Children of no Man's Land by G.B. Stern — Read

I

October brought Samson Phillips to town for six weeks of special signalling instruction. Quite suddenly, from lethargic standing about in the vicinity of Deb, as he had done since her kiss-in-the-ring days, some unseen goad prodded him into courtship. The old-fashioned word exactly expressed the flavour of his proceedings. Perhaps he was afraid she would sink too deeply into the mire of Bohemianism, as exemplified by La llorraine and Cliffe Kennedy, in whose company he had found her on his previous leave. At all events, without quite knowing how it came about, Deb perceived the handsome sapper to be a prominent factor in her daily life. He rang her up on the 'phone regularly every morning, and was alternately facetious or reproachfully tender in claiming her day for the theatre, or a jaunt in the country, or dinner with his people. The play or the restaurant was always selected by him with due care for her innocence and not her preference. He loaded her with gifts that were a compromise between the generosity of an Eastern potentate in the wooing of a rapacious slave-girl, and such restraint as decorum demands before an engagement be a sealed fact: books of poetry, principally Spencer's "Faerie Queene," flowers, chocolates, crystallized fruits-gloves... he was not _quite_ sure about the gloves, and consulted his sister Beatrice, who said she thought a slight touch of unconventionality might be pleasing to Deb; -and war-trophies, which of course were "different."