“A DAINTY COSY-COMFORT FOR YOUR BOY IN THE TRENCHES,”
it described how to make a pair of wool-work slippers, commencing with
“Get a yard of Penelope canvas.”
Then Mrs. Jones was uneasy about her step-daughter, Kathleen, who was
in service near Chepstow. “The food’s all right; but the lady isn’t
what I call a good wife—never thinks of brushing her husband’s best
clothes and putting them away for him of a Monday morning, and yet I’ve
never once missed doing that since I married Jones. And I assure you,
when I married him, he hadn’t a darned sock to his back. I’m sorry
Kathleen hasn’t a better example before her, for she’s inclined to be
flighty. She’s got a week’s holiday next month, and nothing will do
but she must go and visit her cousin, who is working at munitions in
Cardiff. I say to her, ‘Cardiff’s a nasty noisy place; why don’t you
go and visit your Aunt Lizzie at Penglyn, she’s so worried she can
hardly hold her head up some days, and cries from morning till night;
and would be thankful to have someone to talk things over with; or your
father’s Cousin Ann at Caerleon, they’ve had a sight of trouble there,
and never see a soul nor go out of the house from week end to week end;
they’d love to have you.’ But no, it’s Cardiff she wants,” and Mrs.
Jones sighed at the unaccountable taste of one-and-twenty!
“Ah, no one knows what an anxiety that girl’s been to me,” went on the
buxom, good-natured woman, who in reality never makes a trouble of
anything, and has been a real mother to Kathleen. “I sometimes wonder
why I married her father! But there, I will say it looks better on your
tombstone to have ‘The beloved wife of,’ rather than plain Martha
Miggins (as I was), all unbelongst to no one, as it were.”
Don’t imagine for a moment that this implied matrimonial divergence
on the part of Mr. and Mrs. Jones, for a more contented couple you
couldn’t find in the village. It is merely the polite way we have,
locally, of discounting our blessings, lest we should seem to be
flaunting our happiness in the face of less fortunate people.
“By the way,” she said, as we were going out of the door, “have you
heard who it was walked around your place the other night? Well, now,
to think I should have forgotten to mention it, but it was no one,
after all, but the policeman! My husband was over to the police-station
this morning about that mare we’ve lost, and he mentioned it; and, sure
enough, the policeman had got it down in his book that he crossed the
hill by our road that night, and had looked over your house.”
And then I remembered that there was a police-station in the next
village, that did duty for a very wide area of miles. And it was usual
for the policeman to patrol from one village to another, by various
routes, last thing at night, ascertaining if the inhabitants’ doors _en
route_ were all duly locked. We were much relieved in our minds, and
started for home discussing the situation, when Virginia suddenly said—
“Surely that is our dog barking further along the lane?”
We paused to listen.
“Yes, it is,” I said in surprise. “Whatever can he be doing out here?”
and we hurried on; for the dog is a valuable one, and is never let out
without an escort. A turn in the lane brought us face to face with a
tall, familiar masculine figure.
“Why, wherever have you come from?” I exclaimed.
“I’ve just made my escape from the tame lunatic who seems to be in
charge of the cottage,” said the Head of Affairs cheerfully, as he
relieved Ursula of the quart of milk. “And I would suggest, my dear,
that the next time you propose to turn your house into a sanatorium for
‘Mentally Deficients,’ you might give your family due notice. A shock
like that isn’t good for one after climbing such a hill.”
* * * * *
And he might not have been particularly mollified when, later in the
evening, Eileen offered the following apology:—
“I’m very sorry, sir, that I kept you waiting outside all that time in
the cold; only how was I to know you were a gentleman, sir, when you
looked so _exactly_ like a burglar?”
But, fortunately, in the interval he had discovered, in his
dressing-room, a new-but-forgotten pair of boots, and a
not-at-all-bad-considering-it’s-war-time overcoat; and, naturally, he
was inclined to take a roseate view of life.