Yes, the Major spoke. Sir Anthony is a peppery little person and the audience enjoyed the cayenne piquancy of his remarks. The red-tabbed Lieutenant-Colonel spoke. He was a bit dull. The elderly orator from London roused enthusiastic cheers. The wounded sergeant, on crutches, displaying a foot like a bandaged mop, brought tears into the eyes of many women and evoked hoarse cheers from the old men. I spoke from my infernal chair, and I think I was quite a success with the good fellows in khaki. But the only men we wanted to appeal to had studiously refrained from being present. The whole affair was a fiasco.

When we got home, Marigold, who had stood behind my chair during the proceedings, said to me:

"I think I know personally about thirty slackers in this town, sir, and I'm more than a match for any three of them put together. Suppose I was to go the rounds, so to speak, and say to each of them, 'You young blighter, if you don't come with me and enlist, I 'll knock hell out of you!'—and, if he didn't come, I did knock hell out of him—what exactly would happen, sir?"

"You would be summoned," said I, "for thirty separate cases of assault and battery. Reckoning the penalty at six months each, you would have to go to prison for fifteen years."

Marigold's one eye grew pensive and sad.

"And they call this," said he, "a free country!"

I began this chapter by remarking that for a week or two after my second interview with Randall Holmes, nothing particular happened. Then one afternoon came Sir Anthony Fenimore to see me, and with a view to obtaining either my advice or my sympathy, reopened the story of his daughter Althea found drowned in the canal eleven months before.

What he considered a most disconcerting light had just been cast on the tragedy by Maria Beccles. This lady was Lady Fenimore's sister. A deadly feud, entirely of Miss Beccles' initiating and nourishing, had existed between them for years. They had been neither on speaking nor on writing terms. Miss Beccles, ten years Lady Fenimore's senior, was, from all I had heard, a most disagreeable and ill-conditioned person, as different from my charming friend Edith Fenimore as the ugly old sisters were from Cinderella. Although she belonged to a good old South of England family, she had joined, for reasons known only to herself, the old Free Kirk of Scotland, found a congenial Calvinistic centre in Galloway, and after insulting her English relations and friends in the most unconscionable way, cut herself adrift from them for ever. "Mad as a hatter," Sir Anthony used to say, and, never having met the lady, I agreed with him. She loathed her sister, she detested Anthony, and she appeared to be coldly indifferent to the fact of the existence of her nephew Oswald. But for Althea, and for Althea alone, she entertained a curious, indulgent affection, and every now and then Althea went to spend a week or so in Galloway, where she contrived to obtain considerable amusement. Aunt Maria did both herself and her visitors very well, said Althea, who had an appreciative eye for the material blessings of life. Althea walked over the moors and fished and took Aunt Maria's cars out for exercise and, except whistle on the Sabbath, seemed to do exactly what she liked.

Now, in January 1914, Althea announced to her parents that Aunt Maria had summoned her for a week to Galloway. Sir Anthony stuffed her handbag with five-pound notes, and at an early hour of the morning sent her up in the car to London in charge of the chauffeur. The chauffeur returned saying that he had bought Miss Althea's ticket at Euston and seen her start off comfortably on her journey. A letter or two had been received by the Fenimores from Galloway, and letters they had written to Galloway had been acknowledged by Althea. She returned to Wellingsford in due course, with bonny cheeks and wind-swept eyes, and told us all funny little stories about Aunt Maria. No one thought anything more about it until one fine afternoon in May, 1915, when Maria Beccles walked unexpectedly into the drawing-room of Wellings Park, while Sir Anthony and Lady Fenimore were at tea.

"My dear Edith," she said to her astounded hostess, who had not seen her for fifteen years. "In this orgy of hatred and strife that is going on in the world, it seems ridiculous to go on hating and fighting one's own family. We must combine against the Germans and hate them. Let us be friends."

"Mad as Crazy Jane," said Sir Anthony, telling me the story. But I, who had never heard Aunt Maria's side of the dispute, thought it very high-spirited of the old lady to come and hold out the olive-branch in so uncompromising a fashion.

Lady Fenimore then said that she had never wished to quarrel with Maria, and Sir Anthony declared that her patriotic sentiments did her credit, and that he was proud to receive her under his roof, and in a few minutes Maria was drinking tea and discussing the war in the most contented way in the world.

"I didn't write to you on the occasion of the death of your two children because you knew I didn't like you," said this outspoken lady. "I hate hypocrisy. Also I thought that tribulation might chasten you in the eyes of the Lord. I've discussed it with our Minister, a poor body, but a courageous man. He told me I was unchristian. Now, what with all this universal massacre going on and my unregenerate longing, old woman as I am, to wade knee-deep in German blood, I don't know what the devil I am."

The more Anthony told me of Aunt Maria, the more I liked her.

"Can't I come round and make her acquaintance?" I cried. "She's the sort of knotty, solid human thing that I should love. No wonder Althea was fond of her."

"This happened a week ago. She only stayed a night," replied Sir Anthony. "I wish to God we had never seen her or heard of her."

And then the good, heart-wrung little man, who had been beating about the bush for half an hour, came straight to the point.

"You remember Althea's visit to Scotland in January last year?"

"Perfectly," said I.

He rose from his chair and looked at me in wrinkled anguish.

"She never went there," he said.

That was what he had come to tell me. A natural reference to the last visit of Althea to her aunt had established the stupefying fact.

"Althea's last visit was in October, 1913," said Miss Beccles.

"But we have letters from your house to prove she was with you in January," said Sir Anthony.

Most methodical and correspondence-docketing of men, he went to his library and returned with a couple of letters.

The old lady looked them through grimly.

"Pretty vague. No details. Read 'em again, Anthony."

When he had done so, she said: "Well?"

Lady Fenimore objected: "But Althea did stay with you. She must have stayed with you."

"All right, Edith," said Maria, sitting bolt upright. "Call me a liar, and have done with it. I've come here at considerable dislocation of myself and my principles, to bury the hatchet for the sake of unity against the enemy, and this is how I'm treated. I can only go back to Scotland at once."

Sir Anthony succeeded in pacifying her. The letters were evidence that Edith and himself believed that Althea was in Galloway at the time. Maria's denial had come upon them like a thunderclap, bewildering, stunning. If Althea was not in Galloway, where was she?

Maria Beccles did not reply for some time to the question. Then she took the pins out of her hat and threw it on a chair, thus symbolising the renunciation of her intention of returning forthwith to Scotland.

"Yes, Maria," said Lady Fenimore, with fear in her dark eyes, "we don't doubt your word—but, as Anthony has said, if she wasn't with you, where was she?"

"How do I know?"

Maria Beccles pointed a lean finger—she was a dark and shrivelled, gipsy-like creature. "You might as well ask the canal in which she drowned herself."

"But, my God, Anthony!" I cried, when he had got thus far, "What did you think? What did you say?"

I realised that the old lady had her social disqualifications. Plain-dealing is undoubtedly a virtue. But there are several virtues which the better class of angel keeps chained up in a dog-kennel. Of course she was acute. A mind trained in the acrobatics of Calvinistic Theology is, within a narrow compass, surprisingly agile. It jumped at one bound from the missing week in Althea's life into the black water of the canal. It was incapable, however, of appreciating the awful horror in the minds of the beholders.

"I don't know what I said," replied Sir Anthony, walking restlessly about my library. "We were struck all of a heap. As you know, we never had reason to think that the poor dear child's death was anything but an accident. We were not narrow-minded old idiots. She was a dear good girl. In a modern way she claimed her little independence. We let her have it. We trusted her. We took it for granted—you know it, Duncan, as well as I do—that, a hot night in June—not able to sleep—she had stuck on a hat and wandered about the grounds, as she had often done before, and a spirit of childish adventure had tempted her, that night, to walk round the back of the town and—and—well, until in the dark, she stepped off the tow-path by the lock gates, into nothing—and found the canal. It was an accident," he continued, with a hand on my shoulder, looking down on me in my chair. "The inquest proved that. I accepted it, as you know, as a visitation of God. Edith and I sorrowed for her like cowards. It took the war to bring us to our senses. But, now, this damned old woman comes and upsets the whole thing."

"But," said I, "after all, it was only a bow at a venture on the part of the old lady."

"I wish it were," said he, and he handed me a letter which Maria had written to him the day after her return to Scotland.

The letter contained a pretty piece of information. She had summarily discharged Elspeth Macrae, her confidential maid of five-and-twenty years' standing. Elspeth Macrae, on her own confession, had, out of love for Althea, performed the time-honoured jugglery with correspondence. She had posted in Galloway letters which she had received, under cover, from Althea, and had forwarded letters that had arrived addressed to Althea to an accommodation address in Carlisle. So have sentimental serving-maids done since the world began.

"What do you make of it?" asked Sir Anthony.

What else could I make of it but the one sorry theory? What woman employs all this subterfuge in order to obtain a weeks liberty for any other purpose than the one elementary purpose of young humanity?

We read the inevitable conclusion in each other's eyes.

"Who is the man, Duncan?"

"I suppose you have searched her desk and things?"

"Last year. Everything most carefully. It was awful—but we had to. Not a scrap of paper that wasn't innocence itself."

"It can't be anyone here," said I. "You know what the place is. The slightest spark sends gossip aflame like the fumes of petrol."

He sat down by my side and rubbed his close-cropped grey head.

"It couldn't have been young Holmes?"

The little man had a brave directness that sometimes disconcerted me. I knew the ghastly stab that every word cost him.

"She used to make mock of Randall," said I. "Don't you remember she used to call him 'the gilded poet'? Once she said he was the most lady-like young man of her acquaintance. I don't admire our young friend, but I think you're on the wrong track, Anthony."

