“It does cling,” remarked Norah, comprehendingly. “I’ll sponge it for you, daddy; those stains never yield to mild measures. Daddy, do you think they’ll be long getting better?”
Anyone else might have been excused for thinking she meant the mud-stains. But David Linton made no such mistake.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “One hears such different stories about that filthy German gas. It all depends on the size of the dose they got, I fancy. Jim said it was mild; but then Jim would say a good deal to avoid frightening us.”
“And he was able to write. But Wally hasn’t written.”
“No; and that doesn’t look well. He’s such a good lad—it’s quite likely he’d write and let us know all he could about Jim. But I don’t fancy the doctors would let them travel unless they were pretty well.”
“I suppose not. Oh, doesn’t it seem ages until to-morrow, dad!”
“It’ll come, if you give it time,” said her father. “However—yes, it does seem a pretty long time, Norah.” They laughed at each other.
“It doesn’t do a bit of good for you to put on that wise air,” Norah said, “because I know exactly how you feel, and that’s just the same as I do. And anyone would be the same who had two boys at the Front like Jim and Wally.”
“I think they would,” said her father, abandoning as untenable the position of age and wisdom. “Thank goodness they will be back with us to-morrow, at any rate.” He put his clothes-brush on the table and stood up, tall and thin and a little grim. “It seems a long while since they went away.”
“Long!” Norah echoed, expressively. It was in reality only a month since her brother Jim and his chum had said good-bye on the platform at Victoria Station; and in some ways it seemed only a few minutes since the train had moved slowly out, with the laughing boyish faces framed in the window. But each slow day, with its dragging weight of anxiety, had been a lifetime. To them had come what the whole world had learned to know; the shiver of fear on opening the green envelopes from the Front; the racking longing for the news; the sick dread at the sight of a telegram—even at the sound of an unusual knock. David Linton had grown silent and grim; Norah felt an old woman, and the care-free Australian life which was all she had known seemed a world away—vanished as completely as the Australian tan had faded from her cheeks.