Exchanging with Ackroyd, "too sick a man for fighting" (who parted with several superfluous inches of appendix and convalesced in time to go out with the Second Battalion and meet a glorious end at Ypres), Franky was swallowed up in the vortex of Aldershot. 000, Cadogan Place saw him but once more before the roaring flood whirled him away, like a slim brown autumn leaf, to the Unknown.
His gift to Margot on the night of their parting was a silver elephant of truculent aspect, having ruby eyes and mother-o'-pearl tusks and a howdah on its back, accommodating a "Gladsome Days" pull-off kalendar.
"You're such nuts on mascots and gadgets, best childie, I thought I'd get you this beggar for a keepsake. Saw it in a shop in Bond Street. It goes like so!"—Franky demonstrated by sticking a penknife-blade under the liberal whack of leaves that had become obsolete since the First of January. "Rather a neat notion. Something appropriate for every day o' the week," he continued, indicating a rhymed distich appearing beneath the current date. This, the first of many utterances on the part of the Silver Elephant, ranging from the idiotically inappropriate to the appositely malign, ran as follows:
"Be very kind to Pussy-cat And handle her with care: You would not pull her by the tail If her claws grew out of there!"
"Well, if that's the best this beast can do—" began Margot, sternly surveying the proboscidean. Then she softened, meeting Franky's disappointed eyes, and said it was a lovely present and she would always keep it on the table by her bedside. She and Franky were almost lovers again for the brief time that yet remained to them. She even endured without open resentment his continual references to the child.
"Take care of you both for my sake, won't you, Kittums? Of course, long before Christmas I hope to be back with you! But"—he tenderly crushed the little figure to him as he sat on the bedside holding it embraced—"but if by any old chance I get sent in—remember what kind of man I'd like my boy to be. Sanguine, ain't I?—on the point of his being a boy—putting a pink geranium in the front window before the house is built, but still——"
He laughed awkwardly, and brushed off a shining drop of moisture that splashed on the slender brown leather strap that marks the officer's caste. A third star showed on his khaki sleeve, but he had made no reference to it, and Kittums omitted to ask what it meant. He kissed her gravely on the eyes and lips and forehead, unwound the slender arms that clasped his neck, and gently laid her back upon the pillows. Then with: "Good-night and God bless you!" he went quietly out of the room. The hall-door shut and a servant put the chain up, and the waiting car slid away to the Tower. For "I'm to kip down at the old shop for to-night," Franky had explained, "and shepherd five hundred strengthy foot-sloggers—fat as prize bullocks every one of 'em!—to Nowhere in Particular in the morning."
Margot cried a little when the hall-door shut, and then fell soundly asleep among her big pillows. Waking as a ray of five o'clock sunshine penetrated between the blue-green silk blinds and the lacy curtains, to realise that Something had gone out of her life.
Something wilful, petulant Kittums had not valued until the hall-door had shut behind it. Something that—crawling, shuddering thought!—might never return. She sat up in bed, hugging her knees and staring into a Future without any Franky in it, a tragic little picture against the background of the big frilled pillows, her great dark eyes wide and wild under her tumbled gold brown hair-waves, her paleness enhanced by the rose-silk night-sheath, a maelstrom of thought, emotions, apprehensions, terrors, whirling in the humming-bird brain.
The ray of sunshine presently touched the face of the electric clock and elicited a malicious twinkle from the ruby eyes of the Silver Elephant. Remembering her promise, Kittums put out a hand, pulled off the paper-slip bearing the date of the previous day and read:
"May All Your Hours
Be Bright As This!"