"I don't see it," said he. "That sort of flippancy goes for nothing. Women use it as a sort of quickset hedge of protection." He bent forward and tapped me on my senseless knee. "Young Holmes always used to be in and out of the house. They had known each other from childhood. He had a distinguished Oxford career. When he won the Newdigate, she came running to me with the news, as pleased as Punch. I gave him a dinner in honour of it, if you remember."

"I remember," said I.

I did not remind him that he had made a speech which sent cold shivers down the spine of our young Apollo; that, in a fine rhetorical flourish—dear old fox-hunting ignoramus—he declared that the winner of the Newdigate carried the bays of the Laureate in his knapsack; that Randall, white-lipped with horror, murmured to Betty Fairfax, his neighbour at the table: "My God! The Poet-Laureate's unhallowed grave! I must burn the knapsack and take to a hod!" It was too tragical a conversation for light allusion.

"The poor dear child—Edith and I have sized it up—was all over him that evening."

"What more youthfully natural," said I, "than that she should carry off the hero of the occasion—her childhood's playfellow?"

"All sorts of apparently insignificant details, Duncan, taken together—especially if they fit in—very often make up a whole case for prosecution."

"You're a Chairman of Quarter Sessions," I admitted, "and so you ought to know."

"I know this," said he, "that Holmes only spent part of that Christmas vacation with his mother, and went off somewhere or the other early in January." I cudgelled back my memory into confirmation of his statement. To remember trivial incidents before the war takes a lot of cudgelling. Yes. I distinctly recollected the young man's telling me that Oxford being an intellectual hothouse and Wellingsford an intellectual Arabia Petrea, he was compelled, for the sake of his mental health, to find a period of repose in the intellectual Nature of London. I mentioned this to Sir Anthony.

"Yet," I said, "I don't think he had anything to do with it."

"Why?"

"It would have been far too much moral exertion—"

"You call it moral?" Sir Anthony burst out angrily.

I pacified him with an analysis, from my point of view, of Randall's character. Centripetal forces were too strong for the young man. I dissertated on his amours with Phyllis Gedge.

"No, my dear old friend," said I, in conclusion, "I don't think it was Randall Holmes."

Sir Anthony rose and shook his fist in my face. As I knew he meant me no bodily harm, I did not blench.

"Who was it, then?"

"Althea," said I, "often used to stay in town with your sister. Lady Greatorex has a wide circle of acquaintances. Do you know anything of the men Althea used to meet at her house?"

"Of course I don't," replied Sir Anthony. Then he sat down again with a gesture of despair. "After all, what does it matter? Perhaps it's as well I don't know who the man was, for if I did, I'd kill him!"

He set his teeth and glowered at nothing and smote his left palm with his right fist, and there was a long silence. Presently he repeated:

"I'd kill him!"

We fell to discussing the whole matter over again. Why, I asked, should we assume that the poor child was led astray by a villain? Might there not have been a romantic marriage which, for some reason we could not guess, she desired to keep secret for a tune? Had she not been bright and happy from January to June? And that night of tragedy... What more likely than that she had gone forth to keep tryst with her husband and accidentally met her death? "He arrives," said I, "waits for her. She never comes. He goes away. The next day he learns from local gossip or from newspapers what has happened. He thinks it best to keep silent and let her fair name be untouched...What have you to say against that theory?"

"Possible," he replied. "Anything conceivable within the limits of physical possibility is possible. But it isn't probable. I have an intuitive feeling that there was villainy about—and if ever I get hold of that man—God help him!"

So there was nothing more to be said.



CHAPTER X

I haven't that universal sympathy which is the most irritating attribute of saints and other pacifists. When, for instance, anyone of the fraternity arguing from the Sermon on the Mount tells me that I ought to love Germans, either I admit the obligation and declare that, as I am a miserable sinner, I have no compunction in breaking it, or, if he is a very sanctimonious saint, I remind him that, such creatures as modern Germans not having been invented on or about the year A.D. 30, the rule about loving your enemies could not possibly apply. At least I imagine I do one of these two things (sometimes, indeed, I dream gloatfully over acts of physical violence) when I read the pronouncements of such a person; for I have to my great good fortune never met him in the flesh. If there are any saintly pacifists in Wellingsford, they keep sedulously out of my way, and they certainly do not haunt my Service Club. And these are the only two places in which I have my being. Even Gedge doesn't talk of loving Germans. He just lumps all the belligerents together in one conglomerate hatred, for upsetting his comfortable social scheme.

As I say, I lack the universal sympathy of the saint. I can't like people I don't like. Some people I love very deeply; others, being of a kindly disposition, I tolerate; others again I simply detest. Now Wellingsford, like every little country town in England, is drab with elderly gentlewomen. As I am a funny old tabby myself, I have to mix with them. If I refuse invitations to take tea with them, they invite themselves to tea with me. "The poor Major," they say, "is so lonely." And they bait their little hooks and angle for gossip of which I am supposed—Heaven knows why—to be a sort of stocked pond. They don't carry home much of a catch, I assure you.... Well, of some of them I am quite fond. Mrs. Boyce, for all her shortcomings, is an old crony for whom I entertain a sincere affection. Towards Betty's aunt, Miss Fairfax, a harmless lady with a passion for ecclesiastical embroidery, I maintain an attitude of benevolent neutrality. But Mrs. Holmes, Randall's mother, and her sisters, the daughters of an eminent publicist who seems to have reared his eminence on bones of talk flung at him by Carlisle, George Eliot, Lewes, Monckton Milnes, and is now, doubtless, recording their toe-prints on the banks of Acheron, I never could and never can abide. My angel of a wife saw good in them, and she loved the tiny Randall, of whom I too was fond; so, for her sake, I always treated them with courtesy and kindness. Also for Randall's father's sake. He was a bluff, honest, stock-broking Briton who fancied pigeons and bred greyhounds for coursing, and cared less for literature and art than does the equally honest Mrs. Marigold in my kitchen. But his wife and her sisters led what they called the intellectual life. They regarded it as a heritage from their pompous ass of a father. Of course they were not eighteen-sixty, or even eighteen-eighty. They prided themselves on developing the hereditary tradition of culture to its extreme modern expression. They were of the semi-intellectual type of idiot—and, if it destroys it, the great war will have some justification—which professes to find in the dull analysis of the drab adultery and suicide of a German or Scandinavian rabbit-picker a supreme expression of human existence. All their talk was of Hauptmann and Sudermann (they dropped them patriotically, I must say, as outrageous fellows, on the outbreak of war), Strindberg, Dostoievsky—though I found they had never read either "Crime and Punishment" or "The Brothers Karamazoff"—Tolstoi, whom they didn't understand; and in art—God save the mark!—the Cubist school. That is how my poor young friend, Randall, was trained to get the worst of the frothy scum of intelligent Oxford. But even he sometimes winced at the pretentiousness of his mother and his aunts. He was a clever fellow and his knowledge was based on sound foundations. I need not say that the ladies were rather feared than loved in Wellingsford.

All this to explain why it was that when Marigold woke me from an afternoon nap with the information that Mrs. Holmes desired to see me, I scowled on him.

"Why didn't you say I was dead?"

"I told Mrs. Holmes you were asleep, sir, and she said: 'Will you be so kind as to wake him?' So what could I do, sir?"

I have never met with an idiot so helpless in the presence of a woman. He would have defended my slumbers before a charge of cavalry; but one elderly lady shoo'd him aside like a chicken.

Mrs. Holmes was shewn in, a tall, dark, thin, nervous woman wearing pince-nez and an austere sad-coloured garment.

She apologised for disturbing me.

"But," she said, sitting down on the couch, "I am in such great trouble and I could think of no one but you to advise me."

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"It's Randall. He left the house the day before yesterday, without telling any of us good-bye, and he hasn't written, and I don't know what on earth has become of him."

"Did he take any luggage?"

"Just a small suit-case. He even packed it himself, a thing he has never done at home in his life before."

This was news. The proceedings were unlike Randall, who in his goings and comings loved the domestic brass-band. To leave his home without valedictory music and vanish into the unknown, betokened some unusual perturbation of mind.

I asked whether she knew of any reason for such perturbation.

"He was greatly upset," she replied, "by the stoppage of The Albemarle Review for which he did such fine work."

I strove politely to hide my inability to condole and wagged my head sadly:

"I'm afraid there was no room for it in a be-bombed and be-shrapnelled world."

"I suppose the still small voice of reason would not be heard amid the din," she sighed. "And no other papers—except the impossible ones—would print Randall's poems and articles."

More news. This time excellent news. A publicist denied publicity is as useful as a German Field Marshal on a desert island. I asked what The Albemarle died of.

"Practically all the staff deserted what Randall called the Cause and dribbled away into the army," she replied mournfully.

As to what this precious Cause meant I did not enquire, having no wish to enter into an argument with the good lady which might have become exacerbated. Besides, she would only have parroted Randall. I had never yet detected her in the expression of an original idea.

"Perhaps he has dribbled away too?" I suggested grimly. She was silent. I bent forward. "Wouldn't you like him to dribble into the great flood?"

She lifted her lean shoulders despairingly.

"He's the only son of a widow. Even in France and Germany they're not expected to fight. But if he were different I would let him go gladly—I'm not selfish and unpatriotic, Major," she said with an unaccustomed little catch in her throat—and for the very first time I found in her something sympathetic—"but," she continued, "it seems so foolish to sacrifice all his intellectual brilliance to such crudities as fighting, when it might be employed so much more advantageously elsewhere."

