Nell laughed and held out her plate.
"I consent because I do not think the recently starving should eat too much at first. Didn't you say that you had been in Egypt fighting? You are in the army, then?"
He nodded casually, and she looked at him thoughtfully.
"Then we ought not to call you 'Mr.,'" she said. "What are you—a colonel?"
He laughed shortly as he picked the fish from the bones.
"Good heavens! do I look so old? No, not colonel. I'm a captain. But I'm not in the army now. I left it—worse luck!"
"Why did you leave it?" she asked.
He looked a little bored—not so much bored, perhaps, as reluctant.
"Oh, for a variety of reasons; the most important being the fact that a relative of mine wished me to do so."
His face clouded for a moment or two; then he said, with the air of one dismissing an unpleasant topic: