“The devil you did!” from Tom, indignantly.

She went on unruffled:—­“He said he’d been left a fortune, and wanted to share it with his godson.  How much did he send?  D’you remember?” She looked round.

“Five pounds!” said Dolly.

“I wish I was his godson,” said Tom.

“And then,” went on Dolly, in her precise way, “the War came, and nothing more happened till suddenly he wrote again to Timmy from Egypt, and then began the presents.  I wonder if we ought to have thanked him for them?  After all, we don’t know that they came from him.  The only present we know came from him was Flick.”

“And a damned silly present, too!” observed Jack, drily.

“Do you think he’s still in love with Betty?” asked Rosamund.

“Of course he’s not.  If he was, he would have written to her, not to Timmy.  Nine years is a long time in a man’s life,” observed Jack sententiously.

“My hat! yes!” exclaimed Tom.  “Poor Betty!”

Jack got up, and made a movement as if he were thinking of going out through the window into the garden.  So Timmy, with a swift, sinuous movement, withdrew from the curtain, and edging up against the outside wall of the house, walked unobtrusively back into the drawing-room.

When his mother—­who had gone out to find something for Betty to take into the village—­came back, she was pleased and surprised to find her little son working away as if for dear life.

CHAPTER V

Close on eight that same evening, Timmy Tosswill stood by the open centre window of the long drawing-room, hands duly washed, and his generally short, rough, untidy hair well brushed, whistling softly to himself.

He was longing intensely for his godfather’s arrival, and it seemed such a long time off to Friday.  A photograph of Radmore, in uniform, sent him at his own request two years ago, was the boy’s most precious personal possession.  Timmy was a careful, almost uncannily thrifty child, with quite a lot of money in the Savings Bank, but he had taken out 10/- in order to buy a frame for the photograph, and it rested, alone in its glory, on the top of the chest of drawers that stood opposite his bed.

There had been a time when Timmy had hoped that he would grow up to look like his godfather, but now he was aware that this hope would never be fulfilled, for Radmore, in this photograph, at any rate, had a strongly-featured, handsome face, very unlike what his mother had once called “Timmy’s wizened little phiz.”

It seemed strange to care for a person you had never seen since you were a tiny child—­but there it was!  To Timmy everything that touched his godfather was of far greater moment than he would have admitted to anyone.  Radmore was his secret hero; and now, to-night, he asked himself painfully, why had his hero left off loving Betty?  The story he had overheard this afternoon had deeply impressed him.  For the first time he began to dimly apprehend the strange and piteous tangle we call life.