"But, good God, my dear lady!" I cried. "Where are your wits? Where's your education? Where's your intelligent understanding of the daily papers? Where's your commonsense?"—I'm afraid I was brutally rude. "Can't you give a minute's thought to the situation? If there's one institution on earth that's shrieking aloud for intellectual brilliance, it's the British Army! Do you think it's a refuge for fools? Do you think any born imbecile is good enough to outwit the German Headquarters Staff? Do you think the lives of hundreds of his men—and perhaps the fate of thousands—can be entrusted to any brainless ass? An officer can't have too much brains. We're clamouring for brains. It's the healthy, brilliant-brained men like Randall that the Army's yelling for—simply yelling for," I repeated, bringing my hand down on the arm of my chair.

Two little red spots showed on each side of her thin face.

"I've never looked at it in that light before," she admitted.

"Of course I agree with you," I said diplomatically, "that Randall would be more or less wasted as a private soldier. The heroic stuff of which Thomas Atkins is made is, thank God, illimitable. But intellect is rare—especially in the ranks of God's own chosen, the British officer. And Randall is of the kind we want as officers. As for a commission, he could get one any day. I could get one for him myself. I still have a few friends. He's a good-looking chap and would carry off a uniform. Wouldn't you be proud to see him?"

A tear rolled down her cheek. I patted myself on the back for an artful fellow. But I had underrated her wit. To my chagrin she did not fall into my trap.

"It's the uncertainty that's killing me," she said. And then she burst out disconcertingly: "Do you think he has gone off with that dreadful little Gedge girl?"

Phyllis! I was a myriad miles from Phyllis. I was talking about real things. The mother, however, from her point of view, was talking of real things also. But how did she come to know about her son's amours? I thought it useless to enquire. Randall must have advertised his passion pretty widely. I replied:

"It's extremely improbable. In the first place Phyllis Gedge isn't dreadful, but a remarkably sweet and modest young woman, and in the second place she won't have anything to do with him."

"That's nonsense," she said, bridling.

"Why?"

"Because—"

A gesture and a smile completed the sentence. That a common young person should decline to have dealings with her paragon was incredible.

"I can find out in a minute," I smiled, "whether she is still in Wellingsford."

I wheeled myself to the telephone on my writing-table and rang up Betty at the hospital.

"Do you know where Phyllis Gedge is?"

Betty's voice came. "Yes. She's here. I've just left her to come to speak to you. Why do you want to know?"

"Never mind so long as she is safe and sound. There's no likelihood of her running away or eloping?"

Betty's laughter rang over the wires. "What lunacy are you talking? You might as well ask me whether I'm going to elope with you."

"I don't think you're respectful, Betty," I replied. "Good-bye."

I rang off and reported Betty's side of the conversation to my visitor.

"On that score," said I, "you can make your mind quite easy."

"But where can the boy have gone?" she cried.

"Into the world somewhere to learn wisdom," I said, and in order to show that I did not speak ironically, I wheeled myself to her side and touched her hand. "I think his swift brain has realised at last that all his smart knowledge hasn't brought him a little bit of wisdom worth a cent. I shouldn't worry. He's working out his salvation somehow, although he may not know it."

"Do you really think so?"

"I do," said I. "And if he finds that the path of wisdom leads to the German trenches—will you be glad or sorry?"

She grappled with the question in silence for a moment or two. Then she broke down and, to my dismay, began to cry.

"Do you suppose there's a woman in England that, in her heart of hearts, doesn't want her men folk to fight?"

I only allow the earlier part of this chapter to stand in order to show how a man quite well-meaning, although a trifle irascible, may be wanting in Christian charity and ordinary understanding; and of how many tangled knots of human motive, impulse, and emotion this war is a solvent. You see, she defended her son to the last, adopting his own specious line of argument; but at the last came the breaking-point....

The rest of our interview was of no great matter. I did my best to reassure and comfort her; and when I next saw Marigold, I said affably:

"You did quite well to wake me."

"I thought I was acting rightly, sir. Mr. Randall having bolted, so to speak, it seemed only natural that Mrs. Holmes should come to see you."

"You knew that Mr. Randall had bolted and you never told me?"

I glared indignantly. Marigold stiffened himself—the degree of stiffness beyond his ordinary inflexibility of attitude could only have been ascertained by a vernier, but that degree imparted an appreciable dignity to his demeanour.

"I beg pardon, sir, but lately I've noticed that my little bits of local news haven't seemed to be welcome."

"Marigold," said I, "don't be an ass."

"Very good, sir."

"My mind," said I, "is in an awful muddle about all sorts of things that are going on in this town. So I should esteem it a favour if you would tell me at once any odds and ends of gossip you may pick up. They may possibly be important."

"And if I have any inferences to draw from what I hear," said he gravely, fixing me with his clear eye, "may I take the liberty of acquainting you with them?"

"Certainly."

"Very good, sir," said Marigold.

Now what was Marigold going to draw inferences about? That was another puzzle. I felt myself being drawn into a fog-filled labyrinth of intrigue in which already groping were most of the people I knew. What with the mysterious relations between Betty and Boyce and Gedge, what with young Dacre's full exoneration of Boyce, what with young Randall's split with Gedge and his impeccable attitude towards Phyllis, things were complicated enough; Sir Anthony's revelations regarding poor Althea and his dark surmises concerning Randall complicated them still more; and now comes Mrs. Holmes to tell me of Randall's mysterious disappearance.

"A plague on the whole lot!" I exclaimed wrathfully.

I dined that evening with the Fenimores. My dear Betty was there too, the only other guest, looking very proud and radiant. A letter that morning from Willie Connor informed her that the regiment, by holding a trench against an overwhelming German attack, had achieved glorious renown. The Brigadier-General had specially congratulated the Colonel, and the Colonel had specially complimented Willie on the magnificent work of his company. Of course there was a heavy price in casualties—poor young Etherington, whom we all knew, for instance, blown to atoms—but Willie, thank God! was safe.

"I wonder what would happen to me, if Willie were to get the V.C. I think I should go mad with pride!" she exclaimed with flushed cheeks, forgetful of poor young Etherington, a laughter-loving boy of twenty, who had been blown to atoms. It is strange how apparently callous this universal carnage has made the noblest and the tenderest of men and women. We cling passionately to the lives of those near and dear to us. But as to those near and dear to others, who are killed—well—we pay them the passing tribute not even of a tear, but only of a sign. They died gloriously for their country. What can we say more? If we—we survivors, not only invalids and women and other stay-at-homes, but also comrades on the field—were riven to our souls by the piteous tragedy of splendid youth destroyed in its flower, we could not stand the strain, we should weep hysterically, we should be broken folk. But a merciful Providence steps in and steels our hearts. The loyal hearts are there beating truly; and in order that they should beat truly and stoutly, they are given this God-sent armour.

So, when we raised our glasses and drank gladly to the success of Willie Connor the living, and put from our thoughts Frank Etherington the dead, you must not account it to us as lack of human pity. You must be lenient in your judgment of those who are thrown into the furnace of a great war.

Lady Fenimore smiled on Betty. "We should all be proud, my dear, if Captain Connor won the Victoria Cross. But you mustn't set your heart on it. That would be foolish. Hundreds of thousands of men deserve the V.C. ten times a day, and they can't all be rewarded."

Betty laughed gaily at good Lady Fenimore's somewhat didactic reproof. "You know I'm not an absolute idiot. Fancy the poor dear coming home all over bandages and sticking-plaster. 'Where's your V. C?' 'I haven't got it.' 'Then go back at once and get it or I shan't love you.' Poor darling!" Suddenly the laughter in her eyes quickened into something very bright and beautiful. "There's not a woman in England prouder of her husband than I am. No V.C. could possibly reward him for what he has done. But I want it for myself. I'd like my babies to cut their teeth on it."

When I went out to the Boer War, the most wonderful woman on earth said to me on parting:

"Wherever you are, dear, remember that I am always with you in spirit and soul and heart and almost in body."

And God knows she was. And when I returned a helpless cripple she gathered me in her brave arms on the open quay at Southampton, and after a moment or two of foolishness, she said:

"Do you know, when I die, what you'll find engraven on my heart?"

"No," said I.

"Your D.S.O. ribbon."

So when Betty talked about her babies and the little bronze cross, my eyes grew moist and I felt ridiculously sentimental.

Not a word, of course, was spoken before Betty of the new light, or the new darkness, whichsoever you will, that had been cast on the tragedy of Althea. I could not do otherwise than agree with the direct-spoken old lady who had at once correlated the adventure in Carlisle with the plunge into the Wellingsford Canal. And so did Sir Anthony. They were very brave, however, the little man and Edith, in their dinner-talk with Betty. But I saw that the past fortnight had aged them both by a year or more. They had been stabbed in their honour, their trust, and their faith. It was a secret terror that stalked at their side by day and lay stark at their side by night. It was only when the ladies had left us that Sir Anthony referred to the subject.

"I suppose you know that young Randall Holmes has bolted."

"So his mother informed me to-day."

He pricked his ears. "Does she know where he has gone to?"

"No," said I.

"What did I tell you?" said Sir Anthony.

I held up my glass of port to the light and looked through it.

"A lot of damfoolishness, my dear old friend," said I.

He grew angry. A man doesn't like to be coldly called a damfool at his own table. He rose on his spurs, in his little red bantam way. Was I too much of an idiot to see the connection? As soon as the Carlisle business became known, this young scoundrel flies the country. Couldn't I see an inch before my blind nose? Forbearing to question this remarkable figure of speech, I asked him how so confidential a matter could have become known.

"Everything gets known in this infernal little town," he retorted.

"That's where you're mistaken," said I. "Half everything gets known—the unimportant half. The rest is supplied by malicious or prejudiced invention."

