He was altogether gay and friendly, and his voice and manner alike were cheerful, but he fell into a ludicrous consternation as he turned to find Major de Blacquaire seated between two turbaned tombs at his left hand. ‘I say, Sergeant,’ said the Major, with his University drawl, ‘I wish you’d go away for half a minute, and leave me to talk things over with your Governah?’ ‘As you like,’ said Polson, and hobbled away towards the south end of the cemetery, where the bay lay gleaming that mild morning, and French and English troopships were landing men who were as broken as he himself had been a month ago. ‘I suppose,’ said De Blacquaire, scratching lines on the ground before him with one of his crutches, ‘that you’re one of the beastliest old bounders that one could find on the face of the earth, and I have the best sort of a good mind to get you into trouble. I suppose you know that?’ ‘Very well,’ said John Jervase. ‘If you won’t get me into any sort of trouble that won’t leave my boy outside, you’re welcome.’ ‘Yes,’ said the Major, ‘that’s where you come in. You go and rob your neighbour for a matter of about twenty years, and when I drop into his property you go on robbing me, and then because your son’s a good chap a man is obliged to let you alone. I don’t think that that is fair.’ John Jervase had seated himself at the opposite side of the cemetery path, and was as busy in the making of hieroglyphics with the point of his neatly folded silk umbrella as Major de Blacquaire was with the point of his crutch. ‘Hit me,’ he said, ‘without hitting the boy and you are welcome.’ Major de Blacquaire scored the wet gravel with the crutch, looking frowningly down upon the ground, and Jervase scored the earth on his side with the neat brass ferrule. ‘I don’t quite see what I am to do with you,’ said the Major. ‘It isn’t the boy’s fault that he has a rotter for a father, is it?’