"Hullo! Did you find your way easily? Daddy, where are the dogs? ... Dogs!" (loudly). "Sybil, you're not going to try to introduce everybody, are you? Why are we all standing here? Why aren't we taking these people into the drawing-room?"
We were borne along into the big drawing-room to the right of the hall. It was full of flowers and lovely old furniture and silver-framed photographs and an immense round tea-table and a cluster of other guests.
Here the sun rose again upon Elizabeth's world. Her eyes had fallen at once upon her fiancé, Colonel Fielding. He was sitting there, near his friend, Captain Holiday.
What a merry tea-fight that was in the hospitable and happy-go-lucky Welsh country-house!
To sit in a dainty drawing-room amidst a cluster of strangers wearing "real" summer frocks. To see a winking bright silver spirit-kettle and a snowy cobweb cloth. To drink tea from fragile cups and to spread, with crystal-handled knives, honey upon wafer bread-and-butter!
These little luxuries we never noticed in our pre-War days. But now—— Remember! It was the first time for weeks that we Land-girls had tasted such refinement!
"What a treat this all is," I remarked to Captain Holiday as he handed hot cakes in a lordly dish.
He replied: "Ah! Now perhaps you'll have an idea how fellows feel when they get out of the mud and plum-and-apple-with-chloride-of-lime up the Line, and back to Civilization for a few days' leave."
"When I got my Paris leave last year," put in the demure voice of Colonel Fielding, who had dropped into a low chair close to his fiancée, "do you know what was the first thing I did?"
"D'you want us to guess, my boy?" boomed the genial master of the house, who was also a Colonel.