We discussed the question after the futile way of men until we went into the drawing-room, where Betty played and sang to us until it was time to go home.

Marigold was about to lift me into the two-seater when Betty, who had been lurking in her car a little way off, ran forward.

"Would it bore you if I came in for a quarter of an hour?"

"Bore me, my dear?" said I. "Of course not."

So a short while afterwards we were comfortably established in my library.

"You rang me up to-day about Phyllis Gedge."

"I did," said I.

She lit a cigarette and seated herself on the fender-stool. She has an unconscious knack of getting into easy, loose-limbed attitudes. I said admiringly:

"Do you know you're a remarkably well-favoured young person?"

And as soon as I said it, I realised what a tremendous factor Betty was in my circumscribed life. What could I do without her sweet intimacy? If Willie Connor's Territorial regiment, like so many others, had been ordered out to India, and she had gone with him, how blank would be the days and weeks and months! I thanked God for granting me her graciousness.

She smiled and blew me a kiss. "That's very gratifying to know," she said. "But it has nothing to do with Phyllis."

"Well, what about Phyllis?"

"I'll tell you," she replied.

And she told me. Her story was not of world-shaking moment, but it interested me. I have since learned its substantial correctness and am able to add some supplementary details.

You see, things were like this.... In order to start I must go back some years.... I have always had a warm corner in my heart for little Phyllis Gedge, ever since she was a blue-eyed child. My wife had a great deal to do with it. She was a woman of dauntless courage and clear vision into the heart of things. I find many a reflection of her in Betty. Perhaps that is why I love Betty so dearly.

Some strange, sweet fool feminine of gentle birth and deplorable upbringing fell in love with a vehemently socialistic young artisan by the name of Gedge and married him. Her casual but proud-minded family wiped her off the proud family slate. She brought Phyllis into the world and five years afterwards found herself be-Gedged out of existence. They were struggling people in those days, and before her death my wife used to employ her, when she could, for household sewing and whatnot. And tiny Phyllis, in a childless home, became a petted darling. When my great loneliness came upon me, it was a solace to have the little dainty prattling thing to spend an occasional hour in my company. Gedge, an excellent workman, set up as a contractor. He took my modest home under his charge. A leaky tap, a broken pane, a new set of bookshelves, a faulty drainpipe—all were matters for Gedge. I abhorred his politics but I admired his work, and I continued, with Mrs. Marigold's motherly aid, to make much of Phyllis.

Gedge, for queer motives of his own, sent her to as good a school as he could afford, as a matter of fact an excellent school, one where she met girls of a superior social class and learned educated speech and graceful manners. Her holidays, poor child, were somewhat dreary, for her father, an anti-social creature, had scarce a friend in the town. Save for here and there an invitation to tea from Betty or myself, she did not cross the threshold of a house in Wellingsford. But to my house, all through her schooldays and afterwards, Phyllis came, and on such occasions Mrs. Marigold prepared teas of the organic lusciousness dear to the heart of a healthy girl.

Now, here comes the point of all this palaver. Young Master Randall used also to come to my house. Now and then by chance they met there. They were good boy and girl friends.

I want to make it absolutely clear that her acquaintance with Randall was not any vulgar picking-up-in-the-street affair.

When she left school, her father made her his book-keeper, secretary, confidential clerk. Anybody turning into the office to summon Gedge to repair a roof or a burst boiler had a preliminary interview with Phyllis. Young Randall, taking over the business of the upkeep of his mother's house, gradually acquired the habit of such preliminary interviews. The whole imbroglio was very simple, very natural. They had first met at my own rich cake and jam-puff bespread tea-table. When Randall went into the office to speak, presumably, about a defective draught in the kitchen range, and really about things quite different, the ethics of the matter depended entirely on Randall's point of view. Their meetings had been contrived by no unmaidenly subterfuge on the part of Phyllis. She knew him to be above her in social station. She kept him off as long as she could. But que voulez-vous? Randall was a very good-looking, brilliant, and fascinating fellow; Phyllis was a dear little human girl. And it is the human way of such girls to fall in love with such fascinating, brilliant fellows. I not only hold a brief for Phyllis, but I am the judge, too, and having heard all the evidence, I deliver a verdict overwhelmingly in her favour. Given the circumstances as I have stated them, she was bound to fall in love with Randall, and in doing so committed not the little tiniest speck of a peccadillo.

My first intimation of tender relations between them came from my sight of them in February in Wellings Park. Since then, of course, I have much which I will tell you as best I may.

So now for Betty's story, confirmed and supplemented by what I have learned later. But before plunging into the matter, I must say that when Betty had ended I took up my little parable and told her of all that Randall had told me concerning his repudiation of Gedge. And Betty listened with a curiously stony face and said nothing.

When Betty puts on that face of granite I am quite unhappy. That is why I have always hated the statues of Egypt. There is something beneath their cold faces that you can't get at.



CHAPTER XI

Gedge bitterly upbraided his daughter, both for her desertion of his business and her criminal folly in abandoning it so as to help mend the shattered bodies of fools and knaves who, by joining the forces of militarism, had betrayed the Sacred Cause of the International Solidarity of Labour. His first ground for complaint was scarcely tenable; with his dwindling business the post of clerk had dwindled into a sinecure. To sit all day at the receipt of imaginary custom is not a part fitted for a sane and healthy young human being. Still, from Gedge's point of view her defection was a grievance; but that she could throw in her lot openly with the powers of darkness was nothing less than an outrage.

I suppose, in a kind of crabbed way, the crabbed fellow was fond of Phyllis. She was pretty. She had dainty tricks of dress. She flitted, an agreeable vision, about his house. He liked to hear her play the piano, not because he had any ear for music, but because it tickled his vanity to reflect that he, the agricultural labourer's son and apprentice to a village carpenter, was the possessor both of a Broadway Grand and of a daughter who, entirely through his efforts, had learned to play on it. Like most of his political type, he wallowed in his own peculiar snobbery. But of anything like companionship between father and daughter there had existed very little. While railing, wherever he found ears into which to rail, against the vicious luxury and sordid shallowness of the upper middle classes, his instinctive desire to shine above his poorer associates had sent Phyllis to an upper middle class school. Now Gedge had a certain amount of bookish and political intelligence. Phyllis inheriting the intellectual equipment of her sentimental fool of a mother, had none, Oh! she had a vast fund of ordinary commonsense. Of that I can assure you. A bit of hard brain fibre from her father had counteracted any over-sentimental folly in the maternal heritage. And she came back from school a very ladylike little person. If pressed, she could reel off all kinds of artificial scraps of knowledge, like a dear little parrot. But she had never heard of Karl Marx and didn't want to hear. She had a vague notion that International Socialism was a movement in favour of throwing bombs at monarchs and of seizing the wealth of the rich in order to divide it among the poor—and she regarded it as abominable. When her father gave her Fabian Society tracts to read, he might just as well, for all her understanding of the argument, set her down to a Treatise on the Infinitesimal Calculus. Her brain stood blank before such abstract disquisitions. She loved easily comprehended poetry and novels that made her laugh or cry and set her mind dancing round the glowing possibilities of life; all disastrous stuff abhorred by the International Socialist, to whom the essential problems of existence are of no interest whatever. So, after a few futile attempts to darken her mind, Gedge put her down as a mere fool woman, and ceased to bother his head about her intellectual development. That came to him quite naturally. There is no Turk more contemptuous of his womankind's political ideas than the Gedges of our enlightened England. But on other counts she was a distinct asset. He regarded her with immense pride, as a more ornamental adjunct to his house than any other county builder and contractor could display, and, recognising that she was possessed of some low feminine cunning in the way of adding up figures and writing letters, made use of her in his office as general clerical factotum.

When the war broke out, he discovered, to his horror, that Phyllis actually had political ideas—unshakable, obstinate ideas opposed to his own—and that he had been nourishing in his bosom a viperous patriot. Phyllis, for her part, realised with equal horror the practical significance of her father's windy theories. When Randall, who had stolen her heart, took to visiting the house, in order, as far as she could make out, to talk treason with her father, the strain of the situation grew more than she could bear. She fled to Betty for advice. Betty promptly stepped in and whisked her off to the hospital.

It was on the morning on which Randall interviewed me in the garden, the morning after he had broken with Gedge that Phyllis, having a little off-time, went home. She found her father in the office making out a few bills. He thrust forward his long chin and aggressive beard and scowled at her.

"Oh, it's you, is it? Come at last where your duty calls you, eh?"

"I always come when I can, father," she replied.

She bent down and kissed his cheek. He caught her roughly round the waist and, leaning back in his chair, looked up at her sourly.

"How long are you going on defying me like this?"

She tried to disengage herself, but his arm was too strong. "Oh, father," she said, rather wearily, "don't let us go over this old argument again."

"But suppose I find some new argument? Suppose I send you packing altogether, refuse to contribute further to your support. What then?"

She started at the threat but replied valiantly: "I should have to earn my own living."

"How are you going to do it?"

"There are heaps of ways."

He laughed. "There ain't; as you'd soon find out. They don't even pay you for being scullery-maid to a lot of common soldiers."

She protested against that view of her avocation. In the perfectly appointed Wellingsford Hospital she had no scullery work. She was a probationer, in training as a nurse. He still gripped her.

"The particular kind of tomfoolery you are up to doesn't matter. We needn't quarrel. I've another proposition to put before you—much more to your fancy, I think. You like this Mr. Randall Holmes, don't you?"

She shivered a little and flushed deep red. Her father had never touched on the matter before. She said, straining away:

"I don't want to talk about Mr. Holmes."

