THAT WHICH HATH WINGS (continued 8)

"Who would have dreamed only three weeks ago, when that excessively long-legged and extremely good-looking Count von Herrnung sat here and talked to us about German women and German Supermen—that we should be at War to-day with Germany?"

"Poor Count Tido!" Something rattled in the Goblin's meagre throat as though she had accidentally swallowed some of her pearls. "That dreadful report in The Wire made the Franzenbad treatment disagree with me horribly! To be drowned in that commonplace North Sea crossing, upon the very eve of realising the one ambition of his life! For he hated us so thoroughly! His Anglophobia was a perfect obsession. Poor dear Tido! One might call it a wasted career!" The speaker dried a tear and continued: "His family will be frantic. You know he was to have been married in October! Baroness Kriemhilde von Wolfensbragen-Hirschenbuttel. Immensely rich! Her father has large interests in the pearl-fisheries of German New Guinea. Her betrothal gift, a superb black and white pearl, the Count always wore as a mascot. Poor Baroness! She will be inconsolable. Marriage means the first draught of real freedom to young German girls!"

Mrs. Charterhouse said in her sweetly venomous way:

"Miss Saxham bears up—under the circumstances!"

"Under what circumstances, might one presume to ask?" Then, reading aright the ambiguous smile of Mrs. Charterhouse, the Goblin rattled out her characteristic laugh:

"What absurdity! You refer to a mere dinner-table flirtation in Paris. The mere rapprochement of atomes crochus! Miss Saxham and Lady Beauvayse dined with us on the night of the Grand Prix. Poor Tido was certainly struck with her. I remember he talked about her eyes and figure afterwards. But her hair being so black and growing so heavily—did not please him. He found the effect—I think his term was—'too crepuscular.'"

"Ah! You throw a ray," said Mrs. Charterhouse in that sugared way of hers, "on a mystery that has intrigued me. Now I know why Miss Saxham went to the Atelier Wiber in the Rue de la Paix and got her crepuscular tresses changed to terra-cotta!"

"Not saffron? Now," said Lady Wastwood, pensively tilting her own green-gold head and elevating her arched black eyebrows, "I should have called that shade saffron or tumeric. Who do you suppose footed the bill for the process? The wretch Wiber simply won't look at you under four hundred and fifty francs!"

"Perhaps Vivie Beauvayse—" suggested Mrs. Charterhouse.

"I think not. Vivie preferred the crepuscular effect. It contrasted capitally with her own style of colouring. You must have noticed, they are seldom seen going about together as they used. Dear Lady Wathe, do you feel faint? Can I get you anything?"

For something had clicked behind the Goblin's pearls, and she had suddenly stiffened in her seat. The superb figure of Patrine Saxham had entered by the swing-doors leading from the vestibule followed by a tall, broad-shouldered young man in loose grey tweeds, whose left sleeve displayed a band of black significantly new.

"Can that be Miss Saxham? It must be!—her type is so unusual! Not having seen her since the night of the dinner I referred to I did not quite grasp the meaning of your references to ingredients common in Indian curries. Of course, I understand now!" The Goblin surveyed the tall, pliant figure with the dead beech-leaf hair through her lorgnette before she leaned forwards and roused the sleeping Brayham by a brisk application of the instrument. "Look, Sir Thomas! Would you have known Miss Saxham?"

"Beparr! ... Wharr? ... God bless my soul, no!"

Brayham, turning in the armchair as the Zoo walrus turns in his concrete pond, surveyed Patrine with a bloodshot stare.

"Silly girl! Spoilt her looks!" he snorted. "Handsome as the dooce with her gipsy-black tresses. Won her bet. Won't get her ring now though, unless von Herrnung paid before he flew!"

"Was there a bet between them? How is it you never told me? Have I deserved this from you?" demanded Lady Wathe indignantly, as Mrs. Charterhouse and Lady Wastwood exchanged glances and smiles.

"Sorry! ... Forgot! ..." Brayham gobbled apologetically. "Man I know happened to be close to 'em leaving Spitz's Restaurant that Sunday night in Paris. Told me he heard von Herrnung lay Miss Saxham his magpie pearl solitaire against a bit o' Palais Royal paste she was wearing—that she wouldn't change the colour of her hair! Made the appointment for her, with Wiber—'Pastiches Artistiques,' and so on, Rue de la Paix. He bragged of it afterwards at the Cercle Moderne! Dam Germans! no idea of decency! Why do Englishwomen intrigue with 'em? Bounders that kiss and tell!"

There was a significant pause, broken by the Goblin's shrillest peal of laughter. The ex-Justice, whose vitality was low, folded his hands and dozed again. Then——

"Now we know who footed the bill," said Cynthia Charterhouse in dove-like accents. While Trixie murmured in the vexed ear of Margot:

"Kitts, my dinkie, you are a pal of the Saxhams. How far had the affair really gone?"

"There was no affair!" said Margot's sweet little voice, very clearly. "Pat rather hated Count von Herrnung than otherwise!"

"Judging by the mute evidence of her hair—" began Mrs. Charterhouse, languidly. How Margot loathed these women, erstwhile her chosen friends and associates, tearing with greedy beaks and vicious claws at the reputation of an unmarried girl....

"Her hair belongs to her! She can bleach it if she wishes!" The little figure rose to its altitude of four feet seven inches and surveyed the scandalmongers with wrathful eyes. "I have said that there was nothing between Miss Saxham and Count von Herrnung"—the little voice was crystal-cold: "I should be extremely obliged to all of you if you will understand this clearly! Miss Saxham is engaged to my husband's cousin, Alan Sherbrand."—Had Franky heard that stately reference to my husband, he would have been "bowled," to quote himself. "Franky likes him, and so do I, tremendously! We're both keen on their bringing off the match!"

There was another resounding silence. Brayham snored melodiously. Then Trixie Wastwood said with her Pierrot smile:

"Really, Kitts, it was—hardly cricket not to have warned us!"

While Mrs. Charterhouse added in tones of iced velvet:

"Regard me also as prone beneath Miss Saxham's Number Eight shoes. Did you say her fiancé was a cousin of Lord Norwater's? Not possibly the son of the uncle who died quite recently? Captain the Hon. Noel Sherbrand, late of the Royal Gunners.... My husband used to know him before—people left off!"

"It is the same. He muddled his career somehow, and—most people cut him! But he is dead," said Margot very deliberately, "and his son, if we have no—" the delicate cheeks flushed with sudden vivid crimson—"his son is perfectly tophole and Franky's next heir. We met him in June in Paris, and so did Pat Saxham! How do any of you know she didn't tint her hair to please him."

"Possibly she did! But, according to Sir Thomas—it was the other man who paid!"

"Odd, isn't it? In this world," said the Goblin with her crackling laugh, "the other man invariably pays the bill! And so the young gentleman over there—who is quite remarkably good-looking in the blond Norman style—and who is going to marry Miss Saxham—succeeds to Lord Norwater in—a certain eventuality! May one be permitted to hope, dear Lady Norwater, that Fate and yourself will combine fortuitously, to keep the cousin out of the House of Peers!"

"Rude, ill-bred, horrid woman!" thought Margot, clenching her little teeth to keep back these epithets. "How dare she twit me with—that! How dare—" Then her hot flush sank away and a mist came before her eyes, and she would have fallen, but that Trixie Wastwood jumped up from the sofa and threw about the little figure a kind, supporting arm.

"I've got you! You're not going to faint, Kittums, are you? Forgive us, my dinkie! What pigs we have been!"

