The relations between the
two brothers--always a little peculiar--became more and more
difficult, and the Major seemed to enjoy pitting them against each
other.
At length the day of the review arrived. Derrick was not looking
well, his eyes were heavy with sleeplessness, and the Major had been
unusually exasperating at breakfast that morning, so that he started
with a jaded, worn-out feeling that would not wholly yield even to
the excitement of this long-expected meeting with Freda. When he
found himself in the great drawing-room at Lord Probyn's house, amid
a buzz of talk and a crowd of strange faces, he was seized with one
of those sudden attacks of shyness to which he was always liable.
In fact, he had been so long alone with the old Major that this
plunge into society was too great a reaction, and the very thing he
had longed for became a torture to him.
Freda was at the other end of the room talking to Keith Collins, the
well-known member for Codrington, whose curious but attractive face
was known to all the world through the caricatures of it in 'Punch.'
I knew that she saw Derrick, and that he instantly perceived her,
and that a miserable sense of separation, of distance, of
hopelessness overwhelmed him as he looked.
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