Adding meditatively, "But it's rather an effort to like him as much as the other kind!"
"Talking of duty, Mr. Grant has gone," said Gwenna as she worked. "You know, Leslie: the engineer at our Westminster place who was always talking to Mabel Butcher and then saying, 'Well! Duty calls. I must away.' I'm sure he said that before he went off to enlist. He's in the R.E. And the office-boy that had such an awful accent went with him. He's in the Halberdiers now; billeted in the country in some garage with six other men."
"How funny! D'you know who one of the men is? My friend, Monty Scott, the Dean's son," said Leslie, laughing again. "You remember him, Taffy, at that dance? He wore that Black Panther get-up.... He came up to see me, in uniform, last Sunday. I told him he'd only joined the Halberdiers because he thought the touch of black suited him. Then he told me of his weird billet in the country with these five other men. Two of them had lately come out of prison, he said; and they were really awfully interesting, comparing the grub they'd had there with what was served out to them here. I asked him (Monty) how he was getting on. He summed up the lot of the New Ranker rather well, I thought. He said, 'I've never been so uncomfortable or laughed so much in my life'!"
The Aeroplane Lady, working, said she thought he must be a dear.
"He is, rather," agreed the girl who had thrice refused to marry this young man.
"Why d'you sigh?" asked Gwenna quickly. A sigh meant, to her, only one thing. Impatience over the absence of the Beloved!
"I—perhaps I was thinking of Monty Scott's eyes," said Leslie lightly, bending over to smooth the dog's neck. "They are so absurdly handsome. Such a pity one can't have them to wear as brooches!" Then, quickly, she turned from the subject of Monty Scott. She drew something out of her black silk bag. A picture postcard.
"From one of our Allies," said Leslie, showing it.
It gave a view of a French Regiment, still wearing the picturesque uniform of Eighteen-seventy, marching down a sunny, chestnut-bordered boulevard. The soldier in the immediate foreground showed under the jaunty képi a dark, intelligent, mobile face that Gwenna recognised.
She sighed and smiled over the card. It brought back to her that tea at Hugo Swayne's rooms with Leslie, and the tall, blonde Englishman who was to be her husband, and that dark young French engineer who had said, "But the Machine is also of the sex of Mademoiselle!" He had written on this card in sprawling French writing and blue French ink, "À Mademoiselle Langue. Salutation amicale. Remember, please, the private soldier Gaston, who carries always in his knapsack the memory of the Curate's Egg!"