THE GIRLS
AT HIS BILLET

THE GIRLS AT HIS BILLET

CHAPTER I

THE HEN-PARTY

Imagine three really pretty girls like ourselves—and then this hole of a place that we live in!

Oh, dear! Why on earth did we have parents who disapproved of early marriages?

They married early enough themselves, goodness knows. Father was twenty-one, and had only just taken on the big yacht-building business in this place. Mother was seventeen. A whole year younger than I am now, if you please. (I am what they called at school "a precocious eighteen.") Just because I've read a lot, and thought a good deal about what I've read. But what price Mother's precocity? which really seemed to be a distinct success. I know she and our good-looking Dad were awfully fond of each other, and awfully happy for the ten years of their married life. So why on earth did they make that absurd stipulation in their will?

That has been at the root of all our troubles!

Why did they say that Aunt Victoria (Mrs. Verdeley) was to take charge of their three daughters (that's us) "until they arrived at the age of twenty-five, in order that the said daughters may not plunge recklessly into the dangers of a too early marriage"?

Since this was what they wished (for Evelyn, Nancy and me to remain old maids until we are twenty-five) they've certainly done the right thing in sending us to live here.

Let me try to describe the sweet spot.

Imagine a village, a God-forsaken village on the bleakest part of the East Coast of England.

Imagine mud flats and wind-swept marshlands, and a sea that crawls out over miles and miles of shore that looks like nothing on earth but sheets and sheets of wet brown paper.

Imagine a street or so of small, red-brick houses. Imagine several boat-building yards, throw in a village green, a post-office, a church, a few better houses, and a railway station, where the trains go twice daily as far as "Nowhere," which is the junction to this place. There you have the delightful part of the world in which we live!

Its name?—well, perhaps the Censor might not like me to tell you its name. So I shall call it "Mud Flats," which is certainly descriptive enough of it.

And now imagine a house that's like a bell without a clapper. In other words, a house full of women, without any sort of a man at all about it. Unless you count Penny, our gardener, who walks lame with rheumatism and who's as deaf as a post, and at least 156 years of age. Poor dear, he's so old that he thought it would stand in his way of getting a job Even Here, so he always wears (over what I suppose is a pink Easter-egg of a head) a bushy raven wig that a baby could see through. He told me it had cost him no end of his savings to buy. Pathetic, isn't it?

A tragedy of old age, my dears. But no more pathetic than our own, which is a tragedy of youth!

To go back to it:

Imagine a life where nothing, absolutely nothing ever happens!

Imagine getting up in the morning and looking out of the window at the brown, flat shore and at the distant sea, with a few fishing-sails dotted about on it. Imagine dressing for the day in country clothes that it doesn't matter what they looked like exactly, considering that nobody ever looked at one, or saw whether one was plain or pretty, dowdy or smart. Imagine coming down to breakfast, always the same breakfast—porridge, fish (for Aunt Victoria won't have bacon in the place), toast, marmalade, and tea. We never have coffee. It is too much trouble to make for just a household of women. That's the keynote of our lives!

And now imagine looking round the table and seeing, morning after morning, the same faces. One old one, that's Aunt Victoria, and two young ones, my sisters, Evelyn (aged twenty-two) and Nancy, who is going to be twenty-one next month.

Also, if I craned my neck a little to look into the gilt-framed mirror over the mantelpiece, I could see a third young face—my own. Really, I sometimes get as tired of that view as of the view out of the windows.

Nancy and I often say what a mercy it would be if, one morning, one could look in the glass and suddenly see a perfectly different face staring at one! The face of quite another girl: dark instead of fair, say. (For all of us are sickeningly fair! I get so tired of it sometimes: tired of the gold and blue and pink and white colouring.)

Or, better still, if the face of one of us suddenly turned into the face of a young man with a nice, firm, jutting-out chin, and a toothbrush moustache! Really, it would be a comfort! Anything for a change, in fact.

Even a change for the worse! Not that there could be anything worse than this stage of absolute deadly monotony. For we never catch a glimpse of the world outside, even though it's no more than a two and a half hours' journey up to London. Aunt Victoria never lets us go. Also she is very, very "difficult" about when we get invitations to stay from girls we were with at school. It would be awful if we went and actually SAW anything of Modern Life! We can only read in the papers about what is going on. And isn't that a flavourless way of getting to know what's on at the theatres, and what sized hats people are wearing?

Even the war, when it came, seemed to have nothing to do with Mud Flats. For months and months after everywhere else was seething with excitement and military, nobody here seemed to think of going to join the Colours. The few young men in the place seemed only busy fishing, or whistling about the boat-building yards as usual. No khaki here—except in the colour of the beastly landscape! No drilling, no route-marching, no doings of any kind!

As I said to the girls: "I don't believe it would make the slightest difference to this hole even if the Germans did land: even if the Kaiser did go into residence at Buckingham Palace and ran that beastly Spread-eagle of his up in place of the Union Jack! Even that couldn't make it any more absolutely mouldy than it is now!"

So you see the state of mind we were in up to about a fortnight ago.

And now perhaps you will have some idea of what the inhabitants of our house (the "Moated Grange" we call it) felt like when the Great News came to Mud Flats.

* * * * * * * *

When I say the "inhabitants," I mean, of course, we three girls, Evelyn, Nancy and me. You couldn't expect any feelings in Aunt Victoria, who is sixty-two, and has a Roman nose, and a figure like a padded armchair. Unless you count feelings about mud on the carpet, and scratches on the mahogany, and the wear and tear of the hearthrug, and her new "Patience" that the Doctor's old-maid sister has just taught her, and so on.

But about the Great News!

I've been chattering on so about other things that I've forgotten to put that first, as I should. It's this kind of thing that has given me my nickname of "Rattle." Everybody calls me that who knows me at all, absolutely ignoring the fact that I have got a most pompous name of my own, and that I have had my hair up for six weary months (ever since I came back from school to drag out an existence in this swamp!). You could only call it a swamp, and an unhabitable one at that, until the great——

Oh, yes! The Great News!

Well, the great news is this: Mud Flats is to be turned into a camp of instruction. Soldiers are to come here in batches, with their officers, and stay for six weeks at a time, undergoing a course of training in making bridges and pontoons, and blowing up houses, and all sorts of thrilling things that they'll have to do when they get out to the front. And when one batch goes another batch will come in and do it all over again.

The long and short of it is that Mud Flats, this awful spot ten miles from Nowhere Junction: Mud Flats, this backyard of beyond, where we live because there are only a few old people and some boat-builders and other civilians in it—Mud Flats is going to be positively crammed with men!

"Men, my dears!" said I to the girls. "Do you understand? Real live young men in trousers (khaki ones, my beloved sisters!) with puttees, and enormous boots, and pipes, and deep bass voices, and by-Joves, and swaggering strides and spurs and tobacco-pouches, and all those things that we've been panting and pining for the merest glimpse of in this desert!"

"Rattle! I do wish you wouldn't allow your high spirits to run away with you like this," said Evelyn to me when she heard me giving vent to those expressions of delight upstairs in the bedroom the day after we had heard the news. You know Evelyn's the eldest and the prim one. She thinks she has to set an example, poor long-suffering dear. She said to me, "Sometimes you become positively vulgar!"

"Vulgar?" I said indignantly. "Why is it vulgar to show I'm delighted that we are all going to have some sort of a change in our lives at last? You know you and Nancy are both as glad as I am that there is now a chance that we shan't have to live the rest of our lives in this perpetual hen-party of four! Even if the new state of affairs does only last for a few months, we shall have had some fun! We shall have had some youth and tobacco-smoke about the place at last!"

Nancy's face went all quivery in her attempt not to let it crumple up into smiles. She has the prettiest face of the lot of us, I think. And we all three are as decent-looking as they make them, though I say it, in our large, blond, Greek-goddessy style. I never did hold with mock modesty, and considering that all nice girls are in duty bound to consider themselves frights, which is what seemed to be the fashion in Aunt Victoria's time. Why should it be correct for a girl not to realise that her skin is white-velvety, and her eyes like corn-cockles with dew on them, and her hair like yellow silk and masses of it?

She would be expected to notice those things quickly enough if they were on another girl, wouldn't she? In fact, she would be looked upon as stupid and unobservant if she didn't.

And if I pretended I didn't it would be merely insincerity, and insincerity is a thing I don't hold with. I told Evelyn so. I am afraid she is just a little inclined to be given to it. I suppose she thinks it's always an eldest sister's duty to look shocked at what the two younger ones say.

"It isn't as if it need make any difference at all to us, even if the village is full of soldiers," Evelyn went on, pouring cold water over my glee. "We shan't get to know any of them, just a houseful of women like ourselves."

"Shan't we!" said Nancy, from the glass where she was trying on her last Spring's hat, which she had retrimmed with a quite smart and rather military-looking "pom-pom." "Shan't we, indeed? Now I will burst upon you another bit of news that I have just heard at the post-office. These men and their officers that are going to come—where do you suppose they are going to live? There aren't any barracks for them: there aren't any tents. And they are not going to be in huts either. No," she finished impressively. "They are going to put them all into billets."

You know, until this war, we were all so benighted that I don't think any of us would have known what a "billet" was. Perhaps we should have imagined that it was a piece of wood. So it is, in the dictionary.

But now, of course, we realised exactly what was meant. It meant that every house in the place would be expected to put up some of these soldiers, to have them to board with them.

"And we shall have some one, see if we don't!" I said exultantly. "This Grange is one of the biggest houses in the place, in fact the biggest next to the Admiral's and the Rectory and the Doctor's. There's the quite big spare room where nobody ever sleeps. The drawing-room makes quite a good sitting-room, and there is the girls' Lair that's simply crying out to be made into a man's smoking-room, and——"

"And you may as well wake up from these rosy dreams at once," said Evelyn, quenchingly, "because there is at least one very good reason why we shan't have any soldiery billeted here with us."

"Why?" I asked quite blankly, and Nancy turned from the glass.

Her hands were still held up to the reorganised hat, which any one could see she had been imagining herself fascinating the New Army with! And she echoed, "Why on earth not?"

"Because," said Evelyn, "we are not forced to take any men if we object. We can refuse. The Authorities allow that, if there are only women in the house, as there are here in the Moated Grange. You can be pretty certain that Aunt Victoria won't want to have any great men with pipes trampling in huge Army boots all over her well-preserved stair-carpets: now, will she?"

I felt my face fall a yard. No, it was not at all likely that Aunt Victoria would agree to take men into her precious house! Why, it was all the lawyers could do to persuade her to take Nancy, Evelyn and me when Father and Mother both died together of German measles. You see, Aunt Victoria is one of the most hopeless types of old maids. Namely, the old maid who has got married to another old maid, and who has added a lot of the "he-old maids'" fads to her own, and who has then become a widow with the last state worse than the first!

"Wild horses," said Evelyn, "will not make Aunt Victoria say they can billet even one of the Camp of Instruction officers here."

"Wild horses isn't a very good way of getting any one to do anything," I said, picking up heart again. "There is a much better way of getting a person like Aunt Victoria to do what you want."

And for ages I wouldn't tell them what I meant. However, to save time, I will tell you now. It is to go on exactly the opposite tack and to make her think that you don't want what you do want. For instance, the whole of lunch-time to-day my conversation has been this sort of thing:

"Oh, Aunt Victoria, isn't it awful to think that almost everybody in this village will have to have soldiers foisted on them soon! Fancy having a strange man in the house whether you wanted to or not. Fancy having to have him to meals, and tramping all up and down your passages! I do think it is an imposition!"

For I knew that was what she had been thinking herself. As usual, she turned slick round.

"Dear me, Elizabeth! What did you say? An imposition, indeed!" she repeated, looking at me most severely over the top of her lady-mayoressy-looking black satin blouse. "A great many people would consider it an honour to be able to do so much for their country, let me tell you. Personally, I think that any Englishwoman worthy of the name should be glad to do what she can for the comfort of these noble fellows. Remember that but for what they do for us we should have no homes to-day, no roofs over our heads, certainly no carpets under our feet! Remember Belgium!"

With much more in the same strain.

I listened, inwardly shrieking with delight, and stamped hard on Nancy's toes under the table at the same time.

Of course, I truly agreed with every single word that Aunt Victoria was saying! Of course, all that about what every Englishwoman should feel was exactly what Nancy and Evelyn and I do feel about soldiers, only more so!

However, it wouldn't have been the least use letting Aunt Victoria know that, not it! The "contrary" old thing would immediately "have taken the offensive," as it says in the newspapers, and would have said: "A great deal too much fuss is being made over these soldiers nowadays. After all, they are only doing their duty! They are only doing what they are paid to do by ratepayers like ourselves. I do not see why we should have the added burden of housing and feeding the creatures!"

So I went on sowing the good seed by saying:

"Well, I suppose that's how one ought to feel! But I am rather glad that the doctor and the admiral will have the bother of the officers, and that the Higginses and the Eltons and all the people in the little houses round about will have the men foisted on them, and chalk-marks of their regiments and companies all over their doors! Anyhow, we shall be left in peace and quiet without a single soldier or officer or anything in our house!"

"And why should you be so sure of that, Elizabeth?" my Aunt Victoria boomed out at me in her stateliest contralto tones. "How do you know that we shall not be asked to harbour some of these brave men?"

I put down my spoon and looked at her in a mildly docile, puzzled sort of way, after having exchanged a glance with Nancy, who was only keeping herself from open giggles by counting the damson stones on her plate.

"Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor!" She counted up to "soldier" again, and then I said to Aunt Victoria: "But, Auntie, you know we won't be expected to put anybody up, as you are a widow-lady living alone with three single nieces in the house. You will be allowed to refuse."

"Refuse! I hope I should not dream of doing anything so unpatriotic!" said Auntie fussily, while I no longer dared meet Nancy's eye. "If any soldiers are suggested to me as visitors to the Grange, I can only say that they will be made welcome to the limit of my modest means!"

So that settled that.

This afternoon the whole thing was fixed up.

An officer came round to arrange about billets for the first draft. We, of course, were absolutely thrilled when we heard his ring at the bell. He gave his name in to Beeton, our housemaid, as "Major Lawless." A lovely name, I thought!

And though he said he wished to interview Mrs. Verdeley, meaning Aunt Victoria, I did manage to be coming through the hall when he passed, and to be looking for something in the drawing-room when he was there. I was aching for the first sight of khaki! Anyhow, I contrived to get in a good hard look at the gallant major. I hoped he'd be like the one in "Jones of the Lancers," "When I'm booted, and trousered, and spurred—MY WORD!"

And I can only tell you that he was absolutely disappointing. To begin with, he was as old as the hills, and I should think he'd learnt his drill before the Flood, or, at any rate, just at the Flood. Embarkation officer, perhaps. Putting the animals through it, you know: this sort of thing: "Beasts of the field—form fours! Form four feet! ... Birds of the air—two flights to the Ark, forward—FLAP!" and so on.

He couldn't have been a day under forty, and not at all the sort of figure that you always imagine a soldier must have: smart and well set-up, and broad-chested and flat-backed.

Oh, no! He was quite round-shouldered, as if he were more accustomed to sitting in an office and bending over desks than doing any real military work! And he was pale. He wore such a worried look, too, as if he had the cares of a whole campaign on his narrow shoulders! The voice in which he talked was so resigned and melancholy.

I heard him say to Aunt Victoria: "Thank you, very much.... Most kind of you, I am sure.... Then the young man will be turning up here about tea-time on Thursday."

Armed with this glad tidings, I scuttled back to the other girls in the Lair, behind the dining-room.

The Lair is quite the nicest room in the house. It is very "girly-girly," but almost as comfortable as if it belonged to men. You know, I always imagine men, as a rule, have things cosier than we have.

The lazy-chairs are very old and very shabby, but they are springy and comfortable still. The broad window-seat is well padded with turkey-red covered cushions, and there is a big curtain of the same stuff to draw and hide the view when it rains, and the mud flats and the lead-paper sea and the weeping grey skies get altogether too depressing.

There is a cottage piano, with a stack of ancient songs about "The Gipsy's Warning" and "In the Gloaming, O My Darling," and that type of thing, as well as our own slightly more modern ditties, and a whole pile of stamp-papered and thumbed dance music—the only chance we ever get of hearing any dance music down here. Woe is me!

Then, in the corner there is a red calico-covered wirework shape for us to make our blouses on. There are our three work-baskets, all rather chaotic, I am afraid, and Evelyn's everlasting knitting. On the walls there are bookshelves, quite full of all sorts of books—my old school histories and geographies, and a long red row of sevenpennies, and the blue Service Kiplings which we clubbed together to buy last summer. The top shelf has got all old novels from mother's and grandmamma's day; also poetry: Keats and Shelley and Byron and Scott. That's how it is I come to be so awfully well-read.

On the walls we have got a queer mixture of pictures, just the ones we like. There is Maurice Greiffenhagen's young shepherd kissing the girl among the poppies: which always comforts Nancy and me to look at, because the girl has such a very big foot, bigger even than ours, and we take sixes! Then there's a tear-off calendar with a picture of Romeo and Juliet, and a quotation for every day in the year.

Then there is a big photograph of the statue of the Venus de Milo, who is such a duck, we think: so good-natured-looking! Rather like my face, I think. And, last of all, there is a framed coloured supplement from the Graphic of the year One, which I do so love. Do you know it? It is a picture of about six girl sisters, all dressed alike, in navy-blue jerseys and kilted skirts with crimson sashes and their hairs down, crowded round a nurse who has got a long-clothes new baby in her arms. She is showing it to the family. And the title of the picture is, "Mamma's Christmas Present: A Boy at Last."

Isn't it appropriate to us in this house? Better days are in store! I feel it in my bones! I skipped into the Lair, where Nancy was busy over a new camisole which she was making out of a summer muslin skirt. Evelyn was sitting by the table, knit, knit, knit.

"'A Boy at Last!'" I quoted the title of the picture to them. "Girls, the major says the young man is to arrive on Thursday next, at tea-time. The question is," I concluded impressively, "THE question is, which of us is he going to fall in love with?"

"My dear Rattle," gasped Evelyn in a really scandalised voice this time. Even Nancy, who generally doesn't mind, murmured, "Really, Rattle, you are too perfectly disgraceful sometimes."

"Why?" I asked, sitting on the table and swinging my feet. "Why shouldn't I mention things that everybody knows are very likely to happen? Have you read all the short stories that they are putting nowadays in magazines about the young soldier who always falls in love with the girls at his billet?"

"All of the girls?" asked Nancy, twinkling over the camisole again.

"Oh, well, one of them. You know what I mean. There is always a romance, an engagement, and a war wedding at the end."

"But that's in magazine stories, you absurd child," said Evelyn again, trying not to laugh. "That's not in real life."

"Real life is so much more like magazine stories than it used to be before the war," I declared. "I am sure there is much more romance all over the place. As for the war weddings, you can't say that's all fiction. You can see photographs of them in the Daily Mirror and the Daily Sketch every morning of your lives. I think it would be perfectly lovely to have one from this house, between one of us and the young officer who's coming here to be billeted! Yes, and never mind the bothering old will about not rushing into early marriages!"

"Rattle, you really are awful!" the two girls said together this time, and again I said: "I am not awful, I am only frank. I only say out in a quite unabashed voice what you know other people are thinking all the time. It is not that I am worse than other people! It's only that I am much more honest."

"It is that you are such a child that you don't really know what you are talking about," Evelyn went on superiorly. "You're only a flapper, after all."

"Flappers are 'in' just now, according to the papers. So he might like me better than any of you in the long run," I said. "Wait and see!" And I hummed the old song, "Maybe the lad will fancy me, and disappoint you all!"

"He may not 'fancy' any of us," said Nancy, sewing away busily at her camisole. "He may be so busy with his classes and his bridge-building and signalling. He won't have a look or a thought for the girls at his billet."

A thought struck me suddenly.

"Let's tell fortunes about it," I suggested, "and see what really is going to happen according to the cards."

And I opened the table-drawer, and brought out the rather cockley pack of cards that we had learnt to play "Beggar My Neighbour" with about five weary years ago, when we all were recovering from whooping-cough, and couldn't go out.

"Let's see," I said, "which of us is what poetry books call the 'destined maid.' And then, which ever comes out the one the young soldier is to have, well!—the other two can just take a back seat and allow her a fair field."

"Rattle, what absolute nonsense," said Evelyn severely. "What bosh! As if anybody believed anything of that sort——"

"We needn't believe it," I said. "It won't 'mean' anything. But it will be just something to pass away the time with before the tea-bell rings. It's a most loathsome afternoon, so we may as well have something to amuse ourselves." For the rain dashed heavily against the windows outside. The melancholy view was the limit. I drew the red curtain. Nancy stirred up the fire, and even Evelyn (pretending she wasn't going to) put down her book, and drew nearer to the table where I was shuffling the cards. And murmuring to myself a poem that I'd just finished. You know, I write verses sometimes. I'll tell you these ones. I call them "Fate." They're about engagements.

"Never chortle when you hear—
That your school-friend's troth is plighted
To a man with spectacles
Or a man the King has knighted.
If he stutters in his speech,
If his years are more than forty,
Even if his head is bald
Do not laugh at her; it's naughty.
Fate has probably reserved
Something worse in store for you!
How would you like a——"

"Oh, come on, Rattle: those are shuffled now!"

"All right. You cut, Nancy," I said, handing the pack to her. She cut, and Evelyn dealt. "Now! It's for the one who is left with the highest card in her hand," I said.

We played out the cards on the old ink-spattered table, laughing and chattering together. For it's all very well to say how dull this place has been, and what a howling wilderness Mud Flats, is, and what a hole of a place the Moated Grange: but we have had quite a lot of fun among ourselves. We three have always got on well together. Nothing can spoil that.

The Queen of Hearts. Good omen, eh?

Nancy threw down the Two of Diamonds.

The Nine of Spades was Evelyn's.

"Aha! you see," I said triumphantly, "I take this trick. Young Lieutenant Whatever-his-name-is will be the fate of the flapper!"

"We ought to try it three times," said Nancy. So again we gathered up the cards and cut and dealt.

I saw the faces of the other two girls growing quite excited over the game, utter nonsense as it was.

This time Nancy had the King of Diamonds, I had the Two of Spades, and Evelyn the Ace. Eldest first, in fact.

"Now again," said Nancy. "Why d'you laugh, Rattle?"

"I'm thinking," I said, "of 'our' possible fiancé."

I wondered what that unconscious young officer, now at his depot, would have thought if he could have taken a little peep at the scene in the country house which was to be his billet.

I wondered if he would have been amused at the picture. The cosy, untidy, red-curtained room, with the trio of pretty girls, all tall, all fair, gathered about the table with their three golden heads bent eagerly above their absurd game. If he could have guessed that the game was supposed to decide which of the players was to become his "destined maid"! Ha! If they all guessed about this sort of thing, what would happen?

There was silence, this last round.

Silence broken only by the little "talking" noise of the flames in our old-fashioned fire-grate, and by the rustling sound of the cards as they flew one above the other just as the autumn leaves outside were dropping from the big sycamore on to the path.

The last card fell.

This time the score stood thus:

Nancy, King of Clubs.

The vulgar Rattle, Three of Diamonds.

The lady-like Evelyn, Five of Hearts.

"Ah, now each of us have come out top once," said I. "How is that supposed to count?"

"Why, that we've all got an even Fate, I suppose," suggested Evelyn, sweeping up the cards and tossing them into the table-drawer again. "Probably that the young man who's coming to be billeted here won't have anything to say to one of us."

"Always look on the bright side," laughed Nancy. "But I believe that the first round was meant to count. Rattle, Queen of Hearts. Child, your elder sisters will retire into the background like Cinderella the other way round, and give you, as you say, a fair field with the young man."

"Thanks, awfully. I would do the same for you, any time," I said gratefully.

And then we all three burst out into shrieks of laughter over our own seriousness about what was only fun.

Now we've got a week to wait and see what the young man's going to turn out like.

Nancy, who is rather sentimental, though she tries to hide it by pretending she's talking bosh—Nancy calls him "the possible Prince Charming."

His real name, according to a quite solemn and ceremonious little note that he's written to Aunt Victoria, is Frank Lascelles.

Auntie says "Lascelles" is what she calls a "good" name, but Nancy says never mind, there are all sorts of ramifications of even the goodest families, so that he need not be one of the very high and mighty ones at all. Auntie says they are always called "Frank" for some reason.

"Frank" is nice.

I wonder whether he is?

* * * * * * * *

(Later.) No! he isn't!

He's come—has this young—— Well, I haven't thought of anything bad enough to call him yet, this young officer that we've got to put up with at the Moated Grange for six mortal weeks.

Oh, how am I going to stand it?

It'll be perfectly ghastly.

However, perhaps I'd better begin again at the story of that awful day when he arrived.

CHAPTER II

THE "BOY AT LAST"

To begin with, when people say they're going to turn up "at tea-time," why don't they find out first when tea-time is?

At the Moated Grange it is always five o'clock.

