It was, as ever on a Sunday afternoon, a welter of khaki and girls. The wicker chairs could not be seen for shrubberies of furs, coloured forest of millinery; there was scarcely a space on the floor clear of muffs, vanity bags, and feet; big feet in brown boots, little feet in high-heeled coloured shoes; swathed feet in hospital wrappings. It took Mr. Brown and Olwen minutes to steer their way through this labyrinth to the further corner by a window that the little campaigner had marked down and engaged just after lunch.
"Now, that's better," he said. "Nobody will come and walk over us here, and nobody can hear what I say through this racket, not that I care if they do.... Well, it's nice to see you again, Miss Olwen. I've been fairly bursting to have a good old mag with you, ever since all this happened.... What? Yes, two teas, please, Miss, if you can call 'em teas. Spelling it with an E at the end is nearer the mark nowadays; sort of reminding you of what once was tea. I've got some sugar here; pinched some out of HER cupboard yesterday—good start, wasn't it? Are you one of those people who miss lump sugar with every breath they draw, Miss Olwen?"
Olwen smiled into the pink, pug-dog face that looked pinker, more pertinacious than ever; the boy held his head even more assuredly in the air, but his blue, prominent eyes were humble as well as joyous, and the whole of him radiated amazement at Fortune as well as delight.
"Tell me about 'all this,'" Olwen begged, and little Mr. Brown zestfully drawing in his chair and letting a pleased grin crumple his cheeks, broke into his story....
Here and there Olwen interposed a question, a "Really," a "Why," a "What did she say to that?" but for the rest she listened mutely as a woman must, with the widening of her eyes, with a nod, a turn of the attentive head, while the cheerful boy's voice—a thread in that closely woven pattern of other voices all about them—ran on and on.
"It was only last Saturday it started. Imagine that! Seems ages ago to me now, so much happening.... However, to begin at the beginning. I'd been to my Board in the morning, and the silly old blighters had given me another three weeks' leave before putting me on light duty. I was in a taxi, coming away from them, because I was in a hurry, promised to meet a fellow I knew for lunch at the Troc....
"By Jove, I never even rang him up after! I've only just thought of that fellow who used to be in the Lace Department at that old show of mine, and I hadn't seen him since '14. Too bad. I'll have to write him. Anyhow I can't help it; absolutely everything seems to have gone straight out of my head.
"Well, I was going to lunch with this fellow, and then I thought after that I'd ring you up, Miss Olwen, and see what you were doing, and if you'd perhaps care to come with me to the Alhambra or something. If I couldn't get hold of you I was going to look up Ross, I thought, and Mrs. Cartwright.... This was where I was mapping out things that came rather different, as it happened!
"We were coming along Piccadilly towards the Circus when my taxi-man (an absolutely dud driver, as I'd noticed) barged straight into a motor-cycle and side-car that were going along at no end of a lick for Knightsbridge. He only pulled up in the very nick of time; the cycle and the rider were over and into the mud; a filthy day it was, p'raps you'll remember—drizzling and the streets like a soap-slide.
"Out I nipped, before the crowd had even begun to collect, and picked up the motor-cyclist with one hand, and started saying what I thought of the taxi-driver with the other—he was swearing away like a trooper at 'these here so and so and so and so side-cars'; and the little nipper who had been upset was cursing him to blazes, an octave higher. The voice took me by surprise, of course.... The little thing was so covered in mud that I couldn't have told you off-hand if it were a boy or girl or a retriever dog.