I looked hard at him as he saluted and said "How do you do?"
He blushed—yes, he had that trick of blushing which camouflages some of the effrontery of some of the least diffident of men. I realized now that it was all a "put-on"—his quietness, his nervousness, his seeming shyness.
"Er—er—I'm so glad I happened to come across you," he said. "The fact is I've something I—I rather wanted to ask you—you two people."
How deprecatingly he spoke, but what a gleam of mischief there was behind those ridiculously long lashes of his! What did he really mean?
I saw him again as I'd seen him at that concert, dressed up in that successful imitation of a Spanish beauty, singing in a contralto that would have lured the bird from the tree, taking in half the audience by his mock "glad eye" at Captain Holiday, and finally tossing that red flower into the little brown paw of the Land Girl whom he most admired. Not too milk-and-watery, all that! And as Elizabeth herself defended him later, "It's not by being namby-pamby that a man gets the D.S.O." In spite of his distressingly—to me—pretty-pretty appearance, there were depths in this idol of Elizabeth's.
Now what had he come to say?
"Er," he began, "I've heard you finished your training and are going away from here."
"Yes, we're off on Monday," Elizabeth said quite steadily.
He tapped against a moss-covered stick with his cane, and went on, as if shyly:
"Er—Holiday told me something of the sort. Do—do you like the job you're going to?"