"I thought you knew me! I most awfully beg your pardon!" he stammered, in scarlet anguish, and the dull eyes suddenly came to life, and the stiff lips smiled:
"It’s Bawne. My sweet, I’m glad! How did you come here?"
"Dad brought me because he’d promised," the boy said joyously as they shook hands.
"Over there." Bawne pointed to two men talking apart beyond the straggling line of spectators, and Patrine recognised the great frame and scholarly stoop of the Doctor, standing with his side-face towards her, a half-consumed cigar in the corner of his mouth, and his stick, a weighty ivory-topped Malacca, loosely gripped in both hands behind his back.
"And the man he is talking to? Why—of course! It’s Sir Roland—how is it I didn’t recognise him?"
"The Chief Scout!" Bawne’s tone was one of incredulous wonder. "But you couldn’t have forgotten _him_! It—isn’t possible!"
Nor even to a stranger did he appear a personality to be easily forgotten, the bright-eyed, falcon-beaked, middle-aged man, whose feather-weight crusher felt was worn at an inimitable angle, and whose slight, active figure set off his well-cut morning suit of thin blue serge in a way to arouse envy in a military dandy of twenty-five.
"You see," Bawne explained, "_he_ was talking business with Father, so I just took myself out of the way." He added: "They hadn’t told me to, but they might have forgotten. And so"—the big word came out of the childish mouth quaintly—"I acted on my initiative—you understand?"
"I understand." The formal handshake once over, their fingers had not separated. She held in her large, strong, womanly palm the hand that was little, and hard, and boyish. It squeezed her fingers, and the squeeze was an apology. It said:
"I’d like you to have kissed me if there hadn’t been lots of people looking. For, of course, you know I love you, Pat!"
"And I love you, Bawne. We’ll always love each other, whatever happens," said the answering pressure. Her spoken utterance was:
"So these are your holidays! ... How did you leave them all at Charterhouse? And—are you still tremendous pals with young Roddy Wrynche?"
"Boys don’t squabble like girls—and Wrynche is a frightfully decent fellow. We passed together from Shell into Under Fourth, and we’ve promised always to stand by each other!"