"Yes, sure! Any time you like to see over the farm! I'll show you our shire horses! Interest you, those would. You shall come round with me."
"Oh, thanks. I should love to," murmured Colonel Fielding, with one last glance at my chum before he melted away out of the landscape.
Even as he did so, I saw the expression on that fair, girlish face of the man we'd always nicknamed "Elizabeth's Old Colonel." He was unmistakably, unfeignedly admiring. It made him show, for a second, quite a determined gleam between his long lashes.
But what a waste of time for him to admire Elizabeth—at least if he tried to show it! He was, anyhow, not the sort of person, I decided, that any girl would fall in love with!
Finnicky, I called him. I said so afterwards to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth said she was so busy with the horse she hadn't had time to see what he was like.
Then (as I should have told you) we forgot all about that encounter in the root-field.
For three days we lived the Life Laborious; busy and full, but empty of all young men. Not a glimpse of one.
Then, one evening down at the swimming-pool, I said to Elizabeth, sitting on a mossy boulder and waiting for Vic to come up:
"Do you know we've been here for three weeks now? I feel as if we had been Land Girls all our lives. But the last week has been the quickest——"