"Dr. Saxham, sir, late attached to the Medical Staff at Gueldersdorp."
"Saxham—that is the name—and the child is the only one? Most sad and regrettable. And I think the paragraph in the Wire mentioned—one of your Boy Scouts?"
"One of my Scouts!" The Chief's bright eyes snapped as he added, "Very much to the honour of his troop. Very greatly to the credit of the Organisation—as I mean to prove to him should he happily survive to return!"
"Indeed? You interest me! Pray tell the story."
It was told, succinctly and crisply. He said quite warmly:
"I could hardly have credited! What pluck and energy! And to dare the thing—on the strength of a second flight! A boy like that should have lived! Good-bye, my dear General!"
He added, accompanying the visitor to his door:
"These are pleasant summer evenings to be wasted in London! A shower or so—and one could do a great deal of execution with the White Coachman on our Hampshire trout-rivers, sir!"
He spoke like an angler mildly peeved by deprivation of the sport he loved best, and even paused to tap the glass of a barometer hanging by the wainscot, on his way back to the writing-table littered with State papers, in defiance of the thin, shrill summons of the telephone-bell....
So the General went away, owning to himself that the thing looked desperate. It was better for England that the Plans of the Foulis War Engine should lie at the bottom of the North Sea, but what of his friend, what of his friend's wife?