“Daddy Small laughed hilariously, and filled up Eileen’s glass with Moselle wine.”
Brand looked blank.
“Jealousy?”
“Why, yes,” said Eileen. “Imagine me, an Irish girl, all soppy with emotion at the first sight of English khaki (that’s a fantastic situation anyhow!), after four years with the grey men, and then finding that the first khaki tunic she meets holds the body of a man she knew as a boy, when she used to pull his hair! And such a grave heroic-looking man, Wicky! Why, I felt like one of Tennyson’s ladies released from her dark tower by a Knight of the Round Table. Then you went away and married a German Gretchen! And all my doing, because if I hadn’t given you a letter to Franz you wouldn’t have met Elsa. So when I heard the news, I thought, ‘There goes my romance!’”
Daddy Small laughed again, joyously.
“Say, my dear,” he said, “you’re making poor old Wickham blush like an Englishman asked to tell the story of his V.C. in public.”
Brand laughed, too, in his harsh, deep voice.
“Why, Eileen, you ought to have told me before I moved out of Lille.”
“And where would maiden modesty have been?” asked Eileen, in her humourous way.
“Where is it now?” asked the little doctor.