"Yes, I know," owned up Rhoda Polly, who scorned concealment. "Well, what have you to tell me now that you are here? I let you go just now and unbosom yourself to the Paternal without complaining. That was only playing the game, but certainly you owe it to me to stand and deliver as soon as you got clear."
"Well, and here I am, Rhoda Polly--which will you have--plain narrative--question and answer--the Socratic method, or a judicious mixture of the two?"
I knew the inquiry would resolve itself into the latter. Rhoda Polly went on with the potting of her Alan Richardson, biting her under lip at critical points, but ever and anon flashing a pertinent query at me over the boxes of mould without once raising her head.
With the exception of my talks with Jeanne and the harmless little philandering we had indulged in to pass the time, I confided the whole of my day's adventures to Rhoda Polly. I told her also of the permission that her father had given that Hugh should go north and join the new armies with me.
Then at last Rhoda Polly did lift her eyes with a vividness of reproach in them.
"You cannot find enough to do here?" she said. "You trust these men at the works? I tell you they are not to be trusted. I know them better than either you or my father, I have heard their women-folk talking, and I know what they mean to do."
"I know what they _say_ they mean to do," I retorted. "I also have heard them in their cups, but it is only folly and emptiness."
"Do not be too sure," she said, patting the flowerpot round the edges and squinting down at it as if it were a work of art symmetrically finished. "I warn you we may need you here sooner than you think, and then Gaston Cremieux may not be so friendly as he is to-day."
I asked her why, but she only bent more over her work and shook her head. It had been clear to me from Cremieux's questions that he was in love with Rhoda Polly, and now from Rhoda Polly's prophecy of his future unfriendliness that she had made up her mind to reject him. But, in the meantime, it was my clear duty to go on and do what I could in the army.
We could not hope to defeat the Germans, but at least every additional man in the ranks added to the chance of withstanding them. If we could only hold them at bay till the politicians did their work, all this peaceful Southland would be spared the horrors of war and the more wearing pains of occupation and pillage.