"This water's boiling like mad. Now is my time to prove my assertion that I am capable of making coffee. I want two jugs, or this jug and the tin will do. The coffee? Thanks. I'm afraid I'll have to get you to hold the tin. This is the native method: You make it in the tin—so; then, after a moment or two, you pour the liquid—not the coffee grounds—into the jug, then back, and then back again, and lo! you have café à la Français, or Cairo, or Clapham fashion."
"It's very good," she admitted, when it had cooled sufficiently for her to taste it. "And that is how you made it on the battlefield?"
"Scarcely," he said. "There was no jug, only an empty meat can; and the water—well, the water was almost as thick, with mud, before the coffee was put in as afterward, and the men would scarcely have had patience to wait for the patent process. Poor beggars! Some of them had not had a drop past their lips for twenty-four hours—and been fighting, too."
Nell listened, with her grave gray eyes fixed on his face.
"How sorry you must have been to leave the army!" she said thoughtfully.
"Does warfare seem so alluring?" he retorted, with a laugh. "But you're right; I was sorry to send in my papers, and I've been sorrier since the day I did it."
Nell curled herself up in the bottom of the boat like a well-fed and contented cat, and Vernon, having washed the plates by the simple process of dragging them backward and forward through the water, stretched himself and felt in his pockets. He relinquished the search with a sigh of resignation, and Nell, hearing it, looked up.
"Are you not going to smoke?" she asked. "Dick would have his pipe alight long before this; and, of course, I don't mind—if that is what you were waiting for. Why should I?"
"Thanks; but, like an idiot, I've forgotten my pipe. I've got some tobacco and cigarette paper."
"Then you are all right," she remarked.