Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/45

 last farthing, I gather. And Tollemache makin’ no end of a donkey of himself over that chorus girl with the unlikely hair—can’t think of her name—Gwen—something or other, you know. And now Hector gone to the jolly old bow-wows. Frightfully hard lines on the old Lord-bless-me, what?”

Thus the beginning; and, two days later. Hector Wade’s letter to the War Office asking permission to resign his commission crossed a letter from his colonel, Sir Samuel Greatorex, asking him to send in his resignation.

Late that afternoon he left the house of his ancestors and walked out on the Sussex Downs. Dealle Village lay before him, like a snug, gray nest in the yellow hollow, with the dying sun blazing orange high-lights and purple shadows on cottage face and limestone path and hatch. Then he turned east, to the little garden the other side of the dairy which had been his dead mother’s favorite place. It was a mass of roses, creepers as well as bushes scrambling and growing in their own strong-willed fashion, clothing stones with hearts of deep ruby, building arches of glowing pink and tea yellow against the dark blue sky, lifting shy, single, dewy heads in hushed corners.

Slightly self-conscious, slightly ashamed of the action he picked a gloire-de-Dijon bud and put it in his button hole.

Then he turned down the blue gravel path toward the railway station at Dealle-Plumpton Crossings, in his right hand a small kit bag that held the few belongings, just simple necessaries, he was taking with him.