"Dashed if I can make 'em out," said Mr. Brown, pleasantly. "According to my reckoning, Miss Olwen, there was my regimental pay for July, rations and lodgings for August, and they'll be in arrears for September—and no hospital stoppages.... Cox's do make mistakes; ask anybody. Anybody!"
Olwen agreed that Cox's did make mistakes. Honeyed sympathy informed her tone as she said so.
"Well, that's just that," Mr. Brown concluded, beaming upon her. "But, as I was just asking you, what about a turn on the prom. in the moonlight?"
Here the hump of Captain Ross's square shoulders suddenly straightened out.
He took his hand away from the packet in his pocket, gave a hitch to his belt, then, turning to Olwen, and in the most matter-of-fact voice imaginable, he told the fib that took her breath away.
"I guess Miss Howel-Jones is engaged to me for this dance. Isn't that so, Miss Howel-Jones?"
"Dance? But——" gasped little Olwen, stupefied. "Nobody is dancing!"
"Then I guess we'll have to sit it out together on the old cannon or somewhairrr," said Captain Ross, coolly. "Shall you be all right without anything on your head?"
Now if Captain Ross expected that upon this hint Mr. Brown would retire in good order to his hut, there to brood upon allowances for the rest of the evening, he was no very fine judge of subalterns in the London Rifle Brigade.
Mr. Brown, M.C., stood firm. "Look here, Ross——" he was beginning, when another voice, a deep, genial, elderly voice, was heard behind the shutters of the window through which Captain Ross had come out upon the terrace.