"We'll be back after supper," he added, relenting as the battalion filed out of the little grey house. "We must go up to look at the Caldwell house, but we'll come home here as soon as our duty is done."
"It's good to get home, Wythie," said Basil turning back on the steps, just as he spoke and just as he turned back each week at the same hour.
[CHAPTER FOUR]
ITS DREADFUL NIGHT
"I saved a life to-day, Bruce," said Rob. The Rutherford boys had got back to the little grey house, the evening had shut in around it, shutting out all the world except that small fragment of it which centred around the old hearth.
Over in the corner, under her green-shaded sewing lamp, sat the mother without whom the happiness of the six young people would have been incomplete, and this was true although the six were drifting more and more into the habit of being three pairs. Bartlemy was never tired of vainly trying to satisfy himself in painting Prue's wonderful colouring, and, if the truth were told, Prue never tired of having him try. Bartlemy's talent was developing into something to be taken seriously; already his brothers were making up their minds to the first parting when they should be graduated together. Basil and Bruce had delayed college till Bartlemy could enter with them, but evidently their ways would lie together no further. Bartlemy must go away to study in Italy and France, for his boyish nickname of Fra Bartolomeo was proving prophetic—Bartlemy would be a painter.
Wythie and Basil never seemed to have very much to talk about, but they drifted beside each other invariably, and their many moments of silence seemed to be quite as full of utterance as their moments of speech, as the observant Grey mother noted with a satisfaction that could not be wholly free from regret.
As to Rob and Bruce they chattered ceaselessly, never far apart, always absorbed in identical interests, and with the same kind of a sense of humour—which it is said is the strongest cement of friendship. It was hard to tell much about Rob and Bruce. It was plain to be seen that Bruce was of the same opinion that he had been from the first, which was that Rob easily surpassed all other girls, including sweet Wythie and handsome Prue, just as Rob considered Battalion B collectively the best and cleverest boys in the world, and Bruce the head of the battalion. But their comradeship was so entirely free from the suggestion of sentiment that there was no predicting how it would end. As to Prue, she was but sixteen, and Mrs. Grey was too sensible to build up romances, or to encourage them for such a youthful heroine. She knew that Prue had plenty of that ambition which the other girls lacked, the ambition to shine, to see and to be seen in a larger world than the little grey house and Fayre offered her. She had never been the simple and contented little girl that both of her sisters had been, and the modest fortune that had come to the Greys had rather contributed to her restlessness than made her contented, for it had given Prue a taste of small luxuries which whetted her appetite for greater ones.