"With all the pleasure in the world," he said. "Only there isn't much to tell."
He made short work of what there was. His father, Graham Crosby, an explorer well known to geographical societies, had lost his life from fever in a South American jungle at the age of thirty-seven. His mother, faced with the prospect of almost unendurable poverty, tried her hand at novel writing. "The sentimental kind that you would have hated," he said with a smile. However, they had an enormous success, and enabled her to send her only son to Sandhurst. She died at the close of the Boer War. They were not related to any Crosbys that he knew of, except some excessively dull ones who lived somewhere near Aberdeen.
"Very poor pickings for your mother, I'm afraid," he said with a laugh.
Chip left her at the door with his rather old-fashioned bow, and she watched him until he reached the corner. There he turned, as she had guessed he would, and looked back, and as the maid opened the door, she waved her hand to him gayly. He walked stiffly, thanks to the accident, and leaned a little on his stick. Dear old Chip! . . .
So this was love! With her it took the form
