I pictured that golden, rose-filleted head of Muriel's close to another dark head. Harry's! That was what I couldn't help thinking of. I watched Muriel—the centre of all eyes as she sat at the piano—and I realized what she'd meant to Harry. Not a thought had he had for me after that evening when I introduced him to her. And now history was repeating itself. Now Captain Holiday hadn't a look for anybody else.
It hurt.
Oh! Not the Captain Holiday part, of course! I assured myself hastily—the other. I'd thought I was getting over that. How queer are the workings of that most painful passion—jealousy! Brooding, I sat there with my mates, enjoying themselves on each side of me. I laughed with the others, with the others I watched the stage, and clapped when the curtain fell—to Muriel's music—for the end of the first part.
Then Captain Holiday, still standing by Muriel at the piano, called out:
"There will now be an interval of fifteen minutes! War-time refreshments will be found in the dining-room."
So, with a scraping aside of chairs and a babel of voices, the audience surged out of the "theatre." I went with the others. But that black mood of mine had swept my mind away out of my new and joyous country life, back to the bad old days of London after Harry left.
I sat on a big chair near the door, and watched.
Each Land Girl had found a wounded soldier or two to attend to her. Vic, with Elizabeth under her wing, was the centre of a group of blue. Then a long glass of lemonade was brought to me by the pleasant-faced, red-haired lad I had noticed with Captain Holiday. He talked to me in a gentle, but curious, voice, husky, yet high-pitched. For he told me he'd been shot through the lungs.
"Done me in for the profession if I go back after the war," he said cheerfully. "Spoilt my singing voice." He told me he'd been on the stage from the time he was ten until he joined the Army in 1914.
Here Sergeant Syd, coming up to us with an arm through Peggy's, broke into the conversation.