Captain Bingo gets up and covers the distance between the deck-chairs with a single stride, and puts a big kind hand on the averted shoulder.
"Of course you never did." The boy reaches up and takes the hand, and squeezes it with the shyness of the Englishman who responds to some display of solicitude or affection on the part of a comrade. "Don't mind my rotting like this. There are times when one must let off steam or explode."
"I thought—and so did a few others, the Chief among 'em—that South Africa had saved you by the skin of your teeth," says Captain Bingo, smoking vigorously, and driving his hands very deep into his pockets. "Confoundedly odd how taken in we were! I could have sworn, my part, that you'd just stopped short at——"
"At making a blithering idiot of myself," interpolates Beauvayse. "If you'll go back and sit decently in your chair, instead of standing behind me rattlin' keys and coins in your pocket, and dropping hot cigar-ash on my head, I'll tell you how it happened. Nobody listening?"
"Not a soul," says Captain Bingo, padding back after a noiseless prowl to the coffee-room window.
Beauvayse grips either arm of the chair he sits in so fiercely that they crack again.
"I—I was desperately hard hit over Lessie a year ago——"
"So were a lot of other young idiots."
"That's a pleasant reflection. They were."
"Of course, I"—Bingo's large face becomes very red—"I inferred nothing in any way against Miss Lavigne's chara—— Dash it, I beg your pardon! I ought to call her Lady Beauvayse."