"Heckling the tomtit for defending the saffron-crested blackbird! I rather agree with you," admitted Mrs. Charterhouse as Margot freed herself, saying it was nothing, and proudly moved away. "We women are horribly spiteful," continued Cynthia. "Yes, we are spiteful, Lady Wathe! I am perfectly in earnest. What is the reason? Will anything cure us? Do somebody tell me! Colonel Charterhouse would say it is because we eat too much rich food, walk too little, automobile too much, and want some useful work or other to occupy our minds! He is coming here to lunch with me—he was quite touchingly anxious to be invited!" Her beautiful eyes widened as the swing-doors thudded behind three entering masculine figures, "Why, here he is with Lord Norwater, and your boy, Trixie! All three in khaki! What a day we are having!"

She added, as her handsome middle-aged Colonel made his spurred way through the ever-thickening crush to her:

"I am enlightened! So this was your surprise!"

"Not half as big as mine when I found they were willing to take me. 'Fit as a fiddle,' according to the M. O. Gad!"—he went on, as his wife made room for him on the settle by her side—"as willingly as though he had been somebody else's husband," Lady Wathe said subsequently—"It's to my golf I owe it—these A.M.S. sawbones finding me in the pink! And instead of a back-seat, what do you think they've given me? Command of the Third Reserve Battalion of the blessed old Regiment, the Loyal North Linkshires, vice Crowe-Pinckney, kicked out by a gouty toe! ... How's that for an oldster of fifty-five, ... Eh, what?" His chuckle was that of a Fourth Form athlete picked to supply a gap in the School Eleven. And Cynthia's beautiful eyes, as she slipped her hand into the Colonel's, looked at him as the boy's mother's might have looked upon her son.

Lady Wastwood's Pierrot smile might have played upon the reunited couple mockingly, but that the unexpected apparition of her boy Wastwood in single-starred khaki, adorned with the badge of a crack Hussar Regiment, girt with the Sam Browne and narrow officer's shoulder-strap, and clad as to the legs in spurred brown butcher-boots—dimmed her bright green eyes and brought a choke into her throat. Wastwood the son was so like Wastwood the father—killed at Magersfontein in 1900,—whom Trixie, for no reason apparently, had romantically adored. A burly young man, pink as a baby, with thick fair hair growing down within two inches of his eyebrows, small, fierce blue eyes, and a huge roaring voice, softened down now to a tender bellow as he answered a pale girl's eager question with:

"Well, I can't say exactly when we're going to the Front, but I hope to Christmas it'll be soon!"

Wastwood's engagement to the girl had been announced only the week previously in the Society Columns of the leading dailies. Now, while Wastwood's younger brother Jerry anguished in the throes of a final Exam, at Sandhurst, the said Jerry being set upon getting a Commission in time to go to the Front with one of the First Divisions—his elder sat on a Club sofa and made love to the girl Jerry was subsequently to marry. For not only Wastwood's title, but his vacant Commission as a Lieutenant in the Dapple Greys and his sweetheart went to his junior after Mons.

There was a lot of family and regimental re-shuffling and re-dealing, you will remember, after Mons.

The leaven of the Great Awakening was working in the souls of these worldly-minded, ultra-modern men and women, even as the crowd in the rooms grew denser, as the buzz of talk became almost solid, and khaki mingled with the brilliant toilettes. Hardly a man but wore dead-leaf brown. Wives were entertaining their husbands, mothers were lunching their sons, that day, at the multitudinous little tables in the great and lesser dining-rooms,—there was a revival of old code-words, an interchange of almost forgotten pet-names, a resurrection of ancient jokes, when the atmosphere seemed dangerously charged with emotion. How many Last Sacraments of renewed love were eaten and drunk by husbands and wives who, estranged for years, were to be reunited by the War, and parted by the War until the Day when Wars shall be no more.

That a tall young man in grey tweed with a crape armlet should sit opposite Patrine that day at Margot's special table was one of the thousand miracles already wrought.

Sherbrand had shelved all recollection of that June adventure in the Bois de Boulogne, when a flushed young husband in immaculate top-hat and frock-coat had thanked an angry young man in waterproof overalls and gabardine for not chopping his wife into kedgeree.

Could one be angry any more when this little human dragon-fly was what Patrine called "a frightful pal" of hers. Thank Heaven! Patrine had known nothing of the cousinship when she had answered Sherbrand's plain question, "Will you marry me?" with an assent:

"Sooner than not!"

"Then—it is settled?"

"Yes, you poor dear! If you think me worth having!"

Worth having! Sherbrand's glorious Patrine. Whom to be near was heaven on earth. Whom to obey was a lover's luxury, even when she had issued the mandate:

"Now, you must come to the Club and lunch with me, and meet my friends. Do be decent to them!"

Perhaps you can see Sherbrand bowing rather stiffly to Margot and accepting with the briefest hesitation the smallest of offered hands.

"I thought it must be the same!—I was certain there couldn't be two Flying Sherbrands. Pat!—Mr. Sherbrand can't deny the relationship, though he disapproves of Franky and me most fearfully. You'll have to teach him," went on the coaxing little voice, "that we're lots and lots nicer than he thinks us! For we've got to be friends," said Kittums, "if you and my dear Pat are going to be married! No time like the present! Can't we begin now?"

What a vivid little face it was, though there were tired marks like faint bruises under the great dark eyes, and the rose-flush in the cheeks was less bright than it had seemed in June. He released the tiny jewelled fingers, and found himself presented to the husband.

"Frightfully glad to meet you—more reasons than one!"

Franky, slim, sleek-headed, and dapper in unblemished Regulation tea-leaf, held out his hand, saying as he looked the other squarely in the eyes:

"If I had known your Home address, I should like to have dropped a line to you, when I—when I saw the newspaper yesterday."

"My mother lives at Bournemouth. My father had been an invalid for years. I go down to-day by the afternoon train."

"Ah! Please remember me to my—Aunt Jeannette."

From what dusty shelf of memories had Franky reached down the name of his uncle's unknown wife? But it sounded pleasantly to Mrs. Sherbrand's son. The cloud upon his forehead cleared away, and his cold sea-blue eyes began to thaw into kindness:

"I'd like a word with you in private. Do you mind comin' out of this clackshop into the vest*i*bulee?" Franky went on, quoting his favourite Jimmy Greggson, and with a word to Margot and a glance on Sherbrand's part at Patrine, the two men passed through the swing-doors. Here Franky wheeled, and said with effort:

"This is a bit subsequent! but—if there's time available and the date of my uncle's funeral doesn't happen to be fixed, I should like to say—" He grew furiously red and began to stammer: "My father ... myself ... Dash! how brutally I bungle! But my uncle has a right to—to lie in the family vault with his ancestors. It's at Whins—the Church is in the Castle grounds. I can guarantee that my father—every facility—sympathy—proper respect—" He broke down. Sherbrand answered, now the cooler of the two:

"You are very kind, Lord Norwater. My mother has already received a telegram from Lord Mitchelborough conveying a message to the same effect."

"I engineered that!" thought Franky complacently. But he was fish-dumb. Sherbrand went on:

"She would thank you, as I do, gratefully. But my father—would have preferred to be buried where he died!"

"Good egg! And now there's another thing to get off my chest," said Franky. "You know you stand in for the Viscounty when I succeed my father, or if I get knocked out in this scrap—supposing I should kick without heirs! That being so, suppose you bury the hatchet and lunch with us? Wouldn't in Paris—perhaps you will now? The War seems to rub up old saws like new somehow. That copy-book tag about Blood bein' thicker than water! that's one of the ones I mean. In case my wife got left—do you tumble?"—the ambiguous term was quite expressive—"I'd like to think that you were—would be kind to her!"

