By the time a heart is already involved it is too "fond" to admit of any change! So I found out to my cost. And if there is no heart in the case, as Colonel Fielding declared, how can it "grow" anything at all?
Muriel would remain whatever Muriel was.
I had a note from her one day, scented with her special perfume, to ask me and Elizabeth to come up to tea at the Lodge "as she found that we were able to go out to tea on Sundays."
Elizabeth went. I made a polite excuse and stayed under the trees outside the hut with Vic.
The fact was I felt I just couldn't bear my first sight of The Lodge, Dick Holiday's bachelor abode, to be shown to me as a frame for the picture of Muriel, sitting there in his easy chair, pouring out tea for his friends out of his teapot, offering light cakes that his old housekeeper had made, ringing his bell, behaving altogether as if everything that was his were already hers—himself included.
This would happen. I felt it! But I didn't—oh—I didn't want to have it rubbed in before the time!
So I stayed away and tried to cultivate a philosophical attitude of mind. A hundred years hence it would all be the same, whether Dick Holiday had married his pretty cousin, or whether I had taken the chance that once was mine, and had written to say "Yes" to Richard Wynn!
Further, it didn't matter to England (who must be fed) whether one of her Land-girls was blissfully happy or was unlucky in love. But it did matter that her harvest should prosper and should be brought safely in.
This last question was one that weighed very heavily, those days, on the mind of that gentle giant, our employer, Mr. Price.
I used to meet him striding over the land on those stilt-long legs of his, or leaning over gates and contemplating the big stretches of gold that were the cornfields, with his grey tweed cap pushed a little to one side over a frown of thoughtful anxiety between those ingenuous, intelligent blue eyes of his.