"Billy, Billy!" said his mother reprovingly. "When will you learn to behave yourself and to take care?"
"When will you let me join the Boy Scouts?" retorted her youngest born, gazing up at the ceiling with the face of an innocent cherub, and Mrs. Dashwood was obliged to smile as she looked at her eldest son.
"Your father will be very pleased, Bob," she said. "There have been Dashwoods in the regiment for generations, and it is nice to feel that both my boys will be in a battalion in their father's brigade."
"You should be very proud, madame, that yours is such a military family," said a young man who sat opposite to the children with his back to the tall windows. "Let me see, you will now have four members serving at this great crisis?"
"Yes, it is an honour of which I am indeed more than proud, Monsieur Van Drissel," said his hostess.
"But Uncle Eric doesn't count—he's only at the War Office, and they do nothing there," interposed the irrepressible Billy.
"I shall send you out of the room if you're rude," said his mother. "The War Office is a most important branch."
It was a pleasant room in a charming house, whose grounds sloped down to the ornamental water in Regent's Park, and if one had not known it, one might have imagined it to be one of those countless English homes into which the war had not penetrated.
Captain Bob, looking very different now from the crumpled figure at the bottom of the trench, had escaped death from the sniper's bullet by a fraction of an inch, but he had made quick recovery, and before his month's sick furlough was at an end he was already secretly yearning to get back again. He knew that there was a great push in contemplation, and his only fear was that he might not be in it.
Everything in that room spoke of comfort and money, and everything was very English, except the young man with his back to the windows, and the young woman with the dark eyes on the opposite side of the table.