CHAPTER XV
“CARRY ON!”
After a few delightful days in London, Dalroy walked down Whitehall one fine morning to call at the War Office for orders. Irene went with him. He expected to be packed off to France that very evening, so the two meant making the utmost of the fast-speeding hours. The Intelligence Department had assimilated all the information Dalroy could give, had found it good, and had complimented him. As a Bengal Lancer, whose regiment was presumably in India, he would probably be attached to some cavalry unit of the Expeditionary Force; from being an hunted outlaw, with a price on his head, he would be quietly absorbed by the military machine. Very smart he looked in his khaki and brown leather; Irene, who one short week earlier deemed sabots en cuir the height of luxury, was dressed de rigueur for luncheon at the Savoy.
Many eyes followed them as they crossed Trafalgar Square and dodged the traffic flowing around the base of King Charles’s statue. An alert recruiting-sergeant, clinching the argument, pointed out the tall, well-groomed officer to a lanky youth whose soul was almost afire with martial decision.
“There y’are,” he said, with emphatic thumb-jerk, “that’s wot the British army will make of you in a couple of months. An’ just twig the sort o’ girl you can sort out of the bunch. Cock yer eye at that, will you?”
Thus, all unconsciously, Irene started the great adventure for one of Kitchener’s first half-million.
She was not kept waiting many minutes in an ante-room. Dalroy reappeared, smiling mysteriously, yet, as Irene quickly saw, not quite so content with life as when he entered those magic portals, wherein a man wrestles with an algebraical formula before he finds the department he wants.