He went back to a whirl of business at his bank, and he has stayed there ever since, "carrying on" his usual everyday job (the only sort of "carrying on" he knows, as Vi Vassity would say). In his way he is "on active service" too; doing his duty by his country. There is something the matter with his heart--besides his crossed-in-love affair, I mean--something that prevents him from enlisting. Very hard lines on him, to be quite young and otherwise fit, but doomed to remain a civilian. Of course there have to be some people as civilians still. We couldn't get on without any civilians at all, could we?
My lover joined as a trooper the day before war was officially declared.
And he came over to Miss Million's house in Wales to tell us of his plans the morning after Mr. Brace had gone off to town. He--the other man--was still in the laurel-green chauffeur's kit that he was so soon going to change for his Majesty's drab-coloured but glorious livery. And I was in my maid's black, with cap and apron, when I opened the door to him.
"Where's your mistress? In the drawing-room? Then come into the library, child," said the Honourable Jim Burke, "for it's you I've come to call upon."
"I've only a minute to spare you," I said forbiddingly, as I showed him into the square, rather mouldy-smelling library, with its wall of unread books and its family-portraits of dead and gone Price-Vaughans. "And besides, I don't think a chauffeur ought to come to the front door and----"
"I shall not be a chauffeur a minute longer than it takes me to get out of this dashed kit," said the Honourable Jim. Then he told me about his enlisting for active service.
"It won't be much time I shall have before that regiment gets its orders," he said. "Time enough, though----"
He paused and looked hard at me. So hard that I felt myself colouring, and turned away.
He took a step after me. I felt him give a little pull at my apron-strings to make me look round.
"Time enough to get married, darling of my heart," said Jim Burke, laughing softly.
And he took me into his arms and kissed me; at first very gently, then eagerly, fiercely, as if to make up for time already lost and for all that time yet to come when we must be apart from each other.