"Why do you think so?" Michael said. "What can any human being want with us? Why should our movements be interesting to any one but our two selves?" He laughed. "By Jove, they are interesting to us, though, aren't they?"
His eyes spoke of the morrow.
Margaret laughed, too. Michael's high spirits allowed her no time for reflection. He was carrying her off her feet in his old magnetic way. If he had only beckoned, she would have followed him to the ends of the earth; wings would have carried her, the air would have borne her. The dull realities of her life in London had vanished as if they had never been. The black figure, which had stepped into a cab and followed them, was forgotten.
* * * * * *
For something like half an hour Michael sat talking with Hadassah and Margaret. He had so much to tell them that he succeeded in telling them nothing connectedly or completely. He began a hundred different things and left most of them halfway through, to plunge headlong into another and entirely different subject. The things he wanted to say were tumbling over each other in his mind. The bewildering idea that he was going to be married the next day sent all his thoughts reeling.
Margaret was not the sort of girl to worry over a lot of superficial clothes for a ten days' honeymoon. What she needed she had got together in a couple of hours at Harrod's and one or two good shops in the West End.
They had made up their minds to spend their brief period of married life together at Glastonbury. It was not too far from London and Michael had once stayed in the historical old inn in that quiet city of Arthurian romance. In Egypt he had inspired Margaret with a desire to see Glastonbury in the spring time, when the maythorns were in bloom and the luscious meadows gay with flowers.
Like all soldiers, Michael was very silent upon the subject of his own personal experiences at the Front, although at intervals he would suddenly burst out with some dramatic incident in which he had taken part.
When Hadassah congratulated him on being offered a commission, he laughingly said, "Oh, I must accept it. It isn't fair to shirk it, though I'd rather remain as I am."
Margaret's heart stood still. She knew what he meant; she was not ignorant of the appalling death-rate of officers.