She looked at him in astonishment. I suppose the statement to her seemed foolish and outrageous.
'It is quite true,' he went on earnestly; 'ever since I met Captain Luscombe at Plymouth I have been in the Army, and I am afraid I have not been a very sociable kind of character. I have lived with men all that time, and have been somewhat of a hermit. Of course I have seen women, in England and in France,' and he laughed nervously. 'But—but—no, I have never spoken to one.'
'And how do I strike you?'
'You seem like a being from another and a more beautiful world,' he replied gravely. 'I don't know, though, the world as one sees it here is very beautiful'; and he glanced quickly across the park away to the moors in the distance, which the setting sun had lit up with a purple glow.
At that moment Sir Thomas Bolivick, Lorna's father, came to the door, and in a hearty West Country fashion gave us both a warm welcome.
'Awfully good of you to come, Captain Luscombe,' he said. 'Granville has spoken so much about you, that I feel as though you were an old friend. Nonsense, nonsense!'—this in reply to my apologies for accepting the invitation. 'In times like these, we can't stand upon ceremony. You are a friend of Granville's, and you are a British soldier, that's enough for me. Whatever this war has done, it has smashed up a lot of silly conventions, it has helped us to be more natural, and when Lorna here told me about you, I wanted to see you. You see, I have read reports of your speeches, and when I saw that you were mentioned in the dispatches, I wanted to know you more than ever. So let there be no nonsense about your being a stranger.'
Soon after, we were shown to our bedrooms, and after dressing for dinner I went to Edgecumbe's room.
'I—I—had forgotten,' he gasped. 'How—long have I been here?'
'Twenty minutes. Aren't you going to put on your new togs?'
He looked at me like a man in a dream. 'I had forgotten everything,' he said, 'except——'