"She turned out to be a Hottentot lady, didn't she?"
"Cavalry Problem No. 1. Put yourself in Lieutenant the Right Hon. the Lord Viscount Beauvayse's place, and give in detail the precautions you would have taken to insure the transport of your heart uninjured from the Staff Headquarters to the Hospital Gate. Show on the map the disposition of the enemy, whether desirous to enslave, or likely to be mashed...."
"She was neither," the crimson boy declared. "She was simply a lady, quiet and high-bred and simple enough to have been a Princess of the blood, or to look a fellow in the face and pass him by without the slightest idea—I'd swear to it—that she'd fairly taken his breath away."
"My dear Lord!" The Mayor took a great deal of comfort out of a title. "Attractive the young lady is, I certainly admit, and my wife is—I may say the word—in her praise. But you go one, or half a dozen, better than Mrs. Greening, who will be perfectly willing, I don't doubt, to introduce you, unless the Colonel entertains objections ..."
"To Staff flirtations? Regard 'em as inevitable, Mr. Mayor, like Indian prickly-heat, or fever here. And probably the best cure for the complaint in the present instance would be to meet the cause of it."
"Judge for yourself, Colonel; you've first-class long-distance eyesight." There was a ring of defiance in the boy's fresh voice. "You've seen her before, and it isn't the kind of face one forgets. Here they are ... here she is now, coming back, with the other ladies. The railing spoils one's view, but the gates are open, and in another moment you'll see her pass them."
The Chief moved to the front of the stoep where the Staff had congregated. Men quietly fell aside, making place for him, so that he stood with Beauvayse, in a clear half-circle of figures attired like his own, in Service browns and drabs and umbers, waiting until the three approaching feminine shapes should pass across the open space. One or two Staff monocles went up. The Chief Medical Officer removed and wiped his steel-rimmed eyeglasses before replacing them on his bony aquiline nose.
They came and passed—the white figure and the two black ones. Of these one was very tall, one short and dumpy—veiled and mantled, their hands hidden in their ample sleeves, they went by with their eyes upon the ground. But the girl with them—a slight, willowy creature in a creamy cambric dress, a wide hat of black transparent material, frilled and bowed, upon her dead-leaf coloured hair, and tied by wide strings of muslin under her delicate round chin—looked with innocent, candid interest at the group of men outside the Hospital. The tanned faces, the simple workman-like Service dress, setting off the well-knit, alert figures, the quiet, soldierly bearing, even the distant sound of the well-bred voices, pleased her, even as the whiff of cigars and Russian leather that the breeze brought down from the stoep struck some latent chord of subconscious memory, and brought a puzzled little frown between the delicately-drawn dark eyebrows arching over black-lashed golden hazel eyes. And cognisant of every fleeting change of expression in those lovely eyes, the taller of her two companions thought, with a stab of pain:
"Your father was that man's friend, and the comrade of others like him."
"Now, then!" challenged Beauvayse, as the three figures moved out of sight.