“Mamsie! 'When the gun goes off!' What a civilian way of talking. You are not getting on at all with your military training. Now let me give you some useful information. In two seconds the bugle will call the first sergeant—of each company—to the adjutant's office, and there he'll get the mail for his men. The orderly trumpeter will bring it to the houses on the line, and the colonel's orderly—beautiful creature! There he goes! How I wish we could take him home with us and have him in our front hall. Fancy the feelings of the maids! And the rage on the noble brow of Parkins—awful Parkins. I should like to give his pride a bump.”
Mother and daughter were pacing the colonel's veranda, behind a partial screen of rose vines—October vines fast shedding their leaves. Every breeze shook a handful down, which the women's skirts swept with them as they walked. Mrs. Bogardus turned and clasped Christine's arm above the elbow; through the thin sleeve she could feel its cool roundness. It was a soft, small, unmuscular arm, that had never borne its own burdens, to say nothing of a share in the burdens of others.
“Get your jacket,” said the mother. “There is a chill in the air.”
“There is no chill in me,” laughed Christine. “You know, mamsie, you aren't a girl. I should simply die in those awful things that you wear. Did you ever know such a hot house as the colonel keeps!”
“The rooms are small, and the colonel is—impulsive,” Mrs. Bogardus added with a smile.
“There is something very like him about his fire-making. I should know by the way he puts on wood that he never would have “—Mrs. Bogardus checked herself.
“A large bank account?” Christine supplied, with her quick wit, which was not of a highly sensitive order.
“He has a large heart,” said her mother.
“And plenty of room for it, bless him! The slope of his chest is like the roof of a house. The only time I envy Moya is when she lays her head down on it and tries to meet her arms around him as if he were a tree, and he strokes her hair as if his hand was a bough! If ever I marry a soldier he shall be a colonel with a white mustache and a burnt-sienna complexion, and a sword-belt that measures—what is the colonel's waist-measure, do you suppose?”
Mrs. Bogardus listened to this nonsense with the smile of a silent woman who has borne a child that can talk. Moya had often noticed how uncritical she was of Christine's “unruly member.”