"I shall not be a chauffeur a minute longer than it takes me to get out of this dashed kit," said the Honourable Jim. Then he told me about his enlisting for active service.
"It won't be much time I shall have before that regiment gets its orders," he said. "Time enough, though——"
He paused and looked hard at me. So hard that I felt myself colouring, and turned away.
He took a step after me. I felt him give a little pull at my apron-strings to make me look round.
"Time enough to get married, darling of my heart," said Jim Burke, laughing softly.
And he took me into his arms and kissed me; at first very gently, then eagerly, fiercely, as if to make up for time already lost and for all that time yet to come when we must be apart from each other.
This, if you please, was all the proposal that ever I had from the young man.
I know all his faults.
Unscrupulous; he doesn't care how many duller and stodgier people he uses to his own advantage. Insincere; except to his wife. To me he shows his heart!
Vain—well, with his attractions, hasn't he cause for it? Unstable as water, he shall not excel; except in the moment of stress and the tight corner where a hundred more trusted men might fail, as they did the day he won the Military Cross, when he took that German trench single-handed, and was found with the enemy, aghast, surrendering in heaps around him!