“You are very observant,” he remarked laconically.
“I am also curious,” she laughed, “as you are about to discover. Tell me why you are so interested in Ronnie Granet? You hadn’t met him before, had you?”
Almost for the first time he turned and looked directly at his neighbour. She was a woman whose fair hair was turning grey, well-dressed, sprightly, agreeable. She had a humorous mouth and an understanding face.
“Captain Granet was a stranger to me,” he assented. “One is naturally interested in soldiers, however.”
“You must have met thousands like him,” she remarked,--“good-looking, very British, keen sportsman, lots of pluck, just a little careless, hating to talk about himself and serious things. I have known him since he was a boy.”
Major Thomson continued to be gravely interested.
“Granet!” he said to himself thoughtfully, “Do I know any of his people, I wonder?”
“You know some of his connections, of course,” Mrs. Cunningham replied briskly. “Sir Alfred Anselman, for instance, his uncle.”
“They are both dead. There is a large family place in Warwickshire, and a chateau, just now, I am afraid, in the hands of the Germans. It was somewhere quite close to the frontier. Lady Granet was an Alsatian. He was to have gone out with the polo team, you know, to America, but broke a rib just as they were making the selection. He played cricket for Middlesex once or twice, too and he was Captain of Oxford the year that they did so well.”
“An Admirable Crichton,” Major Thomson murmured.
“In sport, at any rate,” his neighbour assented. “He has always been one of the most popular young men about town, but of course the women will spoil him now.”
“Is it my fancy,” he asked, “or was he not reported a prisoner?”
“He was missing twice, once for over a week,” Mrs. Cunningham replied. “There are all sorts of stories as to how he got back to the lines. A perfect young dare-devil, I should think. I must talk to Mr. Daniell for a few minutes or he will never publish my reminiscences.”
She leaned towards her neighbour on the other side and Major Thomson was able to resume the role of attentive observer, a role which seemed somehow his by destiny. He listened without apparent interest to the conversation between Geraldine Conyers and the young man whom they had been discussing.