Captain Hewes in tow showed himself a captured man.  “I didn’t know that American women could ride until Miss Gray showed me—­today.  It was rippin’.”

Drusilla laughed.  “It is worth more than the ride to have you say ‘rippin’’ like that.”

“She makes fun of me,” the Captain complained; “some day I shall take her over to England and show her how our gentle maidens look up to me.”

“Your gentle maidens,” Drusilla stated, “are driving ambulances or making munitions.  When the Tommies come marching home again they will find comrades, not clinging vines.”

“And they’ll jolly well like it,” said the big Englishman; “a man wants a woman who understands—­”

This was law and gospel to Derry.  “Of course.  Jean, dear, may I tell Drusilla?”

“As if you had to tell me,” Drusilla scoffed; “it is written all over you.”

“Is it?” Derry marvelled.

“It is.  The whole room is lighted up with it.  You are a lucky man, Derry,”—­for a moment her bright eyes were shadowed—­“and Jean is a lucky girl.”  She leaned down and kissed the woman that Derry loved.  “Oh, you Babes in the Wood—­”

“By Jove,” the Captain ejaculated, much taken by the little scene, “do you mean that they are going to be married?”

“Rather,” Drusilla mocked him.  “But don’t shout it from the housetops.  Derry is a public personage, and it might get in the papers.”

“It is not to get in the papers yet,” Derry said.  “Dr. McKenzie won’t let me tell Dad—­he’s too ill—­but we told you because you are my good friend, Drusilla.”

She might have been more than that, but he did not know it.  When he went away with Jean, she looked after him wistfully.

“Good-bye, little Galahad,” she said.

The Captain stared.  “Oh, I say, do you call him that?”

She nodded.

“He’s a knight in shining armor—­”

“I can’t understand why he’s not fightin’.”

“Nobody understands.  There’s something back of it, and meantime people are calling him a coward—­”

“Doesn’t look like a slacker.”

“He isn’t.  I have sometimes thought,” said wise Drusilla, “that it might be his father.  He’s a gay old bird, and Derry has to jack him up.”

“Drink?”

“Yes.  They say that Derry has followed him night after night—­getting him home if he could; if not, staying with him.”

“Hard lines—­”

“And yet he is asking little Jean to marry him.  I wonder if she will keep step with him.”

“Why shouldn’t she?”

“Because Derry is going to travel far and fast in the next few months,” Drusilla prophesied.

Her face settled into tired lines.  For the first time the Captain saw her divorced from her radiance.  He set himself to cheer her.

“What is troubling you, dear woman?”

She was very frank, and she told him the truth.  “I should have been glad to keep step with him myself.”