“It’s better—getting on finely. So far as my leg is concerned, I believe I shall be fit to go out again within ten days. It’s my arm that bothers me a little. One of the nerves, the doctor said, must be wrong. I can only just lift it. You’ve no idea,” he went on, “how a game leg and a trussed-up arm interfere with the little round of one’s daily life. I can’t ride, can’t play golf or billiards, and for an unintelligent chap like me,” he wound up with a sigh, “there aren’t a great many other ways of passing the time.”
“Why do you call yourself unintelligent?” she protested. “You couldn’t have got through your soldiering so well if you had been.”
“Oh! I know all the soldier stuff,” he admitted, “know my job, that is to say, all right, and of course I am moderately good at languages, but that finishes me. I haven’t any brains like your friend Thomson, for instance.”
“Major Thomson is very clever, I believe,” she said a little coldly.
“And a little censorious, I am afraid,” Granet added with a slight grimace. “I suppose he thinks I am a garrulous sort of ass but I really can’t see why he needed to go for your brother last night just because he was gratifying a very reasonable curiosity on my part. It isn’t as though I wasn’t in the Service. The Army and the Navy are the same thing, any way, and we are always glad to give a Navy man a hint as to how we are getting on.”
“I really couldn’t quite understand Major Thomson myself,” she agreed.
“May I ask—do you mind?” he began,—“have you been engaged to him long?”
She looked away for a moment. Her tone, when she replied, was meant to convey some slight annoyance at the question.
“About three months.”
Captain Granet kicked a pebble away from the path in front of him with his sound foot.