‘Ah, oui, madame,’ he said with a gallant effort.

‘Mais vous n’avez pas compris, monsieur.’

‘Ah, oui, compris, madame. Glad to be back, compris? Cushy avec mademoiselle.’

The expression on the face of the ménagère passed very rapidly from astonishment to indignation, and from indignation to wrath. Before Corporal Greenstreet realized what was about to happen, she had swung a muscular arm, and landed a terrific box on his ear, almost knocking him into a scuttle containing split wood and briquettes for the stove. Bourne, thinking with a rapidity only outstripped by her precipitate action, decided that the Hindustani ‘cushy’ and the French ‘coucher’ must have been derived from the same root in Sanskrit. He interposed heroically between the fury and her victim, who without any hesitation had adopted the role of a non-combatant in trying circumstances.

‘Mais madame, madame,’ he protested, struggling to overcome his mirth. ‘Vous vous méprenez. “Cushy” est un mot d’ argot militaire qui veut dire doux, confortable, tout ce qu’il y a de plus commode. Monsieur le caporal ne veut pas dire autre chose. Il veut vous faire un petit compliment. Calmez-vous. Rassurez-vous, madame. Je vous assure que monsieur a des manieres tres correctes, tres convenables. Il est un jeune homme bien élevé. Il n’a pour vous, ainsi que pour mademoiselle, que des sentiments tres respectueux.’

Bourne’s French was only sufficient, when circumstances allowed him an economical use of it; and these were enough to make him a bankrupt even in English. Madame was now moving about her kitchen with the fine frenzy of a prima donna in one of the more ecstatic moments of grand opera. Every emotion has its appropriate rhythm, and she achieved what was proper to her own spontaneously, through sheer natural genius. Perhaps she was too great an artist to allow Bourne’s words to have their full effect at once. She could not plunge from this sublimity to an immediate bathos. Innocence in adversity was the expression patent on the corporal’s face, and perhaps the sight of it brought into her mind some mitigating element of doubt; which she resisted at first as though it were a mere feminine weakness.

‘Nous nous retirons, madame, pour vous donner le temps de calmer vos nerfs,’ said Bourne, with some severity. ‘Nous regrettons infiniment ce malentendu. Monsieur le caporal vous fera ses excuses quand vous serez plus à même d’accepter ses explications. Permettez, madame. Je suis vraiment désolé.’

He swept the corporal out of the house, and into the street, and finding a secluded corner, collapsed.

‘What the fuckin’ ’ell is’t all about?’ the awed but exasperated corporal inquired. ‘I go into th’ ’ouse, an’ only get as far as ’ow d’you do, when she ’ands me out this bloody packet. You’ll get a thick ear yourself, if you don’t stop laffin’.’

Bourne, when he had recovered sufficiently, explained that the housekeeper had understood him to express his intention of going to bed with her mistress.

‘What! D’you mean it? Why, the old girl’s about sixty!’