‘Hugo.’
I asked Mrs. Sebright if she would look after the children for me the next afternoon. She had done so sometimes before, when there was no maid I could trust, and she said she would.
‘I want to see Hugo again, down in London,’ I said. ‘He will only be here for two days, just now.’
‘Poor young man,’ Mrs. Sebright said, ‘he looks very ill. Has he had shell shock, do you think, at any time?’
I said I didn’t think so, but I felt a rush of gratitude to Mrs. Sebright for her kindly tone. I bent down suddenly and kissed her, and she looked surprised.
‘Poor boys,’ she said, ‘poor boys, I pity them indeed.’
And it struck me as very strange that she should class Hugo in any group—as one among others like him—he who to me had always seemed unique; so wholly different from all other people.
XXVIII
Hugo was waiting for me on the platform. We made our way through the hurrying crowds of people, and out of the station, hardly speaking a word.
It was a grey day, a heavy overcast sky threatened rain. We crossed Trafalgar Square, to the Admiralty Arch; then we went through it, and turned to the left, across the open space of the Horse Guards Parade. We walked along where the water used to be, by the War Trades Intelligence Department, those strange piles of Government buildings that usurped the bright coolness of the water. In one small remaining corner the pelicans still lived, crowding with ruffled feathers on their little clumps of rock.