"I should certainly—in that case—try to do what I could." A certain physical and mental resemblance showed between these two long-legged, lightly-built, clean-made Sherbrands, standing together talking of grave matters, with candour and simplicity and British avoidance of sentiment and excess of words.

"But,"—Sherbrand found himself yielding to an impulse of confidence in the owner of the brown eyes that were some inches below his own, "this War is my chance! I'm a certified pilot-aviator and constructor and engineer. Perhaps there'll be a chink in the Royal Flying Corps for me—and many another fellow like me—before long—I hope, not very long! For my father's sake as much as for my own, I'm bound to make good—you understand?"

The brown eyes understood. His kindred blood warmed to the look in them.

"He knew—my father knew that he had failed in life through his own fault. He did not resent his brother's attitude. He bore the consequences more or less patiently, and when he died he left the cleansing of his name to me. Not that he was as badly to blame as people thought. He was born without sufficient of the quality called—objectivity. It's the power that keeps a man slogging, slogging in one groove without getting mechanical or stupid, as long as he attain his ends or can serve his country by keeping on. It's indispensable!"—he emphasised the word, his strong blue-grey eyes full on Franky's—"as indispensable as lymph in your inner ear-tubes. Without it you can't keep a level balance—whether you stand, or walk, or fly!"

"Miss Saxham—knows, I suppose?"

A flush crept up through Sherbrand's tanning:

"I have told her. It wasn't pleasant. But she—likes me enough to overlook it. She—seems to think I should never fail in that way! I hope to God I never shall!" The old boyish terror of inherited weakness cropped up in the tone of the man grown. "It would be horrible to suspect the bacillus of slackness lurking in my blood! If there is—the sooner I get scrapped, the better for her and for me!"

"Well, you've chosen the—kind of career that is going to use up a good many men pretty quickly." Franky was warming more and more to this big blond, candid cousin. "Not that I think there's much of the slacker about you. Few chaps more fit and nervy—that is, going by looks, you know! But if the Kaiser's Flying Men can shoot on the wing as well as they brag they can"—his brown eyes were watchful for a change in the other's face—"then——"

"Then I tumble out of my sky, a dead bird!" said Sherbrand, squaring his broad shoulders, "and someone luckier fills my place!"

"Thumbs up! Ten to one you'd come down with a broken wing or so." There was something that touched Franky's latent quality of imagination in the fellow's queer way of saying "my sky." "This cousin of mine is a handsome fellow," he said to himself, "and a plucky one. And—by the Great Brass Hat!—now I come to think of it—the livin' image of old Sir Roger Sherbrand—his and my great-grandfather—goin' by the portrait in the gallery at Whins."

"So you're firm on joinin' the Flying Corps..." he went on, feeling for the moustache which had been reduced to Regulation toothbrush size. "Good egg You! Wish you all the sporting chances——"

"And better luck," said Sherbrand drily, "with Bird of War No. II. than I had with No. I.!"

"You're building a new 'plane?" The brown eyes were alight with interest.

"Rather! Come and have a look at her one day."

"Like a shot, if only I'd time! Did she tot to a hatful of money?"

"Something under £700. £500 of that goes for the new 'Gnome' engine. You see that German—" Sherbrand broke off.

"I remember! Pretty rough on you, that North Sea crossin' business. Must have been an awful loss. Look here!" Franky reddened again and began to flounder. "Could I—couldn't I—help with the boodle? Got £700 lying by idle. Frightfully glad if you'd let me chip in!—just in a cousinly sort o' way!"

"I am much obliged to you, Lord Norwater."

Confound the fellow! how he froze at the least hint of patronage. He went on, holding his head high:

"You are very kind, but I am not poor, unless as poverty is understood by people of your world. Apart from what my profession brings me I have something in the way of income. My mother's brother left me a sum of money that brings in yearly over £200." He went on as Franky regarded with unaffected interest the man who wasn't poor on two hundred per annum: "The principal—I suppose it tots up to £6,000—I shall naturally settle on my wife."

He warmed and brightened with the utterance of the word. His cold eyes grew soft and his brows smoothed pleasantly. He said with a glowing pride, and a kind of brave shyness that a woman who loved him would have adored:

"I have said nothing yet to Miss Saxham about my hopes of a Commission—I suppose for fear of not pulling the thing off. But the moment it comes along I shall persuade her to marry me. We'll be man and wife before I fly for the Front."

As cocky as though he had landed the biggest catch in the matrimonial waters, thought Franky, instead of that great, slangy, galumphing young woman without a halfpenny at her back. But he did the amiable, in a way characteristic of Franky, ushering the guest back to the luncheon-room, introducing "my cousin" to people worth knowing, doing the honours with a pleasant cordiality that won upon Sherbrand more and more.

Sherbrand took leave directly after lunch, saying that he had to catch the afternoon express for Bournemouth. He had left his bag and suit-case in the hall-porter's care. Would Patrine?—Patrine read the entreaty in the hiatus and yielded to it, saying Yes, she would drive with him, and see him off from Waterloo.

"It's lovely of you!" Sherbrand said to her gratefully as they rose. She gave him her cordial smile and a soft glance from the long eyes. They took leave of their hosts and passed out together, heads slewing as the tall young figures went by.

Once in a taxi, spinning down Short Street, Sherbrand possessed himself of the hand he coveted. Its warm strong, answering clasp thrilled him to speechlessness. He looked at the long white fingers intertwined with his own, and asked himself whether he were deserving of a happiness too great to be credited. When her shoulder touched his, its warm creamy whiteness gleaming through the dead-white of her thin sleeve, his heart drummed until it seemed as though she could not but hear it. But his was not the only heart that beat....

"Thank you." It was her rich warm voice speaking close by his ear. "Thank you for being so nice to my Kittums! She is the truest little soul going. We have been chums ever since I joined the Club. Never quarrelled once—until she made up her mind to marry Franky——"

"And now you're going to marry Franky's first cousin." Sherbrand laughed rather breathlessly. "'Marry' ... 'Marriage.' Two splendid words with meanings and meanings beyond meanings packed into them. Isn't it wonderful? ..." He gripped the warm white hand in his strong brown one. "Pat, your pulses are playing a tune!"

"So are yours," she answered in a low tone.

"What is it?" He bent his head and set his lips in a swift caress to the back of the white hand. Then he turned it gently over and looked earnestly at the blue wrist-veins. They were full and throbbing tumultuously. Her blood was answering to the call of his. He set a second swift kiss upon them and his voice was unsteady as he said:

"I know the name of the tune, my wonder. Patrine! Love!—it's the Wedding March!"

"Whose? Grieg's, or Wagner's in Lohengrin, or Haydn's?"

"Neither Wagner's nor Haydn's nor Grieg's. Yours and mine! I told Lord Norwater to-day that I meant to make sure of you before I fly for the Front."

"You're going to the Front? Oh!—why?" Her long eyes looked at him with sharp terror in them. He answered:

"When the Powers that be offer me a Commission in the Royal Flying Corps."

"I see." She breathed freely. "And so—we are not to be married until then?"

"Would you—to-morrow, if I——"

"You know I would!" Her voice broke over him in a wave of tenderness. "You've made me love you—so dreadfully, Alan. Now if the little tin gods hear us—the spiteful little gods who spoil people's lives—something will happen to part us, soon."

