Perhaps Mrs. Robey alone of them all knew how much they would miss him.
He was such a thoroughly good fellow, he was so useful to her husband in
keeping order among the wilder spirits, and that without having about
him a touch of the prig!

* * * * *

Rose looked up and smiled as the tall young man came forward and shook
hands with her, saying as he did so, "I hope I'm not too early? The
truth is, I've a good many calls to pay this afternoon. I've come to say
good-bye."

"I'm sorry. I thought you weren't going away till Saturday." Rose really
did feel sorry--in fact, she was herself surprised at her rather keen
sensation of regret. She had always liked Jervis Blake very much--liked
him from the first day she had seen him. He had a certain claim on the
kindness of the ladies of the Trellis House, for his mother had been a
girl friend of Mrs. Otway's.

Most people, as Rose was well aware, found his conversation boring. But
it always interested her. In fact Rose Otway was the one person in
Witanbury who listened with real pleasure to what Jervis Blake had to
say. Oddly enough, his talk almost always ran on military matters. Most
soldiers--and Rose knew a good many officers, for Witanbury is a
garrison town--would discuss, before the Great War, every kind of topic
except those connected with what they would have described as "shop."
But Jervis Blake, who, owing to his bad luck, seemed fated never to be a
soldier, thought and talked of nothing else. It was thanks to him that
Rose knew so much about the great Napoleonic campaigns, and was so well
"up" in the Indian Mutiny.

And now, on this 4th of August, 1914, Jervis Blake sat down by Rose
Otway, and began tracing imaginary patterns on the grass with his stick.

"I'm not going to tell any one else, but there's something I want to
tell you." He spoke in a rather hard, set voice, and he did not look up,
as he spoke, at the girl by his side.

"Yes," she said. "Yes, Jervis? What is it?" There was something very
kind, truly sympathetic, in her accents.

"I'm going to enlist."

Rose Otway was startled--startled and sorry.

"Oh, no, you mustn't do that!"

"I've always thought I should _like_ to do it, if--if I failed this last
time. But of course I knew it was out of the question--because of my
father. But now--everything's different! Even father will see that I
have no other course open to me."

"I--I don't understand what you mean,"