Not until the middle of the summer did Bill get leave again. And then there was a special reason for it. The Battalion had been ordered to France. That was an epic Saturday evening in July when he came home with full kit, brown as a bean, hard as a nail, in rare fighting trim. Time was his own until the Thursday following, when he had to go to Southampton to join the Chaps.
Martial his bearing at Christmas, but it was nothing to what it was now. There seemed to be a consciousness of power about him. For one thing he was wearing the stripe of a lance corporal. Then, too, he was a small man, and, as biologists know, small men always have a knack of looking bigger than they are really. Physically speaking, great men are generally on the small side, perhaps for the reason that they have more vitality. Certainly Corporal Hollis, on the eve of his Odyssey, looked more important than the neighbors ever thought possible. Poor Melia began to wonder if she would be able to live up to him.
Melia had never been to London and when Bill proposed that she should accompany him to the metropolis and see him off from Waterloo the suggestion came as quite a shock to a conservative nature. It meant almost as much as a journey to the middle of Africa or the wilds of the Caucasus to more traveled people. She was not easily fluttered; hers was a mind of the slow-moving sort, but it was only after a night and a day, fraught with grave questionings, that she finally consented to do so.
For one thing the shop would have to close for twenty-four hours, at least; besides, and a more vital matter, even her best dress was nothing like fashionable enough for London, the capital city of the empire. Both these objections were promptly overruled. An obliging neighbor--during the last few months the neighbors had proved wonderfully obliging--consented to take charge of the shop in Melia's absence; while at the psychological moment a paragraph appeared in the _Evening Star_ saying that as the Best people were making a point of wearing old clothes, any attempt at fashion in war time was bad taste. This interesting fact left so little for further discussion that at a quarter past nine on the morning of an ever-memorable Wednesday they steamed out of Blackhampton Central Station, London bound.