I had plenty to think about besides Randall.  They made me Honorary Treasurer of the local Volunteer Training Corps which had just been formed.  The members not in uniform wore a red brassard with “G.R.” in black.  The facetious all over the country called them “Gorgeous Wrecks.”  I must confess that on their first few parades they did not look very military.  Their composite paunchiness, beardedness, scragginess, spectacledness, impressed me unfavourably when, from my Hosea-carriage, I first beheld them.  Marigold, who was one of the first to join and to leap into the grey uniform, tried to swagger about as an instructor.  But as the little infantry drill he had ever learned had all been changed since the Boer War, I gathered an unholy joy from seeing him hang like a little child on the lips of the official Sergeant Instructor of the corps.  In the evenings he and I mugged up the text-books together; and with the aid of the books I put him through all the new physical exercises.  I was a privileged person.  I could take my own malicious pleasure out of Marigold’s enforced humility, but I would be hanged if anybody else should.  Sergeant Marigold should instruct those volunteers as he once instructed the recruits of his own battery.  So I worked with him like a nigger until there was nothing in the various drills of a modern platoon that he didn’t know, and nothing that he could not do with the mathematical precision of his splendid old training.

One night during the thick of it Betty came in.  I waved her into a corner of the library out of the way, and she smoked cigarettes and looked on at the performance.  Now I come to think of it, we must have afforded an interesting spectacle.  There was the gaunt, one-eyed, preposterously wigged image clad in undervest and shrunken yellow flannel trousers which must have dated from his gym-instructor days in the nineties, violently darting down on his heels, springing up, kicking out his legs, shooting out his arms, like an inspired marionette, all at the words of command shouted in fervent earnest by a shrivelled up little cripple in a wheel-chair.

When it was over—­the weather was warm—­he passed a curved forefinger over his dripping forehead, cut himself short in an instinctive action and politely dried his hand on the seat of his trousers.  Then his one eye gleamed homage at Betty and he drew himself up to attention.

“Do you mind, sir, if I send in Ellen with the drinks?”

I nodded.  “You’ll do very well with a drink yourself, Marigold.”

“It’s thirsty work and weather, sir.”

He made a queer movement of his hand—­it would have been idiotic of him to salute—­but he had just been dismissed from military drill, so his hand went up to the level of his breast and—­right about turn—­he marched out of the room.  Betty rose from her corner and threw herself in her usual impetuous way on the ground by my chair.

“Do you know,” she cried, “you two dear old things were too funny for words.”