Drusilla supplemented her efforts.
But gradually the Captain's manner froze. With a sort of military
sixth sense, he felt that he had been asked to break bread and eat salt
with a slacker, and he resented it.
After dinner Drusilla sang for them. Sensitive always to atmosphere,
she soothed the Captain with old and familiar songs, "Flow gently,
sweet Afton," and "Believe me if all those endearing young charms."
Then straight from these to "I'm going to marry 'Arry on the Fifth of
January."
"Oh, I say--Harry Lauder," was Captain Hewes' eager comment. "I heard
him singing to the chaps in the trenches just before I sailed--a little
stocky man in a red kilt. He'd laugh, and you'd want to cry."
Drusilla gave them "Wee Hoose among the Heather," with the touch of
pathos which the little man in the red kilt had imparted to it as he
had sung it in October in New York before an audience which had wept as
it had welcomed him.
"Queer thing," Captain Hewes mused, "what the war has done to him, set
him preaching and all that."
"Oh, it isn't queer," Margaret was eager. "That is one of the things
the war is doing, bringing men back to--God--" A sob caught in her
throat.
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