“I mean, you can think of so many delicious things. We might believe you were wounded, you know, coming home to see your wife and daughter. As if the sentries had allowed you to come in for a little while. They would be outside now, watching. Men with dirty faces and heavy boots.”
“Yes, if I had a wife and daughter,” suggested Baron.
“Oh, well—Flora and I. Anyway, you’ve got a mother, and that’s the real thing when there’s any soldier business.”
“It’s a real thing, anyway,” observed Mrs. Baron.
“Yes, of course,” admitted the child. She sighed deeply. How was any one to get anywhere, with so many literal-minded people about? She remembered the man in the play who said, “If we are discovered, we are lost,” and the other who replied, “No, if we are discovered, we are found.”
It was Mrs. Baron who returned to prosaic affairs.
“I’m going out this afternoon,” she said briskly. “I’ve been tied up here in the house three Thursdays. There are people I simply must call on.”
Bonnie May did not know why her heart should have jumped at this announcement. Still, there seemed to be no end to the possibilities for enjoyment in a big house when there wasn’t anybody to be saying continuously: “You must,” or “You mustn’t.”
She wandered up-stairs as soon as luncheon was over, and in Baron’s room she was overcome by an irresistible impulse.
She heard the houseman moving about in the next room, and the thought occurred to her that she had never seen the houseman’s room. She had never even spoken to the houseman. There was something quite mysterious about the fact that he always kept to himself.