"But I do. Come, my dear. In this life there must be always a certain amount of give and take. I'm not the man to drive a one-sided bargain. I'll make you a fair offer—as between father and daughter. I'll wipe out all that's past. In leaving me like this, when misfortune has come upon me, you've been guilty of unfilial conduct—no one can deny it But I'll overlook everything, forgive you fully and take you to my heart again and leave you free to do whatever you like without interfering with your opinions, if you'll promise me one thing—"

"I know what you're going to say." She twisted round on him swiftly. "I 'll promise at once. I'll never marry Mr. Holmes. I've already told him I won't marry him."

Surprise relaxed his grip. She took swift advantage and sheered away to the other side of the table. He rose and brought down his hand with a thump.

"You refused him? Why, you silly little baggage, my condition is that you should marry him. You're sweet on him aren't you?"

"I detest him," cried Phyllis. "Why should I marry him?"

Her eyes, young and pure, divined some sordid horror behind eyes crafty and ignoble. Once before she had had such a fleeting, uncomprehended vision into the murky depths of the man's soul. This was some time ago. In the routine of her secretarial duties she had, one morning, opened and read a letter, not marked "Private" or "Personal," whose tenor she could scarcely understand. When she handed it to her father, he smiled, vouchsafed a specious explanation, and looked at her in just the same crafty and ignoble fashion, and she shrank away frightened. The matter kept her awake for a couple of nights. Then, for sheer easing of her heart, she went to her adored Betty Fairfax, her Lady Patroness and Mother Confessor, who, being wise and strong, and possessing the power of making her kind eyes unfathomable, laughed, bade her believe her father's explanation, and sent her away comforted. The incident passed out of her mind. But now memory smote her, as she shrank from her father's gaze and the insincere smile on his thin lips.

"For one thing," he replied after a pause, pulling his straggly beard, "your poor dear mother was a lady, and if she had lived she would have wanted you to marry a gentleman. It's for her sake I've given you an education that fits you to consort with gentlefolk—just for her sake—don't make any mistake about it, for I've always hated the breed. If I've violated my principles in order to meet her wishes, I think you ought to meet them too. You wouldn't like to marry a small tradesman or a working man, would you?"

"I'm not going to marry anybody," cried Phyllis. She was only a pink and white, very ordinary little girl. I have no idealisations or illusions concerning Phyllis. But she had a little fine steel of character running through her. It flashed on Gedge.

"I don't want to marry anybody," she declared. "But I'd sooner marry a bricklayer who was fighting for his country than a fine gentleman like Mr. Holmes who wasn't. I'd sooner die," she cried passionately.

"Then go and die and be damned to you!" snarled Gedge, planting himself noisily in his chair. "I've no use for khaki-struck drivelling idiots. I've no use for patriots. Bah! Damn patriots! The upper classes are out for all they can get, and they befool the poor imbecile working man with all their highfalutin phrases to get it for them at the cost of his blood. I've no use for them, I tell you. And I've no use either for undutiful daughters. I've no use for young women who blow hot and cold. Haven't I seen you with the fellow? Do you think I'm a blind dodderer? Do you think I haven't kept an eye on you? Haven't I seen you blowing as hot as you please? And now because he refuses to be a blinking idiot and have his guts blown out in this war of fools and knaves and capitalists, you blast him like a three-farthing iceberg."

Everything in her that was tender, maidenly, English, shrank lacerated. But the steel held her. She put both her hands on the table and bent over towards him.

"But, father, except that he's a gentleman, you haven't told me why you want me to marry Mr. Holmes."

He fidgeted with his fingers. "Haven't you a spark of affection for me left?"

She said dutifully, "Yes, father."

"I want you to marry him. I've set my heart on it. It has been the one bright hope in my life for months. Can't you marry him because you love me?"

"One generally marries because one loves the man one's going to marry," said Phyllis.

"But you do love him," cried Gedge. "Either you're just a wanton little hussy or you must care for the fellow."

"I don't. I hate him. And I don't want to have anything more to do with him." The tears came. "He's a pro-German and I won't have anything to do with pro-Germans."

She fled precipitately from the office into the street and made a blind course to the hospital; feeling, in dumb misery, that she had committed the unforgivable sin of casting off her father and, at the same time, that she had made stalwart proclamation of her faith. If ever a good, loyal little heart was torn into piteous shreds, that little heart was Phyllis's.

In the bare X-ray room of the hospital, which happened to be vacant, Betty sat on the one straight-backed wooden chair, while a weeping damsel on the uncarpeted floor sobbed in her lap and confessed her sins and sought absolution.

Of course Gedge was a fool. If I, or any wise, diplomatic, tactful person like myself, had found it necessary to tackle a young woman on the subject of a matrimonial alliance, we should have gone about the business in quite a different way. But what could you expect from an anarchical Turk like Gedge?

Phyllis, not knowing whether she were outcast and disinherited or not, found, of course, a champion in Betty, who, in her spacious manner, guaranteed her freedom from pecuniary worries for the rest of her life. But Phyllis was none the less profoundly unhappy, and it took a whole convoy of wounded to restore her to cheerfulness. You can't attend to a poor brave devil grinning with pain, while a surgeon pokes a six-inch probe down a sinus in search of bits of bone or shrapnel, and be acutely conscious of your own two-penny-half-penny little miseries. Many a heartache, in this wise, has been cured in the Houses of Pain.

Now, nothing much would have happened, I suppose, if Phyllis, driven from the hospital by superior decree that she should take fresh air and exercise, had not been walking some days afterwards across the common by the canal. Bordering the latter, Wellingsford has an avenue of secular chestnuts of which it is inordinately proud. Dispersed here and there are wooden benches sanctified by generations of lovers. Carven thereon are the presentments, often interlaced, of hearts that have long since ceased to beat; lonely hearts transfixed by arrows, which in all probability survived the wound and inspired the owner to the parentage of a dozen children; initials once, individually, the record of many a romance, but now, collectively, merely an alphabet run mad.

Phyllis entered the avenue, practically deserted at midday, and rested, a pathetically lonely little grey-uniformed figure on one of the benches. On the common, some distance behind her, stretched the lines of an Army Service train, with mules and waggons, and here and there a tent. In front of her, beyond the row of trees, was the towing-path; an old horse in charge of a boy jogged by, pulling something of which only a moving stove pipe like a periscope was visible above the bank. Overhead the chestnuts rioted in broad leaf and pink and white blossom, showing starry bits of blue sky and admitting arrow shafts of spring sunshine. A dirty white mongrel dog belonging to the barge came up to her, sniffed, and made friends; then, at last obeying a series of whistles from the boy, looked at her apologetically and trotted off. Her gaze followed him wistfully, for he was a very human dear dog, and with a sympathetic understanding of all her difficulties in his deep topaz eyes. After that she had as companions a couple of butterflies and a bumble-bee and a perky, portly robin who hopped within an inch of her feet and looked up at her sideways out of his hard little eye (so different from the dog's) with the expression of one who would say: "The most beauteous and delectable worm I have ever encountered. If I were a bit bigger, say the size of the roc of the Arabian Nights, what a dainty morsel you would make! In the meantime can't you shed something of yourself for my entertainment like others, though grosser, of your species?" She laughed at the cold impudence of the creature, just as she had smiled at the butterflies and the bumble-bee. She surrendered herself to the light happiness of the moment. It was good to escape for an hour from the rigid lines of beds and the pale suffering faces and the eternal faint odour of disinfectants, into all this greenery and the fellowship of birds and beasts unconscious of war. She remembered that once, in the pocket of her cloak, there had been a biscuit or two. Very slowly and carefully, her mind fixed on the robin, she fished for crumbs and very carefully and gently she fed the impudent, stomach-centred fellow. She had attracted him to the end of the seat, when, whizz and clatter, came a motor cycle down the avenue, and off in a terrible scare flew the robin; the idyll of tree and beast and birds suffered instant disruption and Randall Holmes, in his canvas suit, stood before her.

He said:

"Good morning, Phyllis."

She said, with cold politeness: "Good morning." But she asked the spring morning in dumb piteousness, "Oh, why has he come? Why has he come to spoil it all?"

He sat down by her side. "This is the luckiest chance I've ever had—finding you here," he said. "You've had all my letters, haven't you?"

"Yes," she answered, "and I've torn them all up."

"Why?"

"Because I didn't want them," she flashed on him: "I've destroyed them without reading them."

He flushed angrily. Apart from the personal affront, the fact that the literary products of a poet, precious and, in this case, sincere, should have been destroyed, unread, was an anti-social outrage.

"If it didn't please a woman to believe in God," he said, "and God came in Person and stood in front of her, she would run out of the room and call upon somebody to come and shoot Him for a burglar, just to prove she was right."

Phyllis was shocked. Her feminine mind pounced on the gross literalness of his rhetorical figure.

"I've never heard anything more blasphemous and horrible," she exclaimed, moving to her end of the bench. "Putting yourself in the position of the Almighty! Oh!" she flung out her hand. "Don't speak to me."

In spite of the atheistical Gedge, Phyllis believed in God and Jesus Christ and the Ten Commandments. She also believed in a host of other simple things, such as Goodness and Truth, Virtue and Patriotism. The arguments and theories and glosses that her father and Randall wove about them appeared to her candid mind as meaningless arabesques. She could not see how all the complications concerning the elementary canons of faith and conduct could arise. She appreciated Randall's intellectual gifts; his power of weaving magical words into rhyme fascinated her; she was childlike in her wonder at his command of the printed page; when he revealed to her the beauty of things, as the rogue had a pretty knack of doing, her nature thrilled responsive. He gave her a thousand glimpses into a new world, and she loved him for it. But when he talked lightly of sacred matters, such as God and Duty, he ran daggers into her heart. She almost hated him.

