Page:Cornelia Meigs--The island of Appledore.djvu/194

174 and earnest talk with his guest in the garden.

“There’s a use for old men after all, if they just know something,” he said mysteriously to  Billy that evening, and had seemed so cheered  that he could even speak of potato-planting  without bitterness.

Billy went into the hotel’s telephone booth and sent the message, spelling out each word  laboriously, since the girl operator at the other end was not used to taking code messages and  seemed much annoyed at the lack of meaning.

“I can’t waste my time sending such nonsense,” was her first tart comment, and it required much persuasion to make her believe that all was as it should be.

When he had finished with Captain Saulsby’s message, he proceeded to send another on his own account. It was a cablegram to his father, asking if he would give his consent, should Billy wish to enlist in the Navy.

“If there is going to be a real war I might want to go in by and by,” he reflected. “It will take two months to get a letter answered,  so I may as well ask this way. I’m afraid he won’t say yes. If I were eighteen I wouldn’t have to ask him. But once it is done I know he and mother wouldn’t object.”