"Yes, I, me, Julian O'Farrell: Giulio di Napoli. Haven't I sacrificed my prospects and my sister's prospects rather than throw you to the lions? Didn't I waste those perfectly good snapshots? Didn't I sit tight, protecting you silently, letting you have all I'd expected to have for myself and Dare?"
I gasped. To speak was beyond my powers just then.
"I know what you'd like to say," Julian explained me to myself. "You'd love to say: 'The d—d cheek of the man! It's rich!' Well, it is rich. And I mean to be rich to match. That's in my plan. And so are you in it. Practically you are the plan. To carry it out calmly, without ructions and feathers flying, I put your brother and my sister in the way of falling in love. Dare didn't want to join the Beckett party and didn't want to stay with it. Now, she does want to stay. Brian distrusted me and was intrigued by Dare. Now, he gives me the benefit of the doubt. And he has no doubts of her—— That's a beautiful timbered house, isn't it, Mr. Beckett? Yes, I was just telling Miss O'Malley that this place seems to me the best one we've visited yet. I shall never forget it, or the circumstances of seeing it, shall you, Miss O'Malley? Don't you think, sir, she might let me call her 'Mary,' now we all know each other so well? I'm 'Julian' to her brother and he's 'Brian' to me."
"I certainly do think she might," said Father Beckett, with that slow, pleasant smile which Jim inherited from him.
CHAPTER XXI
It's late at night again—no, early to-morrow morning, just about the hour when to-morrow's war-bread is being baked by to-night's war-bakers. But it's good to burn the midnight electricity, because my body and brain are feeling electric.
We have had the most astonishing day!
Of course, I expected that, because we were going to Noyon, and I evacuated all unneeded thoughts and impressions (for instance, those concerning the O'Farrells) to make room for a crowd of new ones, as we did at the Hôpital des Épidémies with convalescents, for an incoming batch of patients. But I didn't count on private, personal emotions—unless we blundered into an air raid somewhere!
You remember those authors we met once, who write together—the Sandersons—and how they said if they ever dared put a real incident in a book, people picked out that one as impossible? Well, this evening just past reminded me of the Sandersons. We spent it at the War Correspondents' Château, not far out of Compiègne: that is, we spent it there if it was real, and not a dream.