His arm went round her and gathered her against him. He said with a great thrill of triumph:

"If the Great God is for us we can defy the little tin devils! It was He who made us for each other, brought us together—will bring us closer still!"

He added, as a handsome boy of nineteen or twenty, dressed at the zenith of the fashion, and already showing the worn lines of habitual dissipation, flashed by driven in a silver-grey Lanchester, with a notorious Cyprian enthroned at his side:

"How can I thank Him enough for what He has done for me? How many temptations He has helped me resist, that I might come to you clean to-day!"

"Were any of the temptations like Mrs. Mallison?" She had freed her hand from his, and now leaned forwards, hiding her clouded face from Sherbrand under the pretext of following the grey car with her eyes. "That was little Wyvenhoe with her.... How young he is! And how old she must be! Why, I've seen her portrait in a Book of Beauty dated forty years back—with a chignon and waterfall. They called her the Marble Marvel in those days, didn't they? Before she pitched her cap over the windmill, and made hay of the Prunes and Prisms. Now she acts in Music Hall sketches—has a voice like a raven's, paints a quarter-of-an-inch thick, and exploits Eton boys. Is anything the matter?"

Sherbrand had suddenly started and pulled his watch out. Now he rapped on the glass at the back of the chauffeur, leaned out of the window and spoke to the man, and resumed his seat, answering:

"The matter is that I had forgotten an important appointment. I can manage to keep it by the skin of my eyelids by taking the three o'clock train to Bournemouth instead of the two-thirty Express. You won't mind? You'll come with me and wait for me?"

"Not a little bit! ..." she answered to the one question and to the other: "Of course I will!"

CHAPTER LI

THE INWARD VOICE

The taxi, arrested and reversed on its way to Piccadilly Circus, was soon speeding Westwards. It whirred up Berkeley Street, traversed Berkeley Square, and turned into a short street ending in railings, enclosing grass wonderfully green for August, clipped bushes of evergreens, and some autumn-foliaged planes.

"We'll keep the man. I'll take his number. He'll look after my kit for me. Let me help you out, dear!"

He opened a gate in the railings and let her through. A large double house, with many windows, severely screened with brown curtains and wire blinds, loomed behind them, commanding the oblong patch of London green. The Modern Gothic porch of a lofty building of smoke-darkened freestone rose up before them. Patrine said under her breath, realising the ecclesiastical character of the edifice:

"Great Scott! It's a church!"

But Sherbrand, who had stayed to shut the gate in the railings did not hear the tabooed expletive. He caught her up and turned the massive iron handle of the porch-door which was braced by bands of iron with trefoil heads, and studded with heavy nails. They went down two shallow steps into an oblong, vaulted chamber, very cool and dark and fragrant, tesselated with squares of black and white stone. Slabs of black marble lined the walls to the height of a tall man. An inscription in Early English lettering, cut into the black background and gilded, caught Patrine's eye in passing. She read beneath the symbol of the Cross:

Cross. "Sodality of the Blessed Sacrament"

Under were lists of names, all male, ranged alphabetically. Her quick eye dropped to the initial S. and found Sherbrand there. But when she looked for her companion, he was waiting hat in hand, at a door some distance beyond them.

"You will come in and wait for me?" he whispered as she came towards him.

"Why not? As well here as anywhere!" He opened the door and she passed in.

To Patrine's left hand, close to the door by which they had entered, was a small unpretending altar supporting the tinted image of an emaciated, bearded monk in a black robe girdled with a white cord. A clustered pillar of red and white marble supported a shallow basin containing a little water. Patrine shrugged as Sherbrand dipped his fingers and made upon brow and breast the sacred Sign. Then he seemed to hesitate—dipped again and held the wetted finger tips towards her, evidently courting her touch. She shook her head hastily. Her eyes swept purposely past his, scanning the vast interior. They were standing in the shorter southern transept of what was some church.

The vast nave was dark and cool, full of silence and shadow and the perfume of flowers and incense, mingled with a fragrance far subtler than these. Pillars of richest Modern Gothic design supported the roof, whose forest of rich dark timbers showed little adornment, except at the Sanctuary end. Here coffering, diapering, and gilding made for splendour; rich marble cased the pillars and floored the stately choir with its rows of stalls, wrought in dark wood, elaborately carved. The north transept housed the organ, a towering instrument of many pipes. The scarlet cushion on the vacant organ-bench, the book of chants left upon the rack, the black and yellow-white of the well-used keys, the numbered heads of the stops, showed through the lattice-work of a high wrought-iron screen, wonderfully painted and gilt. Between Patrine and the nave was a pulpit of red and white marble like the pillars, with a carved sounding-board of obviously ancient work. Rows of pews flanked the wide central aisle and the two smaller, and on the right of a lofty oaken screen that masked the west door, with the mellow light of a great rose-window falling on it, towered a huge Crucifix in black marble, upholding a white tortured Figure whose drooping thorn-crowned Head, like His hands and feet and side, dripped with crimson.... Patrine winced at the sight, and turned hastily away.

Now she was looking over the head of Sherbrand, who knelt before her upright and motionless,—at the High Altar, backed with a noble triptych, its three panels displaying the Annunciation, the Visitation, and the Nativity. A silver lamp depending by chains from the centre of the Sanctuary roof burned with a small steady flame before the Tabernacle—standing between tall tapers burning in gleaming candlesticks, and vases of huge white golden-anthered August lilies—hiding behind its broidered curtains and golden doors, the Ineffable Mystery.

"Come!" Sherbrand's whisper said, close at her ear as he rose up. She turned and followed him down a side-aisle. "Sit here!" he signed to her, pointing to a narrow bench. He waited until she was seated, laid his hat and stick beside her, gave her a grave smile, bent his knees once more, looking towards the High Altar and moved noiselessly away.

Turning her head to follow him with her eyes, Patrine saw that the large dark church was not as empty as she had supposed. Kneeling or seated figures of men and women were scattered here and there amongst the wilderness of empty pews. The serried rows of rush-bottomed kneeling-chairs in either side-aisle showed aggregations of people, ten or a dozen together, chiefly in the neighbourhood of certain narrow wooden doors appertaining to small structures that might be little chapels or vestries, set between groups of pillars in regular sequence down the length of the side-walls. Still following Sherbrand's figure with her eyes she saw him knock at one of the doors, wait as though for an answer, and enter. As the door swung towards her, she saw that it bore a name in gilt letters within an oval on the upper panel. Each of the doors, a questing glance satisfied her, bore a name.

Of course the little wooden chapels were confessionals. Was Confession the important business that necessitated Sherbrand's losing a train and foregoing the company of Patrine to the station, a favour so eagerly sought and so ardently received? Her red lips curled a little at the corners as she turned her face back towards the High Altar, rising within the low barrier of the red and white marble Communion-rail. So remote and pure and set apart with its tall, shining lights and gleaming vases of pure white lilies, its snow-white silk frontal embroidered with a golden ray-surrounded Chalice, its fair white linen Altar-cloth, with a running border of Old English lettering in dark rusty red:

"He had borne our Infirmities and Carried out Sorrows. He was Wounded for our Iniquities. He was Bruised for our sins."

The words seemed to have a physical as well as mental force and impressiveness. It was as though they swept from the high white Table through the fragrant, wax-lit stillness of the Sanctuary, winnowing the still, spicy air of the dark nave and the lighter side-aisles as with wide, powerful, unseen wings. And despite the presence of nearly a hundred people scattered about the great building, the stillness was extraordinary. It got on the nerves.