Aunt Victoria is so embedded in her old-fashioned, old-maidish ways that she doesn't realise anybody else could have it at any other time. She didn't dream of altering her hours, or her habits, or even her afternoon siesta, as she calls it, just because to-day was The Day. I mean the day when the first draft of camp-of-instruction soldiers were to come down to Mud Flats. Even yesterday there'd been some signs of life about the place.

A big car full of khaki had driven up to the "Pearl and Oyster," which is the one-eyed hotel of our hamlet. It's now the headquarters for the officers of the permanent staff. Meaning, the instructors of the classes they're going to have here for destroying houses and blowing up bridges and wrecking railways and whatever else they have got to do.

It sounds all very jolly and destructive, doesn't it?

The butcher's wife said, with a grave waggle of her grey head, that she "reckoned Mud Flats would never be the same place again after all this."

We do so hope it won't.

There has been a general buzz going on in all the little shops of the village here. The talk has been about nothing but how many men Mrs. So-and-So has got to find room for in her place: also which particular lot are paying two-and-sixpence a day and which three shillings. Also about the difference it will make having to cook for these lads, and the preparations that will have to be made....

Plenty of preparations, for example, at the Moated Grange.

Aunt Victoria had still got on what we call her "Paroxysm of patriotism," brought on, of course, out of perverseness, just because I had pretended to be "so against" the billeting.

I am against it now, considering what has happened, but I am coming to that presently.

We had made the spare bedroom, which was to be given over to the young officer, into a perfect vision of comfort—snowy curtains, the best towels, a huge tablet of scented soap on his washing-stand. As a last touch Nancy had put the pink eiderdown from her own bed, if you please.

"Charity blankets would be quite good enough for a mere woman," she declared. "We simply must have the best of everything for our brave defenders."

"He has not begun to defend us yet," suggested Evelyn, in her rather squashing voice.

But I know she is just as keen as anybody on making things nice for him. For at that moment she was arranging in an old cut-glass finger-bowl upon his dressing-table a bouquet of all the flowers we have got left now that it is autumn. Namely, some bright yellow button chrysanthemums, a spray of red berries, and the last pink monthly rose that I could find blossoming over our porch. We had put a fire in the bedroom, too, in case he found the air of Mud Flats too chilly after Salisbury Plain. Mrs. Miles at the post-office said that "a tidy few of them" were expected to come from Salisbury.

As for the tea which we had prepared for the creature—well, it was a case of nine whole pennyworth of cream to start with. Then we had brown bread and butter and white, with no end of butter spread on it. Evelyn had made a gingerbread cake, which she is very good at, and I had made lemon cheese (which, if I had only known then the sort of person I was making it for I shouldn't have squeezed a single lemon!). Then, again, Cook, usually the grumpiest old soul alive, who grudges any one "mucking about" in her lovely big warm kitchen—even Cook unbent until she wasn't one bit the cross old thing that she seems by nature! She herself volunteered to make delicious sandwich-paste out of the cold fish that was left over from breakfast.

"There's nothing that gentlemen fancy more than some sort of a little relish with their tea," she told me as she went to the cupboard for the red pepper. "They'll give all the sweet things that's going for something savoury in the anchovy line, or a nice taste of potted ham! Yes, you mark my words, young ladies, it will come in handy to you some day when you have got a house and gentlemen of your own to provide for.

"Dear me!" she went on quite expansively, "there will be some satisfaction in cooking meals now, such as there never is when it's just a parcel of ladies, that is content to make a meal off the top of a breakfast egg and a teaspoonful of raspberry jam! There will be a difference in the order I shall have to give to the butcher as soon as the young orficer-gentleman arrives."

The one thing that all of us hoped about him was—well, what do you suppose? That he was dark. For if you have lived all your life in a household of fair heads (even Aunt Victoria is fair turned to grey—a most depressing tint) you will realise how one simply pants to see an opposite colour. Evelyn is golden blonde: Nancy is much lighter, a regular ash-blonde. I am betwixt and between: in fact, what they call "a honey-blonde." "How lovely!" a lot of people would say. But what I think is, "How insipid!"

"I hope the young man is going to be as black as jet," I said decisively, "with midnight eyes like pools of—of black currant tea: and an olive skin and a black moustache like the mark of candle smoke on his upper lip. That'll make all of us look so dazzling by contrast. A fair girl one can put up with, after all. But what I say is, there's no devil in a fair man."

"Rattle!" remonstrated Evelyn in her best "shocked" voice.

"Sorry if I've said the wrong word again," I apologised. "When I said 'devil' in that sense, of course what I meant was 'individuality.' I should never dream of marrying a man who hadn't got plenty of that."

"You'll wait till you're asked, like everybody else," said Evelyn, who is really very simple, in spite of being the eldest. "And that depends entirely upon the young man himself."

"Oh, does it? Oh, does it?" I cried, taking a taste of hot lemon-curd out of the spoon as I talked. "I bet you the young orficer-gentleman won't have a chance against Little Me if I take it into my head it's me he's got to fall in love with. Didn't he come out mine first of all in the cards? And doesn't Shakespeare say the same thing?"

"Shakespeare?" echoed Nancy.

"Yes, Shakespeare. I don't understand what half of those sonnets of his are about as a rule. But this one I mean is pretty clear. Something about:

"'For when a woman woos, what mother's son
        Will rudely leave her till she do prevail?'

"So you see that if I intend to 'prevail' upon this Mr.——"

"Really, Rattle, one would think you had been engaged at least three times already," said Evelyn, "instead of never having had the vaguest hint of a love affair, you absurd child."

"Makes no difference at all to a person of any imagination," I told her cheerfully. "Haven't I had the run of all the novels in the house? And isn't it just the same as if I'd met all these eligible young heroes I've read about? Yes. I'm so well up in the love scenes by this time that I know exactly what the most successful sort of young girl does at those emergencies.

"You needn't think I shouldn't know how to handle the situation. You needn't think that just because I've lived in this little mud-puddle, with nobody but my sisters to talk to, that I shouldn't be perfectly capable of coping with a fascinating young man. Oh, dear, yes. I should be very offhand with him, too," said I, warming to my subject. "I should start away by saying to him, 'Now, Billet Boy'——"

"Now WHO?" demanded Nancy, rather startled.

"'Billet Boy.' That would be my name for him," I said, raising my voice so that they should hear what I said as I stood with my aproned back to them, stirring away at my double-cooker over the fire. "I should say, 'You know, I'm going to call you Billet Boy, because I think Mr. Lascelles is too long and pompous a name for a mere junior subaltern. As for Frank, it's too affectionate.'"

