“We owe nothing,” the Colonel said. “Not a thing.”
“Will you marry me and will we have the five sons?”
“I will! I will.”
“The thing is that, would you?”
“Of course.”
“Kiss me once again and make the buttons of your uniform hurt me but not too much.”
They stood there and kissed each other true. “I have a disappointment for you, Richard,” she said. “I have a disappointment about everything.”
She said it as a flat statement and it came to the Colonel in the same way as a message came from one of the three battalions, when the battalion commander spoke the absolute truth and told you the worst.
“You are positive?”
“Yes.”
“My poor Daughter,” he said.
Now there was nothing dark about the word and she was his Daughter, truly, and he pitied her and loved her.
“No matter,” he said. “You comb yourself and make a new mouth and all that, and we will have a good dinner.”
“Say once more, first, that you love me and make the buttons very tight.”
“I love you,” the Colonel said quite formally.
Then he whispered into her ear as gently as he knew how to whisper, as his whisper was when they are fifteen feet away and you are a young lieutenant on a patrol, “I love you only, my best and last and only and one true love.”
