"Do you wonder?" I asked.
"I call that a silly question," she answered.
There was little room to spare in the Junior Bachelor suite by the time the Junior Bachelor had fitted a wife and a guest into the mediaeval, lancet-windowed rooms in the Cloisters. I was made welcome and comfortable, however, and was struck by the revolutionary changes effected by Sonia in the fortnight she had lived there.
Speech Day passed off uneventfully, with its time-honoured ritual unchanged. Once more the retiring monitors, standing face to face with Burgess at the birch table, received, reversed and yielded up the long school birch; once more the new monitors were handed their symbol of office. Then the roll was called, a diminutive malefactor publicly birched across the back of his hand, and we returned to Chapel. The breaking-up service had already taken place, but honour had yet to be paid to the dead. In a voice that twice quavered and broke, Burgess—for thirty-eight years head master of Melton—read the roll of those who had fallen in the war, every one a former pupil of his own, and seven-tenths the brothers, uncles or fathers of boys now in the school. My stall was next to O'Rane's and his hand shot out and gripped mine when Loring's name was read out last on the list. With a twisted face Burgess pulled off his big horn spectacles and wiped them, while the organ crashed into the Dead March.
From that evening we had all Melton to ourselves. The housemasters stayed on for a couple of days to dispose of their reports, then collected their wives and children and hastened away to the sea. By the 4th of August, my last night there, only Burgess, O'Rane and Sonia were left. I remember proposing that my host and hostess should dine with me at the "Raven" by way of a change, but O'Rane told me it was impossible, as Burgess had been invited to take pot-luck with us in the Cloisters.
"There aren't enough arm-chairs or anything of that kind," he said, "but you can perch on the music-stool and I'll sit on the floor. And I doubt if we've enough knives or plates, but nothing matters as long as we hurry dinner through and let the old man get back to his pipe. He never knows what he's eating and never complains."
At eight o'clock the slam of a door echoed through the desolation of Great Court. With one hand smoothing his long white beard and the other thrust into the bosom of his cassock, Burgess strode across to the Cloisters, hardly pausing to glance at the opal sky or the creeper-clad houses around him, their crumbling stone white and warm from the long afternoon's sunshine.
During dinner he spoke of the Germany he had known before the Danish war, when Bismarck was a young member of the Frankfurt Diet, and the callow, revolutionary Wagner lived exiled from the kingdom of Saxony. He discussed the war from many points of view—racially as the effort of a growing nation to secure adequate land and food for its members, economically as a new Punic struggle for markets and politically as the last throw of a bankrupt landed class to win back the power it had gradually lost to the encroaching democracy.
We talked of the war's duration and the probable form of its end, of the redistribution of Europe and the guarantees of a lasting peace. Then O'Rane handed round cigars and offered Burgess the better of the arm-chairs.