“I got your telegram, father, and here I am.”

Mr. Hazlewood turned back from the window with a smile upon his face.

“It is good of you, Richard.  I wanted you to-day.”

A very genuine affection existed between these two, dissimilar as they were in physique and mind.  Dick Hazlewood was at this time thirty-four years old, an officer of hard work and distinction, one of the younger men to whom the generals look to provide the brains in the next great war.  He had the religion of his type.  To keep physically fit for the hardest campaigning and mentally fit for the highest problems of modern strategy and to boast about neither the one qualification nor the other—­these were the articles of his creed.  In appearance he was a little younger than his years, lithe, long in the leg, with a thin brown face and grey eyes which twinkled with humour.  Harold Hazlewood was intensely proud of him, though he professed to detest his profession.  And no doubt he found at times that the mere healthful, well-groomed look of his son was irritatingly conventional.  What was quite wholesome could never be quite right in the older man’s philosophy.  To Dick, on the other hand, his father was an intense enjoyment.  Here was a lovable innocent with the most delightful illusion that he understood the world.  Dick would draw out his father by the hour, but, as he put it, he wouldn’t let the old boy down.  He stopped his chaff before it could begin to hurt.

“Well, I am here,” he said.  “What scrape have you got into now?”

“I am in no scrape, Richard.  I don’t get into scrapes,” replied his father.  He shifted from one foot to the other uneasily.  “I was wondering, Richard—­you have been away all this last year, haven’t you?—­I was wondering whether you could give me any of your summer.”

Dick looked at his father.  What in the world was the old boy up to now? he asked himself.

“Of course I can.  I shall get my leave in a day or two.  I thought of playing some polo here and there.  There are a few matches arranged.  Then no doubt—­” He broke off.  “But look here, sir!  You didn’t send me an urgent telegram merely to ask me that.”

“No, Richard, no.”  Everybody else called his son Dick, but Harold Hazlewood never.  He was Richard.  From Richard you might expect much, the awakening of a higher nature, a devotion to the regeneration of the world, humanitarianism, even the cult of all the “antis.”  From Dick you could expect nothing but health and cleanliness and robustious conventionality.  Therefore Richard Captain Hazlewood of the Coldstream and the Staff Corps remained.  “No, there was something else.”

Mr. Hazlewood took his son by the arm and led him into the bay window.  He pointed across the field to the thatched cottage.

“You know who lives there?”

“No.”

“Mrs. Ballantyne.”

Dick put his head on one side and whistled softly.  He knew the general tenor of that cause celebre.