We were regretfully silent—perhaps also a little curious, for our friend was not wont to discourse thus fully to us.
The poet appeared even a little dismayed, owing, doubtless, to that intuition which has made him so justly renowned in his circle of admirers, for the colonel's next remarks filled us all with a similar emotion.
"Dear friends," he said, leaning forward in his chair, and placing his pipe upon the whist table, "may I—would you allow me so to trespass on this friendship of ours, as to ask for your interest in my only son, Thomas?"
For a minute all of us, I fancy, trod the fields of memory.
The poet's thoughts hovered round a small grave in his garden, wherein lay an erstwhile feline comrade of his solitude, whose soul had leaped into space at the assault of an unerring pebble.
The vicar and the doctor would seem to have had similar reminiscences—and had I not seen a youthful figure wading complacently through my cucumber frames? We all were interested in Tommy.
Another chord was touched.
"He is motherless, you see, and very alone," the colonel pleaded, as though our thoughts had been audible.
We remembered the brief bright years, and the long grey ones, and steeled our hearts for service.