Lady Danby, who conducted a Red Cross Hospital in a near-by town, appreciated our embarrassment, and did her best to make us feel at home.
"What a delightful Mess Room!" she exclaimed, as her tall, lithesome figure sank into an arm chair. "It must be so restful and refreshing after those dreadful operations!"
"Captain Reggy finds it very restful indeed," Burnham volunteered mischievously; "he spends a great deal of his time here--mixing drinks."
"Ah!--and he does them so very well too," exclaimed Madame Cuillard, with a flash of her beautiful dark eyes toward the hero of the moment, and lifting her glass to him in gracious compliment. "He is a man after my own heart."
"Madam, you flatter me," Reggy murmured, with a low bow, "and yet I fear I am not the first who has been 'after' such a kindly heart?"
"Nor you shall not be the last, I hope," the little widow returned, with a rippling laugh. "Still, 'Weak heart never won'--ah, non--I am forgetting my English--let it pass. A heart is so easy to be lost in France--you must be careful."
Fraser's Gibsonian figure towered above the others as he and Father Bonsecour and the senior major stood chatting with two Canadian guests. The girls made a pretty contrast, petite, dainty and vivacious; the one with blue-black hair and large soft brown eyes, the other fair as an angel, with hair of finely spun gold and eyes as blue as the sea over the dunes.
"May I take your glasses?" Fraser queried.
"Thank you, by all means," said the little brunette smilingly. "There's nothing I regret more than an empty glass or a flower that is dead."
"The former leaves little to hope, and the latter hopes little to leaf," asserted the senior major sententiously, animated by the beauty of our guests.
"What a dreadful pun, Major Baldwin!" cried the pretty blonde. "You deserve five days C.B.!"
"Thank Heaven," laughed the major, "we don't always get our deserts! We incorrigibles may still, for a moment
_"'Take the cash and let the credit go,_ _Nor heed the rumble of the distant drum'!"_
But the Colonel interrupted these delightful inanities by offering his arm to Lady Danby and showing her to the seat of honour on his right. The other ladies were distributed as impartially as was possible amongst the remaining twenty-four of us. We stood for a moment with bowed heads while our chaplain repeated that concise but effective military grace: