“Oh, let me tell Rose,” she said eagerly. “I always tell her everything. She is far more discreet than I am!” And this was true.
“Well, tell Miss Rose and no one else,” he said. “I don’t even know myself when I am going, where I am going, or how I am going.”
They were now standing in the hall.
“Then you don’t expect to be long in London?” she said.
“No. I should think I shall only be there two or three days. Of course I’ve got to get my kit, and to see people at the War Office, and so on.” He added in a low voice, “There’s not going to be any repetition of the things that went on at the time of the Boer War—no leave-takings, no regiments marching through the streets. It’s our object, so I understand, to take the Germans by surprise. Everything is going to be done to keep the fact that the Expeditionary Force is going to France a secret for the present. I had that news by the second post; an old friend of mine at the War Office wrote to me.”
He gripped her hand in so tight a clasp that it hurt. Then he turned the handle of the front door, opened it, and was gone.
Mrs. Otway felt a sudden longing for sympathy. She went straight into the kitchen. “Anna!” she exclaimed, “Major Guthrie is going back into the Army! England is sending troops over to the Continent to help the Belgians!”
“Ach!” exclaimed Anna. “To Ostend?” She had once spent a summer at Ostend in a boarding-house, where she had been hard-worked and starved. Since then she had always hated the Belgians.
“No, no,” said Mrs. Otway quickly. “Not to Ostend. To Boulogne, in France.”