Harry, here?
Well, I knew he was back from Salonika. I knew he had a staff job in town. Town, after all, is still within a day's journey from these depths of mid-Wales. I also knew that Captain Harry Markham had always had a bit of a reputation as "a leave-hog." I need not be so amazed that he had secured a week's freedom out of that old General of his.
As to why he should spend it in Careg—well, I think trout-stream and a jolly little inn were the explanations that the young man offered in those first hectic moments, filled by spasmodic hand-shaking and those inevitable remarks of: "I say, fancy coming across you here!" and "You're looking jolly fit," and all the other things people say on these occasions, whether they are thinking about them or about something totally different, or wondering how soon they can get away.
It was a curiously mixed crowd in the Prices' hospitable kitchen!
It was like the collections of people you sometimes meet in a dream. I felt as if it were some dream that brought me there to the man whom I had adored, with the man whom I adored now, and with the girl who had taken them both away from me!
With very mixed feelings I let myself down on a kitchen chair near the big grandfather clock. I felt as if I must be "looking," as Vic might have put it, "all ways for daylight." Fortunately nobody there had much time to notice me.
There were Harry and Captain Holiday ("my cousin, you know, whose place this is!") to be introduced by Muriel Elvey. (A characteristically questioning look, here, from Captain Holiday at the new man; at whom he stared before whilst I was shaking hands.)
Then I watched Harry being introduced to Colonel Fielding, who, by the way, had left Elizabeth's side and was now sitting on the arm of the oaken settle by Muriel, in an attitude suggesting that she, Muriel, was the only girl to whom he'd paid any attention in his life. Wretch! It had wiped all the joy and sparkle out of my chum's face once again.
Then there was more tea suggested, more cigarettes handed round, spills lighted at that comforting blaze. I listened, just as detachedly as if I were in the auditorium of a theatre, to the buzz of talk that went up around me—chatter about the hay-carrying, the recent storm, and the weather prospects for the morrow of which Mr. Price, looming tall against the window, seemed rather doubtful.
"Miss Elvey's sweet little white shoes!" Mrs. Price's cheerful voice broke in. "Don't let them scorch. I do hope they are not ruined——"