“But I thought—of course I don’t know anything about it, Jervis, and I daresay you’ll think me very ignorant—but from what the Dean said this morning I thought that only our fleet is to fight the Germans.”
“The Dean is an old——” and then they both laughed. Jervis Blake went on: “If we don’t go to the help of the French and the Belgians, then England’s disgraced. But of course we’re going to fight!”
Rose Otway was thinking—thinking hard. She knew a good deal about Jervis, and his relations with the father he both loved and feared.
“Look here,” she said earnestly. “We’ve always been friends, you and I, haven’t we, Jervis?”
And again he simply nodded in answer to the question.
“Well, I want you to promise me something!”
“I can’t promise you I won’t enlist.”
“I don’t want you to promise me that. I only want you to promise me to wait just a few days—say a week. Of course I don’t know anything about how one becomes a soldier, but you’d be rather sold, wouldn’t you, if you enlisted and then if your regiment took no part in the fighting—if there’s really going to be fighting?”
Rose Otway stopped short. She felt a most curious sensation of fatigue; it was as though she had been speaking an hour instead of a few moments. But she had put her whole heart, her whole soul, into those few simple words.