"What is Guy going to do then?" asked Gaskell-Walker, as he opened the door.
His mother-in-law looked at him vaguely. "Do? I don't know. I suppose he'll go back to the City. Mr. McCormick promised to take him back, but I don't know—he hasn't said anything about it. I'll get his letter."
They went upstairs to the girl's room, for Paul had long since established his æsthetic inability to sit in "the mausoleum," as he called the drawing-room, and there, among the pretty modern knick-knacks and pictures, the mother read her soldier son's letter.
It was a good letter, unoriginal and typical in its lack of grumbling and rather artificial cheerfulness. The writer called his friends and comrades by odd nicknames, vegetable and otherwise; he gave the details of the food, and the delights of sleeping in a bed once more after eighteen months of trench life. Then at the last there was something over which Mrs. Walbridge hesitated for a moment—something which was plainly very important to her. Billy Gaskell-Walker got up.
"I'll just go down and get a cigar out of my coat pocket," he said kindly.
But Mrs. Walbridge stopped him. "No, no, Billy, don't go," she said, "I'd like you to hear because you are going to be brothers now." She could not tell him that it was Paul before whom she had hesitated to read the more intimate part of the letter.
Paul sat at the far end of the room, reading a newspaper, his smoothly brushed hair gleaming over the back of Grisel's favourite chair.
"Of course, you know that Guy has been rather foolish," his mother went on after a pause, putting on her spectacles again. "But he is only twenty-one, after all, and that's not so very old, is it?"
Curiously enough the stranger, the man who was nothing to her or to her boy by blood, understood her better and was closer to her at that moment than either her son or her daughter. Gaskell-Walker drew his chair a little nearer and took his cigarette out of his mouth, a queer little unpremeditated act of homage which she noticed and for which she was grateful.
"A man of twenty-one," he said slowly, "is not a man at all, he's only a child, and Guy is so good-looking, he's so full of what women call charm——" he broke off with an expressive shrug, and after smiling gratefully at him, and lowering her voice a little that she might not disturb Paul's study of the Evening Standard, his mother-in-law went on with the letter, reading in a low, moved voice: