They looked around them, and admitted they could not.
“Apparently,” said Phineas, “the Colonel, good but limited man, has missed all the proper places and dumps us in localities unrecognized by the London Press.”
“Put me on the pier at Brighton,” sang Mo Shendish. “But I’d sooner have Margit or Yarmouth any day. Brighton’s too toffish for whelks. My! and cockles! I wonder whether we shall ever eat ’em again.” A far-away, dreamy look crept into his eyes.
“Does your young lady like cockles?” Doggie asked sympathetically.
“Aggie? Funny thing, I was just thinking of her. She fair dotes on ’em. We had a day at Southend just before the war——”
He launched into anecdote. His companions listened, Phineas ironically carrying out his theory of adaptability, Doggie with finer instinct. It appeared there had been an altercation over right of choice with an itinerant vendor in which, to Aggie’s admiration, Mo had come off triumphant.
“You see,” he explained, “being in the fish trade myself, I could spot the winners.”
James Marmaduke Trevor, of Denby Hall, laughed and slapped him on the back, and said indulgently: “Good old Mo!”
At the little school-house they stopped to gossip with some of their friends who were billeted there, and they sang the praises of the Veuve Morin’s barn.
“I wonder you don’t have the house full of orficers, if it’s so wonderful,” said some one.