Here Nancy, quite suddenly, gave a loud cough. I thought it was just the red pepper that cook had left on the table. So I took no notice. I went gaily and recklessly on, talking as quickly as I stirred.

"You see, girls, the affection will all have to be on the young man's side. Anyway, at first. Perhaps, a good deal later on, at the end of the six weeks that he's going to be here, perhaps then I shall turn round and——"

Here, with the lemon-curd spoon still steaming in my grasp, I did turn round to sort of give point to the remark....

Point?

Oh, horrors! If you only had seen the point that the remark had unconsciously taken!

For what did I behold? My two sisters standing there quite paralysed with embarrassment. Evelyn crimson and Nancy magenta with blushes.

And beyond them, having just pranced in through the back kitchen door, was a small, red-haired figure in khaki, with a floppily-soft cap, high brown boots, and a Sam Browne belt.

In one horrified flash, of course, we had all realised who it was. The young man who was coming here to be billeted. Second-Lieutenant Frank Lascelles himself!

* * * * * * * *

(Here follow some impressions of Francis Lascelles, Esquire, Temporary Second-Lieutenant R.E.)

Jolly ripping billet this! Startling contrast to what I'd expected, namely, a bleak, tumble-down villa kept by the oldest inhabitant as ugly as sin. Anything but, by Jove! Found myself landed in a bright, cosy kitchen full of a heavenly smell of cooking and a regular beauty-chorus of tall girls. Two of them very pretty. Can't think why girls don't always wear white aprons and trot about in red firelight. Suits them A1. Third girl (seems to be the youngest), Some Peach. All of them goddess-built with smothers of golden hair. Just as I blew in The Peach was holding forth to the others. All about my humble self and what she was going to call me when I arrived.

Personally don't care what she calls me as long as can persuade her to let me take her out in the side-car of my motor-bike: but afraid I dropped rather a brick by way of a start.

(Here the youngest girl resumes.)

The brute: the little brute! Eavesdropping, I call it. It's all very well for Nancy to say she did cough to let me know he was there. It's all very well for Evelyn to say it wasn't his fault that I would go gabbling on.

Why did he laugh?

That's the unforgivable thing!

If he'd behaved like a gentleman and pretended he hadn't heard anything, then perhaps I could have thought no more about it. I could have overlooked his really dreadful personal appearance— But I'm coming to his appearance later on. When I've got time to spread myself on it.

I'll go back to that first awful minute when he stood framed in the open doorway of our back kitchen, creasing up his eyes and showing all his teeth, and rocking with idiot laughter, while we stood like three Lot's wives, turned to pillars of salt, in aprons.

Evelyn was the first to collect herself.

Evelyn came forward, rather pink still, but holding herself as dignifiedly as if she had swallowed both rolling-pins as well as the kitchen poker. I really felt proud of Evelyn as she turned to the intruder. She said, in a voice that sounded just as if it were quite a swagger party in her own drawing-room, "How do you do? It's Mr. Lascelles, I suppose?"

"Yes, it is," said the odious little creature. He pulled himself together, looked up from one to the other of us as he put his hand to his floppy cap and saluted briskly before he took it off.

This was the first time any of us girls had received a salute from a man in uniform.

I knew exactly how the other two girls felt about it. I could read it on their faces.

They were thrilled. Wasn't it funny? They were simply tingling with the pride of it from their hair down to their toes.

As for me—No, thank you! I shall wait until something a little more attractive salutes me before I feel anything but annoyance at the cheek of its daring to look at me.

He said, "How d'you do? I say, I am so awfully sorry, don't you know, at bursting in upon you like this. I know it's round the other way. But I did go to the front first, and I couldn't get the servant to hear me."

That was because cook had gone over "to row that butcher," and Mary, our housemaid, had what she calls "popped up-street" to the post-office-and-drapery to get herself a fresh Peter Pan collar to wear in honour of the new arrival, not realising how much too soon he was going to arrive.

I shall never forgive either him or her for that!

Evelyn, becoming more and more the credit of the family, was smiling graciously down upon the little horror, and telling him that it didn't matter one scrap, and that she was very glad to see him, and that she hoped we should be able to make him comfortable.

To which he replied, without a moment's hesitation, "Oh, thanks awfully. I'm sure you will. Are you Mrs. Verdeley, may I ask?"

"No," said Evelyn, growing about an inch visibly before our eyes with pride at being taken for Married. "My aunt, Mrs. Verdeley, is usually asleep at this hour of the afternoon: that is why she did not hear your ring. I am her niece, Miss Evelyn Verdeley, and this is my sister Nancy."

Here Nancy dimpled at him, and apologised for her gingered, floury hands.

"And this," Evelyn went on, turning to me, "is my youngest sister."

Here she paused. She said afterwards that it was because she forgot for a moment what my other name was besides "Rattle."

And I think I could quite well leave off that nickname now, and pass it on to the creature that we have got to have billeted with us.

For he is a "rattle," if you like. At least ten times more so than I, and a far sillier kind of one. For he actually began to hum that tune out of the Alhambra revue that we have got the music of:

"Here's my youngest sister. Take a look at her. Take a look at her——"

At the same time he was taking a look at me, and twinkling all over himself in a way for which I simply longed to boil him.

"It's too sweet of you," he then said, "to be making lemon cheese on purpose to please me. Absolutely nothing I like so much, I assure you——"

I determined then and there that I'd never make another eggspoonful! And I said in a truly forbidding voice, "I don't think I was making it on purpose for you exactly."

"What? Not for the Billet Boy?" he said. And tried to make me smile at him. Me! I could have taken the double-cooker full of hot curd and flung it over his red head! (Wait: I'm coming to his red hair presently.) I gave him a look that—well, I can't describe it. You should have seen it. Anyhow, I gave him a look that chilled him. For he left off twinkling at me at last, and turned to the two other girls.

And actually had the insolence to ask in a plaintive voice if it would be possible to have the first detachment of tea now, in the kitchen. It was then a quarter to four. Of course, he ought to have been told tea would be ready in an hour and a quarter. I'm ashamed of Evelyn and Nancy.... In less time than it takes me to write about it they got the creature's tea.

