“I shook hands with the girl, who was standing smiling beside him, and for a while we stopped there talking. He was fifteen years or so older than I, and had left the service as a Captain, but we both came from the same part of the country, and in days gone by I’d known him very well indeed. His marriage had taken place four years previously while I was abroad, and now, meeting his wife for the first time, I recalled bit by bit the gossip I’d heard in letters I got from home. How to everyone’s amazement he’d married a girl young enough to be his daughter; how everybody had prophesied disaster, and affirmed that she was not half good enough for one of the elect like Giles Yeverley; how she’d been engaged to someone else and thrown him over. And yet as I looked at them both it struck me that the Jeremiahs had as usual been completely wrong: certainly nothing could exceed the dog-like devotion in Giles’s eyes whenever he looked at his wife. “We strolled over to find some easy chairs, and he fussed round her as if she was an invalid. She took it quite naturally and calmly with a faint and charming smile, and when he finally bustled away to talk to Apson, leaving me alone with her, she was still smiling. “‘You know Giles well?’ she said. “‘Awfully well,’ I answered. ‘And having now returned from my sojourn in the wilds, I hope I shall get to know his wife equally well.’ “‘That’s very nice of you, Dog-face’—she turned and looked at me—and, by Jove, she was pretty. ‘If you’re anything like Giles—you must be a perfect dear.’ “Now I like that sort of a remark when it’s made in the right way. It establishes a very pleasant footing at once, with no danger of miconstruction—like getting on good terms with a new horse the moment you put your feet in the irons, instead of messing around for half the hunt. Anyway, for the next ten minutes or so I didn’t pay very much attention to the cricket. I gathered that there was one small son—Giles junior—who was the apple of his father’s eye; and that at the moment a heavy love affair was in progress between the young gentleman aged three and the General’s daughter, who was as much as four, and showed no shame over the matter whatever. Also that Giles and she were stopping with the General and his wife for a week or ten days. “And it was at that stage of the proceedings that a prolonged burst of applause made us look at the cricket. Sergeant Trevor was apparently out—how I hadn’t an idea—and was half-way between the wickets and the tent next to the one in which we were sitting, and which Apson always had erected for the local villagers and their friends. I saw them put up one hundred and twenty-five on the board as Trevor’s score, and did my share in the clapping line.