"Oh, how dreadful," Becky cried.
"No, it wasn't dreadful. They were not worth keeping. You see, I played a lot and made sketches and things, and then there was the war—and I wasn't very well."
He had had two years of aviation, and after that a desk in the War Department.
"And now I am painting again."
"Gardens?" Becky asked, "or the sea?"
"Neither. I am trying to paint the moor. I'll show you in the morning."
The Admiral was in the kitchen, superintending the chowder. Jane knew how to make it, and he knew that she knew. But he always went into the kitchen at the psychological moment, tied on an apron, and put in the pilot crackers. Then he brought the chowder in, in a big porcelain tureen which was shaped like a goose. Becky loved him in his white apron, with his round red face, and the porcelain goose held high.
"If you could paint him like that," she suggested to Archibald Cope.
"Do you think he would let me?" eagerly.
After supper the two men smoked by the fire, and Becky sat between them and watched the blaze. She heard very little of the conversation. Her