Almost awfully upon the nerves. For a long way behind her, where the shadowy dusk brooded thickest, and the white tortured Figure of the Crucified hung drooping from the great Cross of black marble against the background of the towering oak screen, it was as though the first great drops of a thunder-shower were falling, pat, pat, pat! upon the pavement below.

Merely a trick of imagination—and yet it tortured. One knew by sensations like these that one had been frightfully overstrained of late. One had done lots of things one regretted—several things one disliked to think of; one thing that made one hate oneself sometimes with a very fury of intensity, when one wasn't too busy hating him. But since he was drowned, one had felt it scarcely cricket to go on expending fierce resentment and savage disgust and acute loathing in that direction. One heaped it on the living of the two gross, sensual offenders. Oh God! when Sherbrand had said in that tone of triumph:

"I come to you clean!"

How inexpressibly one had abominated oneself. How one had shrunk against the side of the taxicab, pretending to look after wretched little decadent Wyvenhoe and the unquenchable Mrs. Mallison—feigning sudden absorption in the Piccadilly shop-windows, to escape those clear undoubting eyes that pierced one to the very soul. To be thought good when one was wicked, pure when one was the other thing; believed candid when one was a living lie. Ah!—that not only pierced but scorched.

If anybody, a month or so back, had asked Patrine: "Are you a Christian?" she would have retorted: "What are you playing at? Of course I am—I suppose!" Of late that conjectural Being she had called God had receded, faded, grown dimmer, and vanished. But here in the stillness, looking towards the Altar, she was conscious as those candle-flames went up like prayers from faithful souls, that Good and Evil were living warring Forces. You chose White or Black deliberately, and when Death came—it was anything but the end.

Her hair stiffened slightly on her scalp and a light shudder thrilled through her. She felt with a growing awe, and sense of dreadful certainty, that Someone was looking at her. And to relieve the insupportable tension she stretched out her hand, and took a squat, thick little book from the shelf below the seat in front of her. It was a copy of the Douai translation from the Latin Vulgate of the Bible, and there was a purple marker where she opened it, in the middle of the Book of Job.

"Power and terror are with Him...."

That was the first line that caught her eye. A little lower on the page came:

"Was it not Him that made life? Hell is naked before Him and there is no covering for destruction.... He stretched out the North over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.

"He hath set bounds about the waters, till light and darkness come to an end....

"The pillars of heaven tremble and dread at His beck. By His power the seas are suddenly gathered together, and His Wisdom hath struck the proud one.

"His Spirit hath adorned the heavens ... and seeing we have heard scarce a little drop of His Word, who shall be able to withstand the thunder of His greatness?"

It was like a Voice speaking—a Voice of inconceivable magnitude. It made one go cold, asking oneself the question: What if sin were an insult to Him? A scrap of filth flung in the Face of One who created the atom, the protoplasm, the cell, and the bacillus, and built from these in His own Image, Man.

Sitting in the stilly duskiness the woman He had made shut her eyes and tried to envisage Him. He was not the God of the Curate's Confirmation-class, nor the God the Anglican Vicar of the West End Church preached about, but a Being the hem of whose garment extends beyond the confines of Space, and in whose lap lies Eternity. Infinite Goodness, infinite Love, infinite Purity, infinite Beauty, He could stoop to care for the little beings of His Workmanship so much, that for them He did not hesitate to sacrifice Himself in the Person of His Only Son. Did not love such as this make wilful sin an insult to Him in that Son's Person? Wasn't it—pretty rough on Our Saviour—to have poured out His Blood upon the Cross of Calvary as an atonement for the sins of men like dead von Herrnung, and women like Patrine Saxham, and know them still so beastly, so prurient, so base, so vile? ... It began to dawn upon Patrine, still possessed by that strange hallucination of the Blood that dripped heavily from the tortured Body on the great black Cross behind her, how it might be that evil wilfully committed, opened its Wounds afresh. Drove the thorns anew into the drooping Head of the Crucified, pierced once more the Heart, that inexhaustible fountain of love....

"O! all you that pass by ... attend and see if there be any sorrow like unto My Sorrow."

The words came cropping up through layers of sentences heard and forgotten, clearly as though a voice had spoken them at her side.

This afternoon the headlines of papers had shrieked of horrors. You remember that at seven o'clock in the morning two German Army Corps had poured into Belgium by the eleven strategic railways that provided for The Day. The vast grey-green flood of marching men, the huge python-like columns of machine-guns, the splendidly-horsed batteries of field artillery, the Brobdingnagian siege howitzers thundering behind their traction-engines, the miles of motor- and horse-drawn transport-waggons, carts, and lorries, blotted out the familiar features of the landscape, as, preceded by massed brigades of cavalry, with squadrons of Field Flying Service aëroplanes reconnoitring three thousand feet overhead, the hosts of Germany rolled down towards the banks of the Meuse.

Directly in line of them rose the fortified City of Liége, termed "the Birmingham of Belgium," holding in the suburb of Seraign, five miles distant from the city, the huge Cockerill machine-plant and foundry, one of the largest ironworks in the world. They had stayed three hours at the frontier station of Visé, a Belgium Custom House town of less than 4,000 inhabitants, where a few squadrons of Belgian Cavalry and the Belgian 12th Line Regiment, aided by some heroic peasants, farmers, and townspeople had risen up with desperate gallantry to oppose their inevitable advance.

They had written the sign-manual of the Hun upon the ashes of Visé in the blood of its massacred inhabitants. Frightfulness, the many-headed hydra, was uncaged and let loose ere they rolled on to Liége peeved by their three hours' intolerable delay. While I who write and you who read far from the sound of fusillades, or the crash of shells or the yells of peasants dying amongst the flames of burning houses, learned of these deeds from the shrilly clamorous headlines, and asked one another with raised eyebrows, in incredulous voices: "Can these hideous things possibly have been done?"

Patrine had no doubt that they had been done!—were being done even while she sat waiting in Sherbrand's church for Sherbrand. Did she not know von Herrnung? Were not his fellow-officers and the soldiers he and they commanded, lustful, brutal, cruel, rapacious, arrogant, and pitiless even as he? He was a Type—not the isolated example of a new species. It would not be easily stamped out; its dominating characteristics would write themselves upon a conquered race. Those outraged wives, those violated daughters of Belgium would live to see it reproduced in the living fruit of their humiliation. What honest man could bear to stoop over his wife's bedside and meet the eyes of the Enemy looking at him—from the face of a new-born child!

A rigor of horror seized upon her body and shook it. Her jaw dropped, her eyes closed as though they shrank and withered under their contracting lids. She slid from her seat and fell upon her knees helplessly. Her head sank forwards upon the hands that rose instinctively to hide her face. In the same instant Sherbrand's low voice speaking behind her turned the heart in her bosom to ice.

"Dearest—I am ready, that is if you are? My keeping you was unavoidable. I am going to Communion with my mother, before the Funeral Mass to-morrow, and I wanted to make my Confession first. Has the time seemed long?"

"Not long. Shall we go now?"

He bent the knee to the High Altar and moved with Patrine down the nave towards an altar dedicated to the Virgin Mother, that was on the south side of the church near the great west door. Wax tapers of several sizes burned in a brass stand beside the tiny altar-rail. Sherbrand lighted three tapers and placed them, felt in his waistcoat-pocket for a bit of silver and balanced it on the slotted top of the money-box too gorged with pennies to admit of the slender sixpenny bit. Then with a beautiful, devotional simplicity he knelt upon the narrow blue golden-starred cushion for a moment, looking up at the gracious veiled head that bent above.

