I fear we may have come at an awkward
hour, but Captain Courtier's time is unfortunately limited."

Mrs. Duveen repeated the curtsey. "Will it please you to step in, sirs,"
she said, her eyes fixed upon Don's face in a sort of eager scrutiny.
"It is surely kind of you to come, sir"--to Don.

They entered a small living room, stuffy because of the
characteristically closed windows, but marked by a neatness of its
appointments for which the gipsy appearance of Mrs. Duveen had not
prepared them. There were several unframed drawings in pastel and
water-colour, of birds and animals, upon the walls, and above the little
mantelshelf hung a gleaming German helmet, surmounted by a golden eagle.
On the mantelshelf itself were fuses, bombs and shell-cases, a china
clock under a glass dome, and a cabinet photograph of a handsome man in
the uniform of a sergeant of Irish Guards. Before the clock, and resting
against it so as to occupy the place of honour, was a silver cigarette
case.

Don's eyes, as his gaze fell on this last ornament, grew unaccountably
misty, and he turned aside, staring out of the low window. Mrs. Duveen,
who throughout the time that she had been placing chairs for her
visitors (first dusting the seats with her apron) had watched the
captain constantly, at the same moment burst into tears.

"God bless you for coming, sir," she sobbed. "Michael loved the ground
you walked on, and he'd have been a happy man to-day to have seen you
here in his own house."

Don made no reply, continuing to stare out of the window, and Mrs.
Duveen cried, silently now. Presently Paul caught his friend's eye and
mutely conveying warning of his intention, rose.

"Your grief does you honour, Mrs. Duveen," he said. "Your husband was
one I should have been proud to call my friend, and I envy Captain
Courtier the memory of such a comrade. There are confidences upon which
it is not proper that I should intrude; therefore, with your permission,
I am going to admire your charming garden until you wish me to rejoin
you."

Bareheaded, he stepped out through the porch and on to the trim lawn,
noting in passing that the home-made bookshelf beside the door bore
copies of Shakespeare, Homer, Horace and other volumes rarely found in a
workman's abode. Lempriere's _Classical Dictionary_ was there, and
Kipling's _Jungle Book_, Darwin's _Origin of Species_, and Selous'
_Romance of Insect Life_. Assuredly, Sergeant Duveen had been a strange
man.