He feared it was not bright, and called to Philip for the latest.

‘Nothing that you have not had already in the newspapers,’ Philip replied, distinctly from afar, but very bluntly, as through a trumpet.

Miss Mattock was attentive.  She had a look as good as handsome when she kindled.

The captain persevered to draw his cousin out.

‘Your chief has his orders?’

‘There’s a rumour to that effect.’

‘The fellow’s training for diplomacy,’ Con groaned.

Philip spoke to Miss Mattock:  he was questioned and he answered, and answered dead as a newspaper telegraphic paragraph, presenting simply the corpse of the fact, and there an end.  He was a rival of Arthur Adister for military brevity.

‘Your nephew is quite the diplomatist,’ said Mrs. Dyke, admiring Philip’s head.

’Cousin, ma’am.  Nephews I might drive to any market to make the most of them.  Cousins pretend they’re better than pigs, and diverge bounding from the road at the hint of the stick.  You can’t get them to grunt more than is exactly agreeable to them.’

‘My belief is that if our cause is just our flag will triumph,’ Miss Grace Barrow, Jane Mattock’s fellow-worker and particular friend, observed to Dr. Forbery.

’You may be enjoying an original blessing that we in Ireland missed in the cradle,’ said he.

She emphasised:  ‘I speak of the just cause; it must succeed.’

‘The stainless flag’ll be in the ascendant in the long run,’ he assented.

‘Is it the flag of Great Britain you’re speaking of, Forbery?’ the captain inquired.

‘There’s a harp or two in it,’ he responded pacifically.

Mrs. Dyke was not pleased with the tone.  ‘And never will be out of it!’ she thumped her interjection.

’Or where ‘s your music?’ said the captain, twinkling for an adversary among the males, too distant or too dull to distinguish a note of challenge.  ’You’d be having to mount your drum and fife in their places, ma’am.’

She saw no fear of the necessity.

‘But the fife’s a pretty instrument,’ he suggested, and with a candour that seduced the unwary lady to think dubiously whether she quite liked the fife.  Miss Barrow pronounced it cheerful.

‘Oh, and martial!’ he exclaimed, happy to have caught Rockney’s deliberate gaze.  ’The effect of it, I’m told in the provinces is astonishing for promoting enlistment.  Hear it any morning in your London parks, at the head of a marching regiment of your giant foot-Guards.  Three bangs of the drum, like the famous mountain, and the fife announces himself to be born, and they follow him, left leg and right leg and bearskin.  And what if he’s a small one and a trifle squeaky; so ’s a prince when the attendant dignitaries receive him submissively and hear him informing the nation of his advent.  It ’s the idea that ‘s grand.’

‘The idea is everything in military affairs,’ a solemn dupe, a Mr. Rumford, partly bald, of benevolent aspect, and looking more copious than his flow, observed to the lady beside him.  ‘The flag is only an idea.’