can result from a mutual undertaking, in which two young people are engaged. After Mr. Lumley and Miss Glyn had finished the pulpit—which to do them justice was a work of great labour crowned with success—they felt as if they had been acquainted, not for hours, but for weeks. This impression, was further strengthened when they met at dinner. Letty, wearing her plain white school frock, the young man looking handsome and well groomed in the regulation swallow tail. It transpired, that they had been engaged in decorating the church, and Mrs. Fenchurch and her husband might have been a little surprised at finding they already knew one another so well, had not the Colonel been absorbed in regimental stories, and Mrs. Fenchurch mentally composing an important letter, that was to go by that night’s post.
After dinner, when Colonel Fenchurch and his guest had each smoked an excellent cigar, the former said: