The younger man smiled at him. "I'll tell you, sir. I ordered a great sheaf of La France roses and lilac to be sent up, with a huge glass jar to put 'em in, to my room at the Hotel. And there I lay and looked at 'em, till déjeuner, because I hadn't seen a flower for months!"
The other guests then took up that never-failing topic of leave, and how some people always get it and some never; why? A question unanswerable. I thought of Captain Harry Markham, nicknamed in his regiment "The Special Leave King." But the thought of my faithless admirer could not depress me now. For the moment I was perfectly content, sitting at that gay tea-table between my motherly hostess and Dick Holiday.
He chaffed me about "a woman's ineradicable love of luxury, on the Land or off!" and I laughed, glad that I could sometimes see him thus for half an hour, without any Muriel to spoil it all.
On the other side, my hostess's questioning talk flowed on.
"You like the Farm-work, my dear?" to me. "Your people don't mind you taking it up? The Prices look after you? Perfect dears, aren't they? Has Mrs. Price had the Isle of Wight disease? Her bees, I mean? No? How's that, I wonder, when everybody else's bees in the county—oh, she doesn't keep bees? ... When are your friend and Colonel Fielding to be married?"
"Not for a long time!" burst from Elizabeth, but our kind hostess went on, unheeding.
"Couldn't we arrange to have the wedding from this house? I adore weddings, don't you? ... Vera!" to a laughing blonde in light blue who was a niece of the house, "you haven't eaten all the light-cakes? Aren't there any more light-cakes for when Captain Holiday's cousin comes in? Dick! You did say your cousin, Miss Elvey, was coming later?"
"Yes!" from my neighbour. "She's driving up presently."
My heart sank.
Muriel Elvey was coming after all?