The friend who had brought the boy began to explain, with a miserable sense of guilt. He had dropped asleep in the train on the way to Paris, and Little Yeogh Wough, wanting to explore the corridor, had opened a door which he thought led out into it, but which was really on the opposite side and only led out on to the railway track and into the void of the night. He had been in the very act of stepping down out of the train, which was going at seventy-five miles an hour, when a Frenchman sitting in the compartment jumped up and sprang forward and clutched at him—saving him by a second's space only from what must have been certain death!
Strange! To think as I look back now that, by this act of saving an English child, that unknown Frenchman saved a soldier who was to help to defend France against the next great onslaught of the Germans!
"I told you so," said Miss Torry to my husband and me, when our unlucky friend had retired to get ready for dinner. "I told you that man wasn't a fit person to have the charge of a child—and such a child as that. What a mercy that Frenchman had his wits about him! One can't be too careful whom one trusts children with in the present day."
"And I told you that the boy would be changed," I said to her in a low voice, so that Little Yeogh Wough, who had run into the next room, might not hear. "He's not my boy at all. The difference is perfectly amazing."
Miss Torry threw up her hands again.
"That's it, you see. I knew how it would be directly he got under your aunt's influence. I knew she'd let him have his way in everything. And Old Nurse, too! I always did feel that it's never any good trusting anybody who's got a long upper lip. Well, now I'll go and see that he washes his face and hands properly. He actually hasn't said yet that he's sorry you've got such a dreadful cold. I'll tell him what I think of him."
And she whisked into the inner room.
"I believe a good deal of his disagreeableness comes from that overcoat," I said to my husband. "He feels that he's looking his worst in it, and he can't be himself when he feels that. It's all Old Nurse's fault. She said he'd better not have a fawn cloth one, because his vanity must be checked at any cost."
Ah! The dear boy! How vain he was when he first put on his khaki eleven years afterwards!
When his bedtime came, on this his first evening in Paris, he did not get up to say good night when told to do so.