Mother had called.
"It is an honour to know the Gilpins," he assured me.
I knew that. I knew they were frightfully rich and aristocratic, and
that half the officers were crazy about Grace Gilpin. All the most
attractive ones used to live up at Brennon House playing tennis and
boating on the artificial lake in the grounds; and they used to give
weekly dances and have a coon orchestra from London, and they had
amateur theatricals and no end of fun.
Grace Gilpin had always seemed sort of unreal to me, like the princess
in a fairy story. I had never seen her.
"Please! Please!" I protested. "This is madness!"
"It is delicious madness," he said softly.
In the moonlight I could see the heavy, colourless heads of flowers; the
scent of them, sweet and strange and all different, seemed to wave over
us for a minute as we passed.
"They'll be on the veranda," he said. "We'll go round."
"You're not going in!" I said desperately.
He stopped and looked down at me.
"In six weeks I go to the front with my draft," he said. "And I hope to
be killed. To-night has placed us both in the most extraordinary
position. It's practically impossible for us, at the moment, to
extricate ourselves. It just happens that fate has played into my hands
in the rummiest way. I don't want to extricate myself. Six weeks is a
very short time. I'm awfully rich. I'll give you a topping time, a
time you'll remember all your life--if you won't try to extricate
yourself for six weeks."
"Pretend to be engaged to you?"
"Why not? You've no one else in view at the moment. Everyone will envy
you, and say sweet things to your face and nasty things behind your
back. If you won't--I leave you to explain things to your people and
the regiment and the wives of the regiment."
"I can't!"
"Precisely! Then why worry? What does our engagement demand of us?
Civility and excessive courtesy in our bearing towards each other before
people. And please"--he caught his breath sharply--"when we are alone
we will have no horrible hypocrisy, no feminine flim-flam, no playing up
and pretty lies and coquetries and deceits; nothing but the plain
unvarnished truth and bare honesty; as we have no interest in each
other, we can at least pay each other the compliment of behaving as if
we were two men."
"But," I began, dazed. He absolutely carries you off your feet.
"Come on," he said curtly.
We went through a sort of old-fashioned honeysuckle and jasmine pergola
and came opposite a broad stoep, all hung with baskets of pink geraniums
and ferns and pink Japanese lanterns with electric lights inside, and
white wicker armchairs and big pink silk cushions and white tables.
It was just like a theatrical scene.
There was an awfully handsome middle-aged woman sitting at a table
playing bridge with three elderly men, and someone inside the inner room
was playing "Iolanthe."