But for the modernity of the tweed clothes, the pose of the athletic, lightly-built body would, with the mellowed light from the great rose window falling on the keen bronzed face and thick fair hair, have suggested a knight at prayer. In a moment he rose. They returned as they had come, passed through the chapter-house of the Sodality, and issued through the door into the garden. She said, as he triumphantly possessed himself of the dear white hand:

"Tell me, when you lighted and placed those three candles and knelt down—what did you intend—what was it for? A practical insurance against a railway-accident?"

The dull, ill-timed gibe was no sooner uttered than she sickened with self-contempt. For Sherbrand answered with direct simplicity:

"Well, no! Call my three candles a reminder that I have asked Our Lady's help and protection and guidance for three dear people. My father, my mother, and my wife that is to be. For myself I asked that I might never disappoint you. You don't know how I shall try to live up to your belief in me!"

"You dear boy!" Touched to the quick response of tears she could barely falter: "You're a million times too good for me, if only you knew!"

"I know this—that the wide world doesn't hold another woman like my woman! Why, Pat, the very sound of your voice lashes all the blood in me into big red roaring waves of love."

"'Big red roaring waves.' Oh, Alan!"

She laughed, driving back the hot salt tears that stung her eyelids. The taxi was waiting at the corner of Blount Street, patiently ticking out twopence. Sherbrand whistled and it approached them. But this time Patrine did not enter. She could not now drive to Waterloo. It was much, much too late. She refused even to be dropped anywhere. She infinitely preferred walking. It was quite a pleasant stroll from there to Harley Street.

So they wrung hands and looked in each other's eyes and parted. When the taxi vanished round the corner of Blount Street, the tall, gallantly-borne figure in the golden-braided hat and pale rose gown began to walk swiftly towards Grosvenor Square. Suddenly it paused, wheeled, and returned upon its paces, passed through the gate in the railings and disappeared into the church.

In bed that night in the chintz-hung room at Harley Street, Patrine, recalling the experience that had followed the yielding to that irresistible prompting, wondered if it had actually taken place, or were woven of the tissue of dreams.

Kneeling upon a bast matting-covered hassock behind the door of the narrow little wooden cell into which she had slipped as a tall, grey-haired officer in Service khaki passed out,—she had rested her elbows upon a narrow ledge before her and peered through a close grating of bronze wire at a figure dimly descried beyond.

The priest was white-haired and of small stature. A meagre ray of light falling from above upon the hands clasped over the ends of the narrow stole of violet-purple that hung loosely about his neck, showed them wasted and yellow-white and deeply wrinkled. By the testimony of the hands he was an old man. Something in the manner of her address must have struck him as unusual. She had not spoken six words in her quick, hot, stammering whisper before he lifted a hand and said authoritatively:

"Stop!"

And as she had arrested the rush of her words, he had continued, in a grave, dry voice, quite devoid of unction or sympathy, cautiously lowered and yet wonderfully distinct:

"You say that you wish to 'confide something' to me 'under the seal of Confession,' and you are not a Catholic!"

"No, I am not! I suppose I would be called—a sort of Christian, though." She said it haltingly. "Does my not being a Catholic prevent you listening to anything I ... want to say?"

The dry voice came back:

"I do not refuse to hear what you have to say. But Confession, Absolution, and Penance are Catholic Sacraments. I cannot extend the benefits of the Church to one who stands without her pale."

"I'm sorry! ... I suppose, I really haven't got the right to ask advice from you, or to expect you to keep anything—secret?"

There was a little old man's cough. The dry voice followed:

"I did not say that. As a priest, I am bound to give good counsel to those who ask it. And I promise you, also as a priest, to respect your confidence.... Now if you desire to go on—for I have several penitents waiting—I will ask you to do so. Be clear and truthful and brief. Mention no person by name. Let there be no exaggeration. Now begin! ..."

"It's like this..." And she had blurted out the ugly, sordid story, that in the plain, unvarnished narration grew uglier and more sordid still.

He had listened without the movement of an eyebrow or the twitch of a muscle. At certain points where she had deviated from the sheer fact by a mere hairsbreadth the dry little cough had interjected: "Think again!" When she touched upon the circumstances that had resulted in "another man's" offer of marriage:

"You have accepted this other?" he had asked, and followed her affirmative by saying, quietly, just as he had told her she was not a Catholic: "You have not told him of—what has taken place. Is he an honourable, upright man?"

"Very!"

"H'mm!" said the dry cough. "What is his religion?"

"He is a Catholic."

"H'mm! ... A devout Catholic?"

"He seems—awfully keen on his Church!"

A silence had followed, during which the beating of Patrine's heart and the singing of the blood in her ears had seemed to fill the clean little wooden place. Then:

"Do you intend to tell this keen Catholic," asked the merciless voice, "that you do not come to him—pure?"

"No! ... At least..." The heave of her bosom against the little shelf before the lattice made the dry wood quiver and creak. A deep sigh broke from her. The priest's voice continued:

"You have made it quite clear why you have applied to me. To be encouraged not to tell! But even for your own sake I advise you to make confession. Do you expect God's blessing upon a marriage that is—upon your side—a fraud?"

"Men aren't angels!" Patrine burst out rebelliously. "How do I know that he—Yes, I do know!"

His face had risen up before her, and his voice was in her ears saying with that note of gladness in it: "I come to you clean!" and shame and compunction choked her, as she added:

"He's straighter than I should have believed it possible for any man to be."

"H'mm!" The dry hacking old man's cough came again. He sniffed twice, sharply. Now he was speaking again.

"You have not known many—or any Catholic men before this one. Your doubt as to the existence of masculine purity proves with what type of persons you have hitherto mixed. For your own sake you will be wise to tell the truth to this gentleman. If you loved him you would tell him for his. Now you must leave. I have given you too much time as it is. Repeat after me as I dictate." He clasped the withered hands and began briskly: "Oh, my God——"

After a brief ineffectual hesitation, Patrine echoed him. He went on trailing after him a voice that stumbled and dragged:

"Oh, my God! I am very sorry that I have offended Thee by the sin of fornication, and have yielded up my body to uncleanness, instead of keeping myself pure as Thou commandest. I beseech Thee for the love of Thy Son my Saviour Jesus Christ to bestow upon me the grace of a genuine sorrow for my sin; and while I implore that Thou wouldst mercifully spare me the ruin and disgrace I have merited by my own act, I faithfully promise Thee to profit by the bitter lesson I have learned. But if I find myself as the natural consequence of my wickedness——"

"—of my wickedness——"

The dragging echo failed. A mist came before her eyes.

"Go on," said the stern voice from the other side of the grating. It went on dictating:

"But if I find myself as the natural consequence of my sinfulness about to be the mother of a child, I vow not to be guilty of any violence to the innocent. But to bear my bitter punishment meekly, as coming from Thy Hand. Amen."

She said the words. He blessed her with some such words as these:

"Now may God bless and forgive you, and bring your soul from darkness into His Light. Leave me now. Please shut the door."

She heard the dry little hacking cough again as she closed it after her. But she did not go away thinking him harsh and merciless. She had seen great shining tears dropping, dropping upon those withered hands.

CHAPTER LII

KHAKI

Remember how upon the great grey canvas of London, broadly splashed in with khaki, from the becoming dead-leaf of the Regular troops to the deadly ginger of the newly mobilised Reserve or the hideous mustard-yellow of the latest recruit to the newest Territorial unit—Recruiting posters of every shape, size, and method of appeal to patriotism, suddenly flared out, ranging from the immemorial red-and-blue printing on white to the huge pictorial hoarding-plaster in monochrome. Dash in as values the glow of re-awakened patriotism, the resounding silences in which Royal Messages to British Citizens and lieges were delivered by grave officials in scarlet gowns and curly white wigs, and the singing of the National Anthem by huge crowds gathered in front of Buckingham Palace, to cheer, over and over again the King, the Queen, and the Heir to the British Throne.