They fetched out the best afternoon tea-cloth. They laid it on the kitchen table. They spread it with all the lovely things we'd been preparing, including my lemon-curd, I'll trouble you. I left off counting how many slices of bread-and-butter, plastered with it, the young man ate: going on from that to cook's fish-paste, then to the ginger-cake—ginger was appropriate enough. Then back to more lemon-curd, washing it all down with great gulps of hot, sugary tea. At last he said, "You girls must think I'm a cormorant."

Girls! Before he'd known us twenty minutes.

"The fact is," he said, "I didn't manage to snaffle any tiffin on the way down to this God-forsaken—I mean down to this place. And after we arrived—Thanks. Was that my sixth cup? Seven is a lucky number.... Yes, there was only time to get our lads fed."

By the look in Nancy's eyes I could see exactly what she was thinking, namely, how splendid it was of him to see about getting his men fed before he thought of having lunch himself. I could see that she was within an inch of melting into tears over the idea. I think that I mentioned before how utterly sentimental Nancy is.

And, of course, it was absurd to think anything of that. Naturally an officer thinks of getting his men fed first. It is only his duty, after all. Why make a fuss about it?

Why, men with horses have to attend to them first. I shouldn't have thought much of this little Lieutenant Frank Lascelles if he had gone and gorged himself instead of attending to his Tommies. Goodness knows, he was making up for lost time now.

I didn't see why I should stop in the kitchen and watch him do it. He's going to have plenty of attention and spoiling without me.

So, humming a careless tune, I left that orgy in the kitchen and came away to sit by myself in the Lair. The Lair where we'd had so many conversations about what "our billeted officer" was going to be like. Little did I ever think how painfully unattractive the young man would be!

I said so to Evelyn and Nancy to-night, when they came in to brush their hairs and gossip as usual before we all went to bed. They were all flushed and sparkly ... evidently their first impressions of Mr. Lascelles were very different from mine. I told them what I thought of him. "To begin with, so small!" I said disgustedly. "So shrimpesque!"

"Nonsense! He's five-foot-six-and-a-bit. He said so. That's not a bad height," said Evelyn. "It's only because we're such a family of young giantesses that he may look a little short——"

"A little!" I scoffed. "He's what I call two teacups and a rim high! He's tiny!"

"Small men make the best fighters," ventured Nancy. "Look at Nelson. Look at Napoleon."

"How can I possibly? Don't be so silly," I said. "All I can look at is the creature and his awful looks. His hair! That hideous shade of ginger! And sprinkled with freckles all over his absurd face!"

"Still," Evelyn reminded me very unkindly, "he did 'come out yours' in the cards!"

"I abdicate," I said, tying a bit of pink ribbon found the ends of my plaits with a jerk. "Not any, thanks," I said, imitating the curate's voice at tea. "I resign my first chance. I'd rather marry dear old Penny the gardener. Even a black wig is better than carrots grown on the premises——"

"Rot——"

"And I've just made up a lovely poem about it, too." I ignored them. "I call it 'Repudiation.' Here it is:

"'Oh, I will never marry
A man who is shorter than me,
A man who has not enlisted,
Or a man in the N.C.C.
The R.A.M.C., or a red-haired R.E.,
Would be likewise definitely barred by me.'

"So if one of you wants to get up Our Great Khaki Romance with the Lascelles lad, ending in a war-wedding and an arch of swords, prrrray don't let any thought of your youngest sister stand in your way. Do you hear, Evelyn?"

"I hear you talking more nonsense in half an hour," said Evelyn, "than ten ordinary girls get through in a day. Who began the idea of a Khaki romance? Not I——"

"Then perhaps it'll be Nancy's," said I, skipping into bed and drawing the pillows well down into the nape of my neck. "Blush, Nancy; the bride's always supposed to. I shall be merely the bridesmaid. No! I shall be the 'Best Girl'; that's what they have nowadays. The best man always has the ring to find when it drops through a crack in the floor; so I suppose my job will be to keep the bridegroom from getting lost? Goodness knows he'd be small enough," I said, cruelly. "And I don't see how there's going to be room for anybody to sit on his knee ever, not in our family. But anyhow the game is between you two girls now. Good-night. Good luck!" And I curled myself up to my well-earned rest.

CHAPTER III

THE INCUBUS IN THE HOUSE

I say, dear readers, have you ever had to live in the house with a person you absolutely hate? It's awful.

I've had some experience of it already.

When I was at school, it was our German mistress whom I loathed with a black and bitter hatred. I can't tell you how every detail about her used to get on my nerves, from the way she did her tow-coloured hair in plaits round her head (that you could see was never washed) to the way she used to stump into the classroom on her large flat feet and call out in her odious Hanover accent: "Elizabet, I shall r-r-report you! Elizabet, why zis noise? Sit immediately down and write out two hundred times, 'I shall not talk in Preparation: I shall not talk in Preparation.'"

Do you know, when I left school I simply cried for joy, just because I was leaving "Fraulein"! (I wonder how many English schoolgirls have felt that delight!) Never again should I hear her murder the King's English! Never again should I behold her everlasting red check blouse that always smelt of the golosh cupboard! Never, never again should I have to sit next to her in church and feel myself tingling all over with the exasperation of being anywhere near a person I so disliked!

When they read of the atrocities in Belgium, some people said they would never have believed such things of the Germans. They'd always considered the Germans a noble, brave, splendid, intelligent and all that sort of thing Nation. They were surprised. I wasn't. I'd believe ANYTHING of a nation that produced people like our "Fraulein" at school.

My goodness, how I detested her!

And now that old, well-known feeling of exasperation and dislike has come back to me here, at the Moated Grange, Mud Flats.

All because of the person I once imagined was going to turn out such a ray of sunshine in our house: all because of this horrid, red-haired, giggling, school-boyish microbe of a little officer-boy that we've got to have billeted on us. He's been here a week now.

For seven whole days we've had the Grange sort of permeated with him. We've had him taking up the bathroom for hours and hours the first thing in the morning, as well as when he comes in caked with mud in the afternoon, and using absolutely all the hot water and leaving his disgusting shaving-brush face downwards on the soap, always: we've had him whistling and singing the whole time, too.

The sounds of his splashing and wallowing like a grampus are always accompanied by the sounds of his bellowing bursts of song. His favourite seems to be that Gaiety thing:

"Oh, please don't try to flirt with me:
Don't try to flirt with me——"

(As if one could imagine anybody wanting to!)

