"I'm getting out my son's things because he is coming home," said the lady.
Mr. Russell was bathing his bleeding Hound in the basin, and Anonyma was at the window, ostentatiously drinking in the view. Kew took the slate and wrote politely on it: "From school?"
"From the War," said the lady.
Kew donned a pleased and interested expression. It seemed to him better to do this than to write, "Really!" on the slate.
"He wrote about a fortnight ago," the lady's harsh voice continued, "to say he would come to-day. He said he was sick of being grown-up, he told me to get out the soldiers and the Golden Mary. He wants to launch them on the pond again."
Kew nodded. "I have felt like that," he murmured, and the lady seemed to see the sense of his words.
"I should think you are six years older than Murray," she said, "and very different. Come out into the garden, and I'll show you."
Kew followed her, and Anonyma, after a moment's hesitation, went too. But Mr. Russell, who had finished his work of mercy, seemed to think it better to linger in the bathroom, explaining to his Hound the subject of a Biblical picture which hung over the bath.
"You might think I was rather too old to play things well," the mother said to Kew. "But you should see me with Murray. Even my deafness never hindered me with him, I could always see what he said. Look, we made this road for the soldiers coming down to the wharf. Do you see the way we helped nature, by tampering with the roots of the beech. It is a perfect wharf, this little flat bit, it is just level with the deck of the boat at high tide. The lower wharf is for low tide, but of course we have to pretend the tides. That round place is the bandstand, and there the pipers play when there is a troop-ship starting. Sometimes only the Favourite Piper plays, striding up and down the little bowling-green at the top here, but not often, because the work of keeping him going interferes with the disembarkation. We never let the Highlanders go abroad, because Murray loves them so. He is afraid lest something should happen to them. Were the Highlanders your favourites?"
Kew wrote on the slate: "No, the Egyptian Camel Corps."