“I’m not going to tell any one else, but there’s something I want to tell you.” He spoke in a rather hard, set voice, and he did not look up, as he spoke, at the girl by his side.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, Jervis? What is it?” There was something very kind, truly sympathetic, in her accents.
“I’m going to enlist.”
Rose Otway was startled—startled and sorry.
“Oh, no, you mustn’t do that!”
“I’ve always thought I should like to do it, if—if I failed this last time. But of course I knew it was out of the question—because of my father. But now—everything’s different! Even father will see that I have no other course open to me.”
“I—I don’t understand what you mean,” she answered, and to her surprise there came a queer lump in her throat. “Why is everything different now?”
He looked round at her with an air of genuine surprise, and, yes, of indignation, in his steady grey eyes. And under that surprised and indignant look, so unlike anything there had ever been before from him to her, the colour flushed all over her face.
“You mean,” she faltered, “you mean because—because England is at war?”
He nodded.