He was talking to one of the soldiers, a red-haired Blue Boy, with a good-looking, clean-cut, actor-ish face. I heard Captain Holiday saying:
"Righto! I'll tell the Colonel to let you fix him up. That's in the second part."
"Yes, sir," said the red-haired boy.
Captain Holiday, looking down the room caught sight of our party. I heard him give an "Ah." He smiled, nodding at me. This was somehow cheering after that slight chill. He made a movement forward, I think—I'm sure he was coming to speak to me.
But at that moment a pretty, coquettish voice called "Dick!"
And there entered, by a door nearer the stage, Muriel Elvey and her mother. Mrs. Elvey, the sort of mother who never is anything but an adequate "background" to her daughters, looked placid and pleased in well-fitting black, with diamonds.
As for Muriel, she was lovely, yes, lovely! in her Frenchiest little frock of pinks and mauves, and mingled heliotropes. The girlish, low-cut bodice of it had no sleeves, and was held up over her white shoulders by strings of palest coral beads. She was a vision such as Careg had never seen. No wonder the Blue Boys gazed! No wonder the Land Girls, in their clean but coarse overalls, bent forward and studied her with the rapturous, envying sighs they would have heaved over some exquisite fashion-plate! No wonder that she was followed by a slim masculine shape in black-and-white that was Colonel Fielding.
He, too! No wonder, indeed, that her cousin, Captain Holiday, was at Muriel's side in an instant, bending his dark head over her golden one, with its fillet of coral-pink buds.
Now, curiously enough perhaps, that sight spoilt the whole first part of the concert for me.
At first I didn't know why. Such was my incredible self-deception that I gave myself quite the wrong reason for the fact that Muriel Elvey came between me and any enjoyment of the playlet "Poached Eggs and Pearls," excellently acted by a company of nurses and wounded. I was beset, I told myself, by the promptings of jealous memory.