For Nelly was looking at him across the baby, with a dubious wrinkle between her hazel eyes.
“Could I love ’e, I do wonder,” she breathed in the ear he leaned to her, “supposing you’d went and killed a live man!”
“It wouldn’t be a man, Pretty—it would be an enemy!” explained the trooper in all sober faith.
“But a man for all—of live flesh and blood!” Her sweet underlip turned downwards like a grieved child’s. The trooper said, after a slight reflective pause:
“Why, dash my button-stick! I never thought of the beggar in that light. Howsomever, the chances are that th’ boot might be on t’other leg—as far as the killing went. Halloa! Why, what’s this for?”
He had been leaning forwards, looking at the baby, and his handsome head was very near the bosom whence it drank. So, pierced by the stab of that light careless reference to the grim chances of War, Nelly had thrown her strong young arm about her husband’s neck, and snatched him to her, panting:
“Oh, if he ever dared!... The wicked—wicked——”
Mrs. Geogehagan, squatting on her own bed mending her Corporal’s overalls, cried herrings in reprobation:
“Wickud, is ut? Sure, and wouldn’t his wife—whoever she was, poor craythur!—an’ whatever outlandish, quare kind av lingo she might use to spake her mind in, be afther havin’ an aiqual right to say the same av your man?”
Mrs. Geogehagan went on to say that Active Service, meanin’ liberal Bounties, and more Pay, and the chances of Promotion, the jooty of every raal soldier’s wife was to lep out av her skin wid joy at the wind av the worrud av a War.