Recall how keenly-curious Britons densely thronged the neighbourhood of the Houses of Parliament, eager to ascertain the British attitude towards France and other Continental Powers; while immense aggregations of people blocked the entrance to Downing Street, surging outside the wrought-iron screens protecting Ministerial windows; congesting Whitehall until omnibuses proceeded at a snail's pace.

Revive the strange newness of things, the snap and tingle of seeing not only Royal Palaces and Government Offices, but vital places such as Arsenals, Docks, Railway, and Electric Power stations, Powder-magazines and Munition Stores closely guarded by men in tea-leaf or ginger-brown. Sickly the hot flush of things so new with the pale dread of ruin, the ugly rumours of Invasion. Shadow in broad and black, a panic on the Stock Exchange, the dizzying fall of prices on Continental Bourses, the record slump on Wall Street, the frenzied stampede of the run upon the Banks, the Proclamation from the steps of the Royal Exchange of the strange thing called by nearly everybody—anything but a Moratorium; as, for example, a Monatorial, a Monoroarium or Honorarium, and so on.

Who could ever forget the excitement attendant on the sailing of famous passenger and cargo-liners with quick-firers and Maxims nosing through steel shields abaft the lower bridge? How the Red Cross notified its surgeons, nurses, and ambulance-helpers to hold themselves ready for business, and a neat khaki rig-out that had puzzled us in several unfamiliar details, turned out to be the Service uniform of the Royal Flying Corps.

German and Austro-Hungarian Reservists of all classes, summoned home by the strident bellow of Fatherland, surged round their respective Consulates. Prince Cheraowski, Representative of Germany, having had his passports handed him, shrugged the shrug of a disgruntled man, lighted a cigarette, and took a farewell constitutional through St. James's Park. And, on the Declaration of War with Austria-Hungary a few days later, Count Lensdorff received his walking-ticket, and gracefully vanished from the scene. And from the hall-doors of one Embassy in Carlton House Terrace and another in Belgrave Square, British workmen, cheerfully whistling, unscrewed the massive brazen plates. Crowds watched the operation in phlegmatic silence; the single individual who loosed a "boo" being promptly bonneted by a disapproving majority, and moved on by the police, while the windows of the British Embassy at Berlin were being shattered by brickbats, as were those of divers British consulates and Legations throughout the Fatherland. On the mud, stones, and verbal filth lavished on their inmates, of the Yahoo-like usage undergone by Englishmen and Englishwomen, we may not dwell, but I do not think we are likely to forget.

Recall again, how vast public spaces carefully kept and tended by Committees and boards and Councils, became, as at the stroke of a wand, huge training camps of young, keen, healthy if pale-cheeked Britons in ill-fitting gingerbread or mustard-coloured clothes. How groups of unoccupied London houses, or large vacant stores, or the head-centres of the Y.M.C.A. in various districts, would suddenly overflow with bronzed and sturdy warriors of the Regular Forces, and as suddenly empty again. The platforms of railway termini, closely guarded and barred from the public, would be dotted with neat stacks of Lee Enfield rifles, while regularly-breathing sleepers in khaki pillowed on their packs, shielded by the peaks of their tilted caps from the blue-white electric glare, or the yellow dazzle of the morning sun. A whistle—a snort and clank of two big locomotives—and the platforms under the reverberating glass roofs would be empty again, under the dusty yellow sunshine, or the blue-white electric glare.

Remember all this to the daily accompaniment of those huge shrieking headlines, the trotting of innumerable iron-shod hoofs, the ceaseless rolling of iron-shod wheels, the clatter and vibration of huge motor-lorries, vans, and waggons commandeered for the use of the Auxiliary Transport (brilliantly painted in thousands of instances, and proclaiming in foot-long capitals the virtues of Crump's Curative Saline, or Bango's Extract of Beef), mingled with the steady tramp of marching men, all through the days and nights. By night you lay and listened to these sounds, mingled with the bleating of flocks of sheep, and the bellowing of herds of cattle, until the hoofs and wheels and marching boots mingled into the roar of one great ink-black, awful River, whose ice-cold woe-waters—sprung from some mysterious source—swept through our villages and towns and cities, carrying with them millions of lives, brute and human, towards the blood-red dawn of Death.

CHAPTER LIII

FRANKY GOES TO THE FRONT!

With the First Infantry Brigade of the First British Expeditionary Force went the First Battalion of the Bearskins Plain.

Exchanging with Ackroyd, "too sick a man for fighting" (who parted with several superfluous inches of appendix and convalesced in time to go out with the Second Battalion and meet a glorious end at Ypres), Franky was swallowed up in the vortex of Aldershot. 000, Cadogan Place saw him but once more before the roaring flood whirled him away, like a slim brown autumn leaf, to the Unknown.

His gift to Margot on the night of their parting was a silver elephant of truculent aspect, having ruby eyes and mother-o'-pearl tusks and a howdah on its back, accommodating a "Gladsome Days" pull-off kalendar.

"You're such nuts on mascots and gadgets, best childie, I thought I'd get you this beggar for a keepsake. Saw it in a shop in Bond Street. It goes like so!"—Franky demonstrated by sticking a penknife-blade under the liberal whack of leaves that had become obsolete since the First of January. "Rather a neat notion. Something appropriate for every day o' the week," he continued, indicating a rhymed distich appearing beneath the current date. This, the first of many utterances on the part of the Silver Elephant, ranging from the idiotically inappropriate to the appositely malign, ran as follows:

"Be very kind to Pussy-cat

And handle her with care:

You would not pull her by the tail

If her claws grew out of there!"

"Well, if that's the best this beast can do—" began Margot, sternly surveying the proboscidean. Then she softened, meeting Franky's disappointed eyes, and said it was a lovely present and she would always keep it on the table by her bedside. She and Franky were almost lovers again for the brief time that yet remained to them. She even endured without open resentment his continual references to the child.

"Take care of you both for my sake, won't you, Kittums? Of course, long before Christmas I hope to be back with you! But"—he tenderly crushed the little figure to him as he sat on the bedside holding it embraced—"but if by any old chance I get sent in—remember what kind of man I'd like my boy to be. Sanguine, ain't I?—on the point of his being a boy—putting a pink geranium in the front window before the house is built, but still——"

He laughed awkwardly, and brushed off a shining drop of moisture that splashed on the slender brown leather strap that marks the officer's caste. A third star showed on his khaki sleeve, but he had made no reference to it, and Kittums omitted to ask what it meant. He kissed her gravely on the eyes and lips and forehead, unwound the slender arms that clasped his neck, and gently laid her back upon the pillows. Then with: "Good-night and God bless you!" he went quietly out of the room. The hall-door shut and a servant put the chain up, and the waiting car slid away to the Tower. For "I'm to kip down at the old shop for to-night," Franky had explained, "and shepherd five hundred strengthy foot-sloggers—fat as prize bullocks every one of 'em!—to Nowhere in Particular in the morning."

Margot cried a little when the hall-door shut, and then fell soundly asleep among her big pillows. Waking as a ray of five o'clock sunshine penetrated between the blue-green silk blinds and the lacy curtains, to realise that Something had gone out of her life.

Something wilful, petulant Kittums had not valued until the hall-door had shut behind it. Something that—crawling, shuddering thought!—might never return. She sat up in bed, hugging her knees and staring into a Future without any Franky in it, a tragic little picture against the background of the big frilled pillows, her great dark eyes wide and wild under her tumbled gold brown hair-waves, her paleness enhanced by the rose-silk night-sheath, a maelstrom of thought, emotions, apprehensions, terrors, whirling in the humming-bird brain.

The ray of sunshine presently touched the face of the electric clock and elicited a malicious twinkle from the ruby eyes of the Silver Elephant. Remembering her promise, Kittums put out a hand, pulled off the paper-slip bearing the date of the previous day and read:

"May All Your Hours Be Bright As This!"

CHAPTER LIV

OFFICIAL RETICENCE

The First British Expeditionary Force was in France. Thus much after considerable delay was vouchsafed us. Some studiously unenlightening Field post-cards, some industriously Censored private letters, some Press narratives and photographs were permitted us, of Highlanders, Guards, Scots Greys, Middlesex, Worcestershires, Gordons, and others, brought in upon the midnight tide and debarking from huge transports at Boulogne and Havre and Rouen, under burning blue skies and a sizzling sun. The illustrated weeklies and the cinematograph showed them, with battery after battery of R.F.A. and R.H.A. and R.G.A., Ammunition parks and columns, and Engineers with pontoons on motor-waggons, and Field Ambulance units, endlessly streaming into or out of the canvas cities erected on the sites of the old Napoleonic camps. Showed also Comic Relief, in the familiar form of British Tommy, grinningly appreciative of the welcome accorded him by command of the French Republic; meekly submitting to be plucked bare of buttons and badges, by sirens who sought these with offerings of chocolate, wine, and fruit. This meagre pabulum we champed, possessing our souls perforce, in patience; sitting before the great iron curtain of official reticence that had glided down into its grooves as though it never meant to go up again.

Then, with the whiffling swoop of the Jabberwock—the Food Scare was upon us. Letters showered from venerable maiden aunts in remote country districts, describing economies practised by our great-grandmothers in 1801 and 1814. Hot-eyed friends buttonholed one and whispered of Famine that was coming, and pressed crumpled pamphlets, dealing with Food Values, into one's unwilling hand. The Specie Scare came next, rousing the most phlegmatic to frenzied indignation. What! In lieu of the smooth plump British sovereign and half-sovereign welcomed in every corner of the civilised world, must we perforce accept the "magpie," or One Pound note, and the "pinky" or ten-shilling bill!

People frothed and vituperated. We were all frothing, what time the stocky Kalmuck-faced von Kluck with 130,000 Germans of the Kaiser's First Army came rolling down in overwhelming force upon the First and Second British Army Corps. Eighty thousand men of our blood holding the line of the canal from Condé to "a place called Mons" with, as the flanking angle, another place called Binche.

The 5th French Army was in full retreat from Namur and Charleroi; borne back by the resistless pressure of von Buelow, Chief of the Second Army of Attila, 250,000 strong. The 4th French Army was retiring before von Hahsen and a third tidal wave of armed Germanity—humping its huge snaky columns after the fashion of the looper caterpillar—along the menaced line of the Meuse.

The Krupp and Skoda motor-howitzers that had crushed Belgian fortresses like eggshells were coming into position; the circling enemy aëroplanes were directing with smoke-rockets the uncannily excellent shooting of the German Artillery. We who thought we had no more than a couple of Army Corps in front of us, and possibly a Division of Cavalry, were beginning to realise the ugly truth. As the frightful blizzard of iron and flame broke upon the British batteries, and the shallow trenches made in desperate haste and crowded with the flower of the British Army, began to lose the shape of trenches, to melt—to become mere scratches in the earth, littered with human scrap....

We did not suspect, we never dreamed of grave disaster to our Forces, though some of us were strangely haunted by well-loved looks and dear familiar touches before the Iron Curtain of official silence lifted that quarter-inch and the thick red stuff oozed slowly underneath.

An hour or two before the Great Awakening, Margot had 'phoned asking Patrine to come round. Arriving, her friend found Kittums sorely exercised in spirit. The housekeeper, in tears, had sought an interview on the Food Question and entreated her lady to lose no time in provisioning the domestic citadel with Flour, Sugar, Bacon, Tea, Coffee, Potatoes, Cereals, and tinned meats against the approaching days of famine. She begged to submit a List. It would be well to lose no time for all the Banks were breaking. She felt it her duty to mention the fact.

"And so I told Wallop to dry her poor old eyes," explained Kittums, "and I'd go and buy up the Army and Navy Stores as soon as I'd had a look in at what Franky calls the Dross House, just to ask the Manager, as man to man, if there's any chance of the Bank going biff? Your adorable Lynette and your Uncle Owen may say that hoarding things to eat isn't playing the game and all that. Well! When you're too sharp-set to think Imperially, come round here and I'll grub the lot. How is your Flying Man?"

"Doing some Army Coaching. Out Farnborough way," said Patrine. "I've not set eyes on him twice since that Club lunch."

"When Franky cottoned to him so," said Margot. "You've not had a scrimmage?"

"God forbid!"

"Engaged people always squabble."

"Alan and I don't," asserted Patrine.

The car came round and they drove to the Bank. Most Banks had enjoyed a Run and a few had experienced the combination of a Run with a Panic. There had been a severe Run on Margot's bank. Now it was over and a huge majority among the people who formed queues at the doors and crowded the counters were paying in the deposits they had nervously withdrawn. Relieved in mind, Kittums cashed a cheque of magnitude, and the respectable Williams turned the car in the direction of the Stores.

On this Day of the Great Awakening, Woman stormed the departments. Kittums and Patrine plunged into the scrum, to emerge after having achieved a modified success. Lady Norwater's explanation, that she required provisions in wholesale bulk because of a yachting-trip she meditated, had been hit upon by several thousands of other terminological inexactitudinarians. The mounds of bacon, the castled tins of tea and coffee, the sacks of sugar, rice, and cereals, the raisins, currants, and tinned comestibles—had been nearly all picked up by these knowing early risers. Still enough had been secured to relieve the mind of Mrs. Wallop, and scare the wolf from the threshold of 00, Cadogan Place.

"Beg pardon, m' lady." The sedate face of the respectable Williams looked over the last Brobdingnagian parcel transferred to his embrace. "I think if your ladyship 'as no objection it would be better to close the car."

"If it will close," began Margot, looking with interested speculation at the mountainous accumulation of bulky, whitey-brown string-tied bags and packages upon the front seat.

"FOOD 'OGS!" bellowed a man in a rusty bowler hat and soiled shirt sleeves, so suddenly and powerfully that Kittums jumped.

"Garn 'ome!" vindictively shrieked a fiery-faced female. "Greedy-guts! Yah! Git along 'ome!"

"FOOD 'OGS!" reiterated the Stentor in shirt sleeves, backed by an approving murmur from a crowd of dingily-clad men and women gathered upon the pavement right and left of the imposing entrance to the Stores.

"Now then, move on 'ere!" came from a policeman, and the crowd began to dissolve, with lowering glances. Motorcars were moving away, carrying their owners embedded in groceries. Others were driving up to the door.

"Move on, please!" repeated the Man in Blue.

"Not till I've got rid of these things. Call the Commissionaire. Tell him my name and number!—say the orders were given by mistake! ..." Margot went on, when the Alpine range of parcels had melted away under the combined efforts of chauffeur and Commