“I shouldn’t take him exactly.  If he was my father-in-law”—­he made a little grimace—­“I suppose I could pension him off somewhere, or board him out, like an old horse.  One couldn’t have him round.”

“H’m!  I dare say that would do—­but I doubt it.  If you’d ever been a daughter you might feel that you couldn’t dispose of a poor, old, broken-down father quite so easily.  After all, he’s not a horse.  You might more or less forsake him when all was going well, and yet want to stick to him through thick and thin if he came a cropper.  Look at me!  I go off and leave my poor old dad for a year and more at a time—­because he’s a saint; but if he wasn’t—­especially if he’d got into any such scrape as Cousin Henry’s—­which isn’t thinkable—­but if he did—­I’d never leave him again.  That’s my temperament.  It’s every girl’s temperament.  It’s Olivia’s.  But all that is neither here nor there.  If she married you, her whole life would be given up to trying to make you blend with a set of circumstances you couldn’t possibly blend with.  It would be worse than singing one tune to an orchestra playing another.  She’d go mad with the attempt.”

“Possibly; except for one factor which you’ve overlooked.”

“Oh, love!  Yes, yes.  I thought you’d say that.”  Drusilla tossed her hands impatiently.  “Love will do a lot, but it won’t do everything.  You can’t count on it to work miracles in a sophisticated company like the Sussex Rangers.  They’ve passed the age of faith for that sort of thing.”

“I don’t see,” he said, speaking very slowly, “that the Rangers need be altogether taken into consideration.”

She looked at him fixedly.  “Do you mean that you’d—­send in your papers?”

“Only in the sense that if my wife wasn’t happy in the Service we could get out of it.”

“Then you’re really so much in love that you’d be willing to throw up everything on account of it?” There was some incredulity in her tone, to which, however, he offered no objection.

“Willing or unwilling isn’t to the point.  Surely you see that as far as public opinion goes I’m dished either way.  The more I think of it the plainer it becomes.  If I marry Olivia I let myself in for connection with a low-down scandal; if I don’t, then they’ll say I left her in the lurch.  As for the effect on any possible promotion there might be in store for me, it would be six of one and half a dozen of the other.  If I married her, and there was something good to be had, and old Bannockburn, let us say, was at the Horse Guards, then Lady Ban wouldn’t have Olivia; and if I didn’t marry her, and there was the same situation with old Englemere in command, then he wouldn’t have me.  There it is in a nutshell—­simply nothing to choose.”

They proceeded to stroll aimlessly up and down the lawn.

“I can quite see how it looks from your point of view—­” she began.

“No, you can’t,” he interrupted, sharply, “because you leave out the fact that I am—­I don’t mind saying it—­that is, to you—­you’ve been such a good pal to me!—­I shall never forget it!—­but I am—­head over heels—­desperately—­in love.”