FROM THE LIFE
ambition to be a singer—he was the barytone soloist in the Choral Club—to "break into" musical comedy, to take to the concert stage. She had become patiently melancholy, but he attributed that to the war. Her mother's was a military family, and five of her relatives had been killed at the front. The letters from home were full of tragedy and discouragement. She tried to talk to him about it, but he knew very little about the war and cared less. His father was an irreconcilable hater of the Sassenach, rejoicing in the British disasters; and Con felt himself superior to both sides in his neutral indifference.
Now she had just returned from a visit to friends in New York, and she had returned most affectionate, but most depressed. Her brother, Howard Hartley, was going to England to enlist. She had even hinted that there was talk of the whole family accompanying him. But she had said nothing about Lieutenant Williamson, and it was only accidentally that Con overheard some one at the Country Club speaking of the Englishman as her fiancé. That had happened on the club-house veranda, just a few minutes before I spoke to him. It was the cause of his excessive emotion at my offer of assistance. It was the reason why he had tried to get a dance with her, and waylaid her when he saw me with her, and followed us to demand of her, "Are you going to marry him?"
She had refused to say that she was not. She
[ 198 ]