He had to expend much eloquence and persuasion to induce her to listen to him. He had no wish to break any of the Commandments, especially the Third. He professed penitence. But didn't she see that her treatment of him was driving him into a desperate unbelief in God and man? When a woman accepted a man's love she accepted many responsibilities.

Phyllis stonily denied acceptance.

"I've refused it. You've asked me to marry you and I told you I wouldn't. And I won't."

"You're mixing up two things," he said, with a smile. "Love and marriage. Many people love and don't marry, just as many marry and don't love. Now once you did tell me that you loved me, and so you accepted my love. There's no getting out of it. I've given you everything I've got, and you can't throw it away. The question is—what are you going to do with it? What are you going to do with me?"

His sophistries frightened her; but she cut through them.

"Isn't it rather a question of what you're going to do with yourself?"

"If you give me up I don't care a hang what becomes of me." He came very near and his voice was dangerously soft. "Phyllis dear, I do love you with all my heart. Why won't you marry me?"

But a hateful scene rushed to her memory. She drew herself up.

"Why are my father and you persecuting me to marry you?"

"Your father?" he interrupted, in astonishment. "When?"

She named the day, Wednesday of last week. In desperation she told him what had happened. The poor child was fighting for her soul against great odds.

"It's a conspiracy to get me round to your way of thinking. You want me to be a pro-German like yourselves, and I won't be a pro-German, and I think it wicked even to talk to pro-Germans!"

She rose, all sobs, fluster, and heroism, and walked away. He strode a step or two and stood in front of her with his hands on her shoulders.

"I've never spoken to your father in that way about you. Never. Not a word has passed my lips about my caring for you. On my word of honour. On Tuesday night I left your father's house never to go there again. I told him so."

She writhed out of his grasp and spread the palms of her hands against him. "Please don't," she said, and seeing that she stood her ground, he made no further attempt to touch her. The austerity of her grey nurse's uniform gave a touch of pathos to her childish, blue-eyed comeliness and her pretty attitude of defiance.

"I suppose," she said, "he was too pro-German even for you."

He looked at her for a long time disconcertingly: so disconcertingly and with so much pain and mysterious hesitation in his eyes as to set even Phyllis's simple mind a-wondering and to make her emphasize it, in her report of the matter to Betty, as extraordinary and frightening. It seemed, so she explained, in her innocent way, that he had discovered something horrible about her father which he shrank from telling her. But if they had quarrelled so bitterly, why had her father the very next day urged her to marry him? The answer came in a ghastly flash. She recoiled as though in the presence of defilement. If she married Randall, his lips would be closed against her father. That is what her father had meant. The vague, disquieting suspicions of years that he might not have the same standards of uprightness as other men, attained an awful certainty. She remembered the incident of the private letter and the look in her father's eyes.... Finally she revolted. Her soul grew sick. She took no heed of Randall's protest. She only saw that she was to be the cloak to cover up something unclean between them. At a moment like this no woman pretends to have a sense of justice. Randall had equal share with her father in an unknown baseness. She hated him as he stood there so strong and handsome. And she hated herself for having loved him.

At last he said with a smile:

"Yes, That's just it."

"What?"

She had forgotten the purport of her last remark.

"He was a bit too—well, not too pro-German—but too anti-English for me. You have got hold of the wrong end of the stick all the time, Phyllis dear. I'm no more pro-German than you are. Perhaps I see things more clearly than you do. I've been trained to an intellectual view of human phenomena."

Her little pink and white face hardened until it looked almost ugly. The unpercipient young man continued:

"And so I take my stand on a position that you must accept on trust. I am English to the backbone. You can't possibly dream that I'm not. Come, dear, let me try to explain."

His arm curved as if to encircle her waist. She sprang away.

"Don't touch me. I couldn't bear it. There's something about you I can't understand."

In her attitude, too, he found a touch of the incomprehensible. He said, however, with a sneer:

"If I were swaggering about in a cheap uniform, you'd find me simplicity itself."

She caught at his opening, desperately.

"Yes. At any rate I'd find a man. A man who wasn't afraid to fight for his country."

"Afraid!"

"Yes," she cried, and her blue eyes blazed. "Afraid. That's why I can't marry you. I'd rather die than marry you. I've never told you. I thought you'd guess. I'm an English girl and I can't marry a coward—a coward—a coward—a coward."

Her voice ended on a foolish high note, for Randall, very white, had seized her by the wrist.

"You little fool," he cried. "You'll live to repent what you've said."

He released her, mounted his motor bicycle, and rode away. Phyllis watched him disappear up the avenue; then she walked rather blindly back to the bench and sat down among the ruins of a black and abominable world. After a while the friendly robin, seeing her so still, perched first on the back of the bench and then hopped on the seat by her side, and cocking his head, looked at her enquiringly out of his little hard eye, as though he would say:

"My dear child, what are you making all this fuss about? Isn't it early June? Isn't the sun shining? Aren't the chestnuts in flower? Don't you see that bank of dark blue cloud over there which means a nice softening rain in the night and a jolly good breakfast of worms in the morning? What's wrong with this exquisitely perfect universe?"

And Phyllis—on her own confession—with an angry gesture sent him scattering up among the cool broad leaves and cried:

"Get away, you hateful little beast!"

And having no use for robins and trees and spring and sunshine and such like intolerable ironies, a white little wisp of a nurse left them all to their complacent riot and went back to the hospital.



CHAPTER XII

A few days after this, Mrs. Holmes sent me under cover a telegram which she had received from her son. It was dispatched from Aberdeen and ran: "Perfectly well. Don't worry about me. Love. Randall." And that was all I heard of him for some considerable time. What he was doing in Aberdeen, a city remote from his sphere of intellectual, political, and social activities, Heaven and himself alone knew. I must confess that I cared very little. He was alive, he was well, and his mother had no cause for anxiety. Phyllis had definitely sent him packing. There was no reason for me to allow speculation concerning him to keep me awake of nights.

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."

But as I saw that her eyes were foolishly moist, I was not as offended as I might have been by her perception of the ludicrous.

When I said that I had plenty to think about besides Randall, I meant to string off a list. My prolixity over the Volunteer Training Corps came upon me unawares. I wanted to show you that my time was fairly well occupied. I was Chairman of our town Belgian Relief Committee. I was a member of our County Territorial Association and took over a good deal of special work connected with one of our battalions that was covering itself with glory and little mounds topped with white crosses at the front. If you think I lived a Tom-tabby, tea-party sort of life, you are quite mistaken, if the War Office could have its way, it would have lashed me in red tape, gagged me with Regulations, and sealing-waxed me up in my bed-room. And there are thousands of us who have shaken our fists under the nose of the War Office and shouted, "All your blighting, Man-with-the-Mudrake officialdom shan't prevent us from serving our country." And it hasn't! The very Government itself, in spite of its monumental efforts, has not been able to shackle us into inertia or drug us into apathy. Such non-combatant francs-tireurs in England have done a power of good work.

And then, of course, there was the hospital which, in one way or another, took up a good deal of my time.

I was reposing in the front garden one late afternoon in mid-June, after a well-filled day, when a car pulled up at the gate, in which were Betty (at the wheel) and a wounded soldier, in khaki, his cap perched on top of a bandaged head. I don't know whether it is usual for young women in nurse's uniform to career about the country driving wounded men in motor cars, but Betty did it. She cared very little for the usual. She came in, leaving the man in the car, and crossed the lawn, flushed and bright-eyed, a refreshing picture for a tired man.

"We're in a fix up at the hospital," she announced as soon as she was in reasonable speaking distance, "and I want you to get us out of it."

Sitting on the grass, she told me the difficulty. A wounded soldier, discharged from some distant hospital, and home now on sick furlough before rejoining his depot, had been brought into the hospital with a broken head. The modern improvements on vinegar and brown paper having been applied, the man was now ready to leave. I interrupted with the obvious question. Why couldn't he go to his own home? It appeared that the prospect terrified him. On his arrival, at midday, after eight months' absence in France, he found that his wife had sold or pawned practically everything in the place, and that the lady herself was in the violent phase of intoxication. His natural remonstrances not being received with due meekness, a quarrel arose from which the lady emerged victorious. She laid her poor husband out with a poker. They could not keep him in hospital. He shied at an immediate renewal of conjugal life. He had no relations or intimate friends in Wellingsford. Where was the poor devil to go?

"I thought I might bring him along here and let the Marigolds look after him for a week or two."

"Indeed," said I. "I admire your airy ways."

"I know you do," she replied, "and that's why I've brought him."

"Is that the fellow?"

She laughed. "You're right first time. How did you guess?" She scrambled to her feet. "I'll fetch him in."

She fetched him in, a haggard, broad-shouldered man with a back like a sloping plank of wood. He wore corporal's stripes. He saluted and stood at rigid attention.

"This is Tufton," said Betty.

I despatched her in search of Marigold. To Tufton I said, regarding him with what, without vanity, I may term an expert eye:

"You're an old soldier."

"Yes, sir."

"Guards?"

His eyes brightened. "Yes, sir. Seven years in the Grenadiers. Then two years out. Rejoined on outbreak of war, sir."

I rubbed my hands together in satisfaction. "I'm an old soldier too," said I.

"So Sister told me, sir."

A delicate shade in the man's tone and manner caught at my heart. Perhaps it was the remotest fraction of a glance at my rug-covered legs, the pleased recognition of my recognition, ... perhaps some queer freemasonry of the old Army.

"You seem to be in trouble, boy," said I. "Tell me all about it and I'll do what I can to help you."

