While he was speaking he was aware all the time of a tall, blue-eyed youth who stood leaning against a post with a kind of nonchalant grace.  The boy’s pose had been indolent but his eyes had been wide awake, earnest, responsive.  Little by little the captain found himself talking directly to the lad.  What he was saying might be over the heads of some of them but not this chap’s.  He got you as the Americans say.  He had the vision, would go wherever the speaker could take him.  One saw that.

Afterwards the boy had sought out the recruiter to ask if by any chance he knew a girl named Elinor Ruth Farringdon.  It had been rather a tremendous moment for both of them.  Each had plenty to say that the other wanted to hear.  But the full story had to wait.  Corporal Holiday couldn’t run around loose even talking to a distinguished British officer.  There would have to be special dispensation for that and special dispensations take time in an army world.  It would be forthcoming however—­to-morrow.

In the meantime Geoffrey Annersley had heard enough to want to know a great deal more and thought he might as well make some inquiries on his own.  He wanted to find out who these American Holidays were, one of whom had apparently saved his cousin Elinor’s life and all of whom had, one concluded, been amazingly kind to her though the blue-eyed boy had gracefully made light of that side of the thing in the brief synopsis of events he had had time to give to the Englishman.  The captain had taken a fancy to the narrator and was not averse to beginning his investigation as to the Holiday family with the young corporal himself.

Accordingly he tackled the boy’s commanding officer, a young colonel with whom he chanced to be dining.  The colonel was willing to talk and Geoffrey Annersley discovered that young Holiday was rather by way of being a top-notcher.  He had enlisted as a private only a short time ago but had been shot speedily into his corporalship.  Time pressed.  Officers were needed.  The boy was officer stuff.  He wouldn’t stay a corporal.  If all went well he would go over as a sergeant.

“We put him through though, just at first handled him rather nasty,” the colonel admitted with a reminiscent twinkle.  “We do put the Americans through somehow, though it isn’t that we have any grudge against ’em.  We haven’t.  We like ’em—­most of ’em and we have to admit it’s rather decent of them to be here at all when they don’t have to.  All the same we give ’em an extra twist of the discipline crank on general principles just to see what they are made of.  We found out mighty quick with this youngster.  He took it all and came back for more with a ‘sir,’ and a salute and a devilish debonair, you-can’t-down-me kind of grin that would have disarmed a Turk.”

“He doesn’t look precisely meek to me,” Annersley had said remembering the answering flash he had caught in those blue eyes when he was begging the boys to get in an extra lick against the Huns for his sake.