Then we have him doing what I call "the New Army stamp" downstairs. We have him at breakfast, odiously chirpy and gay: "Morning, Mrs. Verdeley! Morning, Miss Evelyn! Morning, Miss Nancy!" in the kind of voice that sounds as if he might just as well say "My dear girls" and have done with it.

To me he just says "Good morning," in quite another tone of voice. (Thank goodness, I have managed to snub Mr. Frank Lascelles into that!)

Then, no sooner has he dashed off to what he calls his work than he seems to be dashing in to lunch again, mud to the eyes, and monopolising all the bathroom again first and all the conversation afterwards. The house is never free of him and his cigarettes and his matches. And his floppy khaki cap seems to be always flung down in three places at once.

I don't know how Aunt Victoria can stand the new state of affairs. I don't know how anybody can stand it.

Curiously enough, everybody at the Grange seems to like him except me.

They all take his part!

Nancy frowned like a thunder-cloud at lunch because I said something about the "REAL Army," meaning the one that was here before the war, and before they took to making officers out of young men-in-the-City and secretaries of suburban tennis-clubs. I heard the Incubus say he'd been all that. He used to be a Bank Clerk, too, before he became what he calls a soldier.

I don't call what he's doing here "soldiering." Do you?

My idea of soldiering is leading charges at the head of your men, with a drawn sword flashing in one hand and a revolver in the other, and you shouting, "Come on, lads! Let 'em have it! No quarter for the Prussian Guard! Remember Wittenberg!" Or else being found covered with blood standing with your back propped against a listening-post, or whatever they're called, with half your company dead at your feet, holding up a battalion of Germans with one dummy machine-gun.... Not much of that sort of thing about Tem. Sec. Lieut. Lascelles' duties. Well, of course there couldn't be, here, but he doesn't even seem to be preparing for it. Instead of that, he goes in for the most footling jobs.

Feeding the men is the funniest. A great G.S. wagon comes along the Junction Road, heaped with their victuals. Revolting masses of raw meat, girls, just like at the Zoo. Loaves, stuck together in fours. Sickening great lumps of cheese. Millions of tins of Tickler's jam. Well, these things are all carted into the empty cottage next door to the post-office, where our old gardener Penny used to live. Here these half-oxen and other raw joints are hacked and sawn and chopped up and flung at the sappers as if they were a lot of hungry jaguars. They tuck these rations away under their arms, or in their haversacks, or string-bags, or anyhow, and tramp off to get their landladies to cook them—the lumps of meat, I mean. Of course, it's the Quartermaster-Sergeant who's supposed to be responsible for all these disgusting proceedings, but the Incubus is most fearfully faddy about seeing that he does it all right. Absurd of him. I hate a man to know anything about housekeeping.

Then he (the Incubus) has the men's billets to pay once a week. Oh, my dears, that Day! The importance of the Ker-reature!

The amount of talk we have about "Four hundred pounds from my Company on me this moment!" And then the fuss-fuss-fuss over Sapper Stick-in-the-Mud, whose billet has been moved and who's got to have breakfast fivepence down on one form, and dinner one-and-a-penny down on another form! It bores me, stiff. I don't know how you can possibly look upon as a real soldier a being who, if you please, has to be always seeing about boots. For we always have yards about those, too. Lance-Corporal Thingammijig's boots, and how they have to be sent off to the London, Chatham and Dover regimental boot-maker to be soled and heeled, and how the bill's come in and had to be sent to Headquarters with a solemn inscription: "These repairs are rendered necessary by fair wear and tear. F. Lascelles."

I call him a mixture of a kitchen-maid and a cashier and a nursery-governess!

And when I said so to Aunt Victoria she actually said quite sharply, "Nonsense. He is a young man who has taken on a number of duties that are entirely strange to him, and I'm sure he is doing them very conscientiously and well, and, Elizabeth, I won't have you talking about 'real' soldiers: they're all alike doing 'real' work and they'll be in 'real' peril of their lives, presently, just like the others, and, Mary, tell Cook Mr. Lascelles likes the beef a little under-done."

Even Aunt Victoria!

It must be because she's deaf and can't hear half the noise he makes and doesn't understand the other half.

As for Evelyn and Nancy, they're sillier and sillier about him. I must admit it's not the "lovey-dovey" Khaki romance kind; no, even they seem to have grasped the fact that nobody could possibly be attracted in that way. But their chummy sort of way is just as annoying. They laugh at all his petty jokes! They listen to his stories, even the ones that we heard from a girl at school that her brother told her in Nineteen Thirteen! They keep on saying, "What a dear he is to have in the house" (dear at any price!) and "Doesn't it make one feel how much we've missed all these years, not having any brother of our own," until it makes me feel literally sick.

I shall be really rude to him one of these days. I shall be driven to it, I know I shall!

* * * * * * * *

(Here follow some comments by Second Lieutenant Frank Lascelles.)

Whew! I said the youngest girl at this billet of mine was a peach. A lemon would have been nearer the mark. Ever since I've been at Mud Flats she's gone out of her way—I swear she has—to be a perfect little beast to me.

Don't know what I've done. The other two girls are the best of pals with me. But this little—well, I'd better not say it. The Peach—for she is a Peach to look at, all the same!—the Peach seems to think it'll hurt her to give me a glance. Whenever I'm about she turns away. Never see anything of the girl but her profile. It's a jolly pretty profile, that I will say for her. Still, that's no reason why she should go about pretending to be a queen on a coin, always side-face on, eh?

Nothing I say or do makes any diff. She pretends she thinks I'm talking to Evelyn or Nancy, the sisters!

And the fact is—well, it doesn't sound very polite to two jolly nice girls, but neither of 'em is a patch upon her. Little demon! To-day she cut me in the village, walking down to the Hard. I swear she saw me coming. She turned her back and glared into a shop window until I'd gone by, walking with Curtis. He saw her. It was only a butcher's shop, too. Absolutely no excuse. Told her about it at lunch.

"You cut me dead," I said.

She just raised her eyebrows and said: "Oh? Was that you going by? So sorry. Hadn't you a different sort of coat on? I must have thought you were one of the sea scouts."

Now, considering the beastly little scouts run about twelve years old and four foot high, it was a little thick, wasn't it? However, "there are others." I'm not breaking my heart about the Peach! I'd just like to see how much ruder she could get; merely as a matter of curiosity!

(The youngest girl resumes.)

If it only weren't for this man, or, rather, Incubus, in the house here, I should think that Mud Flats was so changed for the better since the soldiers have come down.