So he told his story. After his discharge from the Army he had looked about for a job and found one at the mills in Wellingsford, where he had met the woman, a mill-hand, older than himself, whom he had married. She had been a bit extravagant and fond of her glass, but when he left her to rejoin the regiment, he had had no anxieties. She did not write often, not being very well educated and finding difficult the composition of letters. A machine gun bullet had gone through his chest, just missing his lung. He had been two months in hospital. He had written to her announcing his arrival. She had not met him at the station. He had tramped home with his kit-bag on his back—and the cracked head was his reception. He supposed she had had a lot of easy money and had given way to temptation—and

"And what's a man to do, sir?"

"I'm sure I don't know, Corporal," said I. "It's damned hard lines on you. But, at any rate, you can look upon this as your home for as long as you like to stay."

"Thank you kindly, sir," said he.

I turned and beckoned to Betty and Marigold, who had been hovering out of earshot by the house door. They approached.

"I want to have a word with Marigold," I said.

Tufton saluted and went off with Betty. Sergeant Marigold stood stiff as a ramrod on the spot which Tufton had occupied.

"I suppose Mrs. Connor," said I, "has told you all about this poor chap?"

"Yes, sir," said Marigold.

"We must put him up comfortably. That's quite simple. The only thing that worries me is this—supposing his wife comes around here raising Cain—?"

Marigold held me with his one glittering eye—an eye glittering with the pride of the gunner and the pride (more chastened) of the husband.

"You can leave all that, sir, to Mrs. Marigold. If she isn't more than a match for any Grenadier Guardsman's wife, then I haven't been married to her for the last twenty years."

Nothing more was to be said. Marigold marched the man off, leaving me alone with Betty.

"I'm going to get in before Mrs. Marigold," she remarked, with a smile. "I'm off now to interview Madam Tufton and bring back her husband's kit."

In some ways it is a pity Betty isn't a man. She would make a splendid soldier. I don't think such a thing as fear, physical, moral, or spiritual, lurks in any recess of Betty's nature. Not every young woman would brave, without trepidation, a virago who had cracked a hard-bitten warrior's head with a poker.

"Marigold and I will come with you," I said.

She protested. It was nonsense. Suppose Mrs. Tufton went for Marigold and spoiled his beauty? No. It was too dangerous. No place for men. We argued. At last I blew the police-whistle which I wear on the end of my watch-chain. Marigold came hurrying out of the house.

"Mrs. Connor is going to take us for a run," said I.

"Very good, sir."

"Your blood be on your own heads," said Betty.

We talked a while of what had happened. Vague stories of the demoralization of wives left alone with a far greater weekly income than they had ever handled before had reached our ears. We had read them in the newspapers. But till now we had never come across an example. The woman in question belonged to a bad type. Various dregs from large cities drift into the mills around little country towns and are the despair of Mayors, curates, and other local authorities. We genteel folk regarded them as a plague-spot in the midst of us.

I remember the scandal when the troops first came in August, 1914, to Wellingsford—a scandal put a summary end to, after a fortnight's grinning amazement at our country morals, by the troops themselves. Tufton had married into an undesirable community.

"We're wasting time," said Betty.

So Marigold put me into the back of the car and mounted into the front seat by Betty, and we started.

Flowery End was the poetic name of the mean little row of red-brick houses inhabited exclusively by Mrs. Tufton and her colleagues at the mills. To get to it you turn off the High Street by the Post Office, turn to the right down Avonmore Avenue, and then to the left. There you find Flowery End, and, fifty yards further on, the main road to Godbury crosses it at right angles. Betty, who lived on the Godbury Road, was quite familiar with Flowery End. Mid-June did its best to justify the name. Here and there, in the tiny patches of front garden, a tenant tried to help mid-June by cultivating wall-flowers and geraniums and snapdragon and a rose or two; but the majority cared as much for the beauty of mid-June as for the cleanliness of their children,—an unsightly brood, with any slovenly rags about their bodies, and the circular crust of last week's treacle on their cheeks. In his abominable speeches before the war Gedge used to point out these children to unsympathetic Wellingsfordians as the Infant Martyrs of an Accursed Capitalism.

Betty pulled up the car at Number Seven. Marigold sprang out, helped her down, and would have walked up the narrow flagged path to knock at the door. But she declined his aid, and he stood sentry by the gap where the wicket gate of the garden should have been. I saw the door open on Betty's summons, and a brawny, tousled, red-faced woman appear—a most horrible and forbidding female, although bearing traces of a once blowsy beauty. As in most cottages hereabouts, you entered straight from garden-plot into the principal livingroom. On each side of the two figures I obtained a glimpse of stark emptiness.

Betty said: "Are you Mrs. Tufton? I've come to talk to you about your husband. Let me come in."

The attack was so debonair, so unquestioning, that the woman withdrew a pace or two and Betty, following up her advantage, entered and shut the door behind her. I could not have done what Betty did if I had had as many legs as a centipede. Marigold turned to me anxiously.

"You do think she's safe, sir?"

I nodded. "Anyway, stand by."

The neighbours came out of adjoining houses; slatternly women with babies, more unwashed children, an elderly, vacant male or two—the young men and maidens had not yet been released from the mills. As far as I could gather, there was amused discussion among the gossips concerning the salient features of Sergeant Marigold's physical appearance. I heard one lady bid another to look at his wicked old eye, and receive the humorous rejoinder: "Which one?" I should have liked to burn them as witches; but Marigold stood his ground, imperturbable.

Presently the door opened, and Betty came sailing down the path with a red spot on each cheek, followed by Mrs. Tufton, vociferous.

"Sergeant Marigold," cried Betty. "Will you kindly go into that house and fetch out Corporal Tufton's kit-bag?"

"Very good, madam," said Marigold.

"Sergeant or no sergeant," cried Mrs. Tufton, squaring her elbows and barring his way, "nobody's coming into my house to touch any of my husband's property...." Really what she said I cannot record. The British Tommy I know upside-down, inside-out. I could talk to you about him for the week together. The ordinary soldier's wife, good, straight, heroic soul, I know as well and and profoundly admire as I do the ordinary wife of a brother-officer, and I could tell you what she thinks and feels in her own language. But the class whence Mrs. Tufton proceeded is out of my social ken. She was stale-drunk; she had, doubtless, a vile headache; probably she felt twinges of remorse and apprehension of possible police interference. As a counter-irritant to this, she had worked herself into an astounding temper. She would give up none of her husband's belongings. She would have the law on them if they tried. Bad enough it was for her husband to come home after a year's desertion, leaving her penniless, and the moment he set eyes on her begin to knock her about; but for sergeants suffering under a blight and characterless females masquerading as hospital nurses to come and ride rough-shod over an honest working woman was past endurance. Thus I paraphrase my memory of the lady's torrential speech. "Lay your hand on me," she cried, "and I'll summons you for assault."

As Marigold could not pass her without laying hands on her, and as the laying of hands on her, no matter how lightly, would indubitably have constituted an assault in the eyes of the law, Marigold stiffly confronted her and tried to argue.

The neighbours listened in sardonic amusement. Betty stood by, with the spots burning on her cheek, clenching her slender capable fingers, furious at defeat. I was condemned to sit in the car a few yards off, an anxious spectator. In a moment's lull of the argument, Betty interposed:

"Every woman here knows what you have done. You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

"And you ought to be ashamed of yourself," Mrs. Tufton retorted—"taking an honest woman's husband away from her."

It was time to interfere. I called out:

"Betty, let us get back. I'll fix the man up with everything he wants."

At the moment of her turning to me a telegraph boy hopped from his bicycle on the off-side of the ear and touched his cap.

"I've a telegram for Mrs. Connor, sir. I recognised the car and I think that's the lady. So instead of going on to the house—"

I cut him short. Yes. That was Mrs. Connor of Telford Lodge. He dodged round the car and, entering the garden path, handed the orange-coloured envelope to Betty. She took it from him absent-mindedly, her heart and soul engaged in the battle with Mrs. Tufton. The boy stood patient for a second or two.

"Any answer, ma'am?"

She turned so that I could see her face in profile, and impatiently opened the envelope and glanced at the message. Then she stiffened, seeming in a curious way to become many inches taller, and grew deadly white. The paper dropped from her hand. Marigold picked it up.

The diversion of the telegraph boy had checked Mrs. Tufton's eloquence and compelled the idle interest of the neighbours. I cried out from the car:

"What's the matter?"

But I don't think Betty heard me. She recovered herself, took the telegram from Marigold, and showed it to the woman.

"Read it," said Betty, in a strange, hard voice. "This is to tell me that my husband was killed yesterday in France. Go on your knees and thank God that you have a brave husband still alive and pray that you may be worthy of him."

She went into the house and in a moment reappeared like a ghost of steel, carrying the disputed canvas kit-bag over her shoulder. The woman stared open-mouthed and said nothing. Marigold came forward to relieve Betty of her burden, but she waved him imperiously away, passed him and, opening the car-door, threw the bag at my feet. Not one of the rough crowd moved a foot or uttered a sound, save a baby in arms two doors off, who cut the silence with a sickly wail and was immediately hushed by its mother. Betty turned to the attendant Marigold.

"You can drive me home."

She sat by my side. Marigold took the wheel in front and drove on. She sought for my hand, held it in an iron grip, and said not a word. It was but a five minutes' run at the pace to which Marigold, time-worn master of crises of life and death, put the car. Betty held herself rigid, staring straight in front of her, and striving in vain to stifle horrible little sounds that would break through her tightly closed lips.

When we pulled up at her door she said queerly: "Forgive me. I'm a damned little coward."

And she bolted from the car into the house.



