“People had better know that he’s coming here as—as usual,” Sir Thomas said. “The lad’s going out to fight and there’s no need to remember anything else.”
The violence of his wrath had subsided by degrees, with the passing months.
“Certainly not,” his wife assented. “And we want to see him, too, Rose my dear, and bid him Godspeed.”
With a generosity that extended far beyond the circumscribed limits of their understanding, they tried to show that they had forgiven him—were willing to give him another chance.
Cecil came to Squires.
He looked strong and sunburnt, and only his eyes betrayed the sickness of the spirit within the young, healthy body.
His grandparents and Diana Aviolet treated him as usual, but he avoided them as much as possible and spent all his moments with Rose. Ford and he exchanged hardly a word—until seven o’clock on the last evening, an hour before Cecil was due to drive to the junction and board his train.
They were in the large hall, and Rose, unwilling to waste an instant of the few precious ones remaining now, was rapidly unpinning her hat behind the heavy tapestry curtains, prepared to fling it out of sight in the adjacent garden-room dear to Diana, sooner than spend time in going upstairs.
As she stood with upraised arms, pushing her yellow hair away from her forehead before the looking-glass on the wall, she heard Ford’s voice.
“So you’re off, and of course you come back with a commission—that’s understood. But not too many decorations, my boy, not too many laudatory inscriptions, I do beg, and—if you must have them, do manage something more artistically authenticated than your college trophies, won’t you?”