Free Ever After by Elswyth Thane

could we?”
    “Well, the place has got a bathroom!” Bracken grinned. “I must be able to get back and forth to Town, of course. Farthingale would have to be your show during the week, if we took it. You and Aunt Sue would have to run it.”
    “It would be fun,” said Virginia without hesitation. “We could have people down to stay. After all those lovely house-parties we’ve gone to, we could have house-parties of our own!”
    Sue looked from one to the other helplessly. House-parties. Without Eden there to tell her what to do.
    When Major Forbes-Carpenter came to dine with them he was not, to Virginia’s disappointment, wearing the uniform of an officer of Kitchener’s Egyptian Army, sword, head-dress, boots, spurs, and decorations. Like any British officer on leave, he was in mufti,and at the moment conventional black and white evening dress. But the Major’s evening dress had been cut by the best tailor in Savile Row and was worn with a cavalry air; and he walked, of necessity, with a cane which could not disguise a most interesting limp.
    Virginia and Sue had spent some time reading up on the Nile campaign in back numbers of the illustrated papers, assimilating as they went that General Kitchener, Sirdar or Commander-in-Chief of the Egytian Army, had turned it into an excellent fighting force under British officers. The battle of Firket, they learned, was considered a triumph of strategy. “Rough and difficult was the road by which the river force advanced that dark night,” they read, “so dark that foothold among the boulders had to be felt for. Orders were given in whispers, no talking in the ranks, no smoking—thus did Hunter’s division advance upon the doomed and sleeping village. Meanwhile Murdoch, commanding the flank attack, made his detour, timing himself to strike when Hunter struck. The flanking column, while still on the desert heights, grew apprehensive that they would be late for the battle and covered the last four miles at a gallop. With the first ray of dawn the blow fell. Torn by the fire of the infantry, by shrapnel, and by the hail of Maxim bullets, the surprised Dervishes made a good fight of it as they always do, but what remained of them was overwhelmed and swept away like chaff.”
    Bracken said captiously that it was bad dispatch-writing, much too flowery. But he had no fault to find with their Major Forbes-Carpenter and his brigade of Soudanese Lancers. “The senior officer was twice wounded,” they read, “first by the butt of a rifle which had been fired at him without effect while he was pursuing an Emir, and afterwards by a spear in the upper leg. The effective work done by his brigade in twice breaking through the Dervishes as they were gathering for a charge was of the greatest value.”
    Sue and Virginia regarded their guest with round-eyed respect when he arrived at Claridge’s. He was a slender man, not as young as he had been, not as tall as Bracken, square-shouldered, lean-hippe d, with a moustache more closely clipped than was the Mayfair fashion. In spite of his long illness from wounds, he was tanned bronze by the Egyptian sun. His hair was grizzled round the ears, and his direct grey eyes were hooded like an eagle’s, the full upper lid making a straight line across the iris, which gave him the look of frowning severity until he smiled. He was known affectionately to his troops as Carpers, because of his martinet ways—“Button up, chaps, Old Carpers is coming!” the word would run ahead of him through the camp. But he was as watchful of their comfort and their honour as a mother, they would tell you, and the two of themwho had risked their lives at Firket to get him out from under his dead horse and bring him back under fire to their own lines could have been matched a dozen times over and to spare.
    Virginia of course made eyes at him during dinner, and he gave her his ready smile which showed his small, even teeth, and answered her carefully boned-up