They greeted each other in the usual way.
“Hulloa, old man!” from Digby. “Hulloa, young fellow!” from Bertram.
They were alone together in the “study,” Joyce having gone out to dinner again.
“How are things?” asked Digby.
“How’s yourself?” asked Bertram.
“I feel good to be in England again, after that hellish place, Ireland! One feels safe in the streets. No need to keep an eye over one’s shoulder. A knock at the door doesn’t make one jump out of one’s giddy seat!”
And yet, a little later, he started and looked towards the door when there was the double rat-tat of a postman’s knock.
“Sorry!” he said, with a queer grin, as he fumbled for his pipe and lit it.
He was barely twenty, and had escaped the Great War by a year or two, though he had been in training as an officer-cadet before the Armistice; a fair-haired boy, with clear-cut, delicate features, almost girlish, and something of his mother’s look. But altered, thought Bertram. Something had changed in him. There was a loose look about his mouth, and his eyes were shifty. He had developed a slight stutter in his speech.
“Any whiskey, old man?” he asked Bertram, after some preliminary conversation about his father and mother, Joyce, and the right thing to see at the theatre.