The Captain had red hair and a big nose. But he was a gentleman in the fine old English sense; he was a soldier with but one idea, that every physically able man should fight. Every sentence that he spoke was charged with this belief, and every sentence carried a sting for Derry.
More than once Peggy found it necessary to change the subject frantically. Drusilla supplemented her efforts.
But gradually the Captain's manner froze. With a sort of military sixth sense, he felt that he had been asked to break bread and eat salt with a slacker, and he resented it.
After dinner Drusilla sang for them. Sensitive always to atmosphere, she soothed the Captain with old and familiar songs, "Flow gently, sweet Afton," and "Believe me if all those endearing young charms."
Then straight from these to "I'm going to marry 'Arry on the Fifth of January."
"Oh, I say—Harry Lauder," was Captain Hewes' eager comment. "I heard him singing to the chaps in the trenches just before I sailed—a little stocky man in a red kilt. He'd laugh, and you'd want to cry."
Drusilla gave them "Wee Hoose among the Heather," with the touch of pathos which the little man in the red kilt had imparted to it as he had sung it in October in New York before an audience which had wept as it had welcomed him.
"Queer thing," Captain Hewes mused, "what the war has done to him, set him preaching and all that."
"Oh, it isn't queer," Margaret was eager. "That is one of the things the war is doing, bringing men back to—God—" A sob caught in her throat.
Drusilla's hands strayed upon the keys, and into the Battle Hymn of the Republic.