CHAPTER XIII

Thus over the sequestered vale of Wellingsford, far away from the sound of shells, even off the track of marauding Zeppelins, rode the fiery planet. Mars. There is not a homestead in Great Britain that in one form or another has not caught a reflection of its blood-red ray. No matter how we may seek distraction in work or amusement, the angry glow is ever before our eyes, colouring our vision, colouring our thoughts, colouring our emotions for good or for ill. We cannot escape it. Our personal destinies are inextricably interwoven with the fate directing the death grapple of the thousand miles or so of battle line, and arbitrating on the doom of colossal battleships.

Our local newspaper prints week by week its ever-lengthening Roll of Honour. The shells that burst and slew these brave fellows spread their devastation into our little sheltered town; in a thundering crash tearing off from the very trunk of life here a friend, there a son, there a father, there a husband. And I repeat, at the risk of wearisome insistence, that our sheltered homeland shares the calm, awful fatalism of the battlefield; we have to share it because every rood of our country is, spiritually, as much a battlefield as the narrow, blood-sodden wastes of Flanders and France.

Willie Connor, fine brave gentleman, was dead. My beloved Betty was a widow. No Victoria Cross for Betty. Even if there had been one, no children to be bred from birth on its glorious legend. The German shell left Betty stripped and maimed. With her passionate generosity she had given her all; even as his all had been nobly given by her husband. And then all of both had been swept ruthlessly away down the gory draught of sacrifice.

Poor Betty! "I'm a damned little coward," she said, as she bolted into the house. The brave, foolish words rang in my ears all that night. In the early morning I wondered what I should do. A commonplace message, written or telephoned, would be inept. I shrank from touching her, although I knew she would feel my touch to be gentle. You have seen, I hope, that Betty was dearer to me than anyone else in the world, and I knew that, apart from the stirring emotions in her own young life, Betty held me in the closest affection. When she needed me, she would fly the signal. Of that I felt assured. Still...

While I was in this state of perplexity, Marigold came in to rouse me and get me ready for the day.

"I've taken the liberty, sir," said he, "to telephone to Telford Lodge to enquire after Mrs. Connor. The maid said she had Mrs. Connor's instructions to reply that she was quite well."

The good, admirable fellow! I thanked him. While I was shaving, he said in his usual wooden way:

"Begging your pardon, sir, I thought you might like to send Mrs. Connor a few flowers, so I took upon myself to cut some roses, first thing this morning, with the dew on them."

Of course I cut myself and the blood flowed profusely.

"Why the dickens do you spring things like that on people while they're shaving?" I cried.

"Very sorry, sir," said he, solicitous with sponge and towel.

"All the same, Marigold," said I, "you've solved a puzzle that has kept me awake since early dawn. We'll go out as soon as I'm dressed and we'll send her every rose in the garden."

I have an acre or so of garden behind the house of which I have not yet spoken, save incidentally—for it was there that just a year ago poor Althea Fenimore ate her giant strawberries on the last afternoon of her young life; and a cross-grained old misanthropist, called Timbs, attends to it and lavishes on the flowers the love which, owing, I suspect, to blighted early affection, he denies to mankind. I am very fond of my garden and am especially interested in my roses. Do you know an exquisitely pink rose—the only true pink—named Mrs. George Norwood? ... I bring myself up with a jerk. I am not writing a book on roses. When the war is over perhaps I shall devote my old age to telling you what I feel and know and think about them....

I had a battle with Timbs. Timbs was about sixty. He had shaggy, bushy eyebrows over hard little eyes, a shaggy grey beard, and a long, clean-shaven, obstinate upper lip. Stick him in an ill-fitting frock coat and an antiquated silk hat, and he would be the stage model of a Scottish Elder. As a matter of fact he was Hampshire born and a devout Roman Catholic. But he was as crabbed an old wretch as you can please. He flatly refused to execute my order. I dismissed him on the spot. He countered with the statement that he was an old man who had served me faithfully for many years. I bade him go on serving me faithfully and not be a damned fool. The roses were to be cut. If he didn't cut them, Marigold would.

"He's been a-cutting them already," he growled. "Before I came."

Timbs loathed Marigold—why, I could never discover—and Marigold had the lowest opinion of Timbs. It was an offence for Marigold to desecrate the garden by his mere footsteps; to touch a plant or a flower constituted a damnable outrage. On the other side, Timbs could not approach my person for the purpose of rendering me any necessary physical assistance, without incurring Marigold's violent resentment.

"He'll go on cutting them," said I, "unless you start in at once."

He began. I sent off Marigold in search of a wheelbarrow. Then, having Timbs to myself, I summoned him to my side.

"Do you hold with a man sacrificing his life for his country?"

He looked at me for a moment or two, in his dour, crabbed way.

"I've got a couple of sons in France, trying their best to do it," he replied.

That was the first I had ever heard of it. I had always regarded him as a gnarled old bachelor without human ties. Where he had kept the sons and the necessary mother I had not the remotest notion.

"You're proud of them?"

"I am."

"And if one was killed, would you grudge his grave a few roses? For the sake of him wouldn't you sacrifice a world of roses?"

His manner changed. "I don't understand, sir. Is anybody killed?"

"Didn't I say that all these roses were for Mrs. Connor?"

He dropped his secateur. "Good God, sir! Is it Captain Connor?"

The block-headed idiot of a Marigold had not told him! Marigold is a very fine fellow, but occasionally he manifests human frailties that are truly abominable.

"We are going to sacrifice all our roses, Timbs," said I, "for the sake of a very gallant Englishman. It's about all we can do."

Of course I ought to have entered upon all this explanation when I first came on the scene; but I took it for granted that Timbs knew of the tragedy.

"Need we cut those blooms of the Rayon d'Or?" asked Timbs, alluding to certain roses under conical paper shades which he had been breathlessly tending for our local flower show. "We'll cut them first," said I.

Looking back through the correcting prism of time, I fancy this slaughter of the innocents may have been foolishly sentimental. But I had a great desire to lay all that I could by way of tribute of consolation at Betty's feet, and this little sacrifice of all my roses seemed as symbolical an expression of my feelings as anything that my unimaginative brain could devise.

During the forenoon I superintended the packing of the baskets of roses in Pawling the florist's cart, which I was successful in engaging for the occasion,—neither wheelbarrow nor donkey carriage nor two-seater, the only vehicles at my disposal, being adequate; and when I saw it start for its destination, I wheeled myself, by way of discipline, through my bereaved garden. It looked mighty desolate. But though all the blooms had gone, there were a myriad buds which next week would burst into happy flower. And the sacrifice seemed trivial, almost ironical; for in Betty's heart there were no buds left.

After lunch I went to the hospital for the weekly committee meeting. To my amazement the first person I met in the corridor was Betty—Betty, white as wax, with black rings round unnaturally shining eyes. She waited for me to wheel myself up to her. I said severely:

"What on earth are you doing here? Go home to bed at once."

She put her hand on the back of my chair and bent down.

"I'm better here. And so are the dear roses. Come and see them."

I followed her into one of the military wards on the ground floor, and the place was a feast of roses. I had no idea so many could have come from my little garden. And the ward upstairs, she told me, was similarly beflowered. By the side of each man's bed stood bowl or vase, and the tables and the window sills were bright with blooms. It was the ward for serious cases—men with faces livid from gas-poisoning, men with the accursed trench nephritis, men with faces swathed in bandages hiding God knows what distortions, men with cradles over them betokening mangled limbs, men recovering from operations, chiefly the picking of bits of shrapnel and splinters of bone from shattered arms and legs; men with pale faces, patient eyes, and with cheery smiles round their lips when we passed by. A gramophone at the end of the room was grinding out a sentimental tune to which all were listening with rapt enjoyment. I asked one man, among others, how he was faring. He was getting on fine. With the death-rattle in his throat the wounded British soldier invariably tells you that he is getting on fine.

"And ain't these roses lovely? Makes the place look like a garden. And that music—seems appropriate, don't it, sir?"

I asked what the gramophone was playing. He looked respectfully shocked.

"Why, it's 'The Rosary,' sir."

After we had left him, Betty said:

"That's the third time they've asked for it to-day. They've got mixed up with the name, you see. They're beautiful children, aren't they?"

I should have called them sentimental idiots, but Betty saw much clearer than I did. She accompanied me back to the corridor and to the Committee Room door. I was a quarter of an hour late.

"I've kept the precious Rayon d'Ors for myself," she said. "How could you have the heart to cut them?"

"I would have cut out my heart itself, for the matter of that," said I, "if it would have done any good."

She smiled in a forlorn kind of way.

"Don't do that, for I shall want it inside you more than ever now. Tell me, how is Tufton?"

"Tufton—?"

"Yes—Tufton."

I must confess that my mind being so full of Betty, I had clean forgotten Tufton. But Betty remembered.

I smiled. "He's getting on fine," said I. I reached out my hand and held her cold, slim fingers. "Promise me one thing, my dear."

"All right," she said.

"Don't overdo things. There's a limit to the power of bearing strain. As soon as you feel you're likely to go FUT, throw it all up and come and see me and let us lay our heads together."

"I despise people who go FUT," said Betty.

"I don't," said I.

We nodded a mutual farewell. She opened the Committee Room door for me and walked down the corridor with a swinging step, as though she would show me how fully she had made herself mistress of circumstance.

Some evenings later she came in, as usual, unheralded, and established herself by my chair.

The scents of midsummer came in through the open windows, and there was a great full moon staring in at us from a cloudless sky. Letters from the War Office, from brother-officers, from the Colonel, from the Brigadier General himself, had broken her down. She gave me the letters to read. Everyone loved him, admired him, trusted him. "As brave as a lion," wrote one. "Perhaps the most brilliant company officer in my brigade," wrote the General. And his death—the tragic common story. A trench; a high-explosive shell; the fate of young Etherington; and no possible little wooden cross to mark his grave.