“There isn’t much to tell you. You know all about it. We’re not engaged. Old General McLeod objects to our engagement on account of my position. Of course, he’s quite right. He’s very nice about it, and he’s always kindness itself to me. You know, of course, that he and my father were brother officers? Myra and I have been chums since she was four. We love each other, and she would be content to wait, but, in the meantime—well, you know my position. I can only describe it in the well-worn phrases, ‘briefless barrister’ and ‘impecunious junior.’ There’s a great deal of truth in the weak old joke, Dennis, about the many that are called and the few that are briefed. Of course the General is right. He says that I ought to leave Myra absolutely alone, and neither write to her nor see her, and give her a chance to meet someone else, and all that—someone who could keep her among her own set. But I tried that once for three months; I didn’t answer her letters, or write to her, and I worried myself to death very nearly about it. But at the end of the three months she came up to town to see what it was all about. Gad, how glad I was to see her!”
“I bet you were,” said Dennis, sympathetically. “But what d’you mean by telling me you’d got nothing to worry about? Now that you’re just getting things going nicely, and look like doing really well, along comes this wretched war, and you join the army, and such practice as you have goes to the devil. It’s rotten luck, Ronnie, rotten luck.”
“It is a bit,” I admitted with a sigh. My little bit of hard-earned success had meant a lot to me.
“Still,” said Dennis, “you’ve got a thundering lot to be thankful for too. To begin with, she’ll wait for you, and then, if necessary, marry on twopence-halfpenny a year, and make you comfortable on it too. As far as her father is concerned, she’s very devoted to him, and would never do anything to annoy him if she could possibly help it, as I easily spotted the night we dined with them at the Carlton. But she’s made up her mind to be Mrs. Ronald Ewart sooner or later; that I will swear!”
“I’m very glad to hear you say so,” I answered, “but the thing that worries me, of course, is the question as to whether I have any right to let this go on. If war is declared——”
“Which it will be,” said Dennis.
“Well, then, my practice goes to the devil, as you say. How long after the war is it going to be before I could marry one of Myra’s maids, let alone Myra? And, supposing, of course, that I use the return half of my ticket, so to speak, and come back safe and sound, my own prospects will be infinitely worse than they were before the war. The law, after all, is a luxury, and no one will have a great deal of money for luxuries by the time we have finished with it and wiped Germany off the map. Besides, if there’s no money about, there’s nothing to go to law over. So there you are, or, rather, there I am.”
“What do you intend to do, then?” my friend asked.
“I shall go up to Scotland to-morrow night—well, of course, it’s to-night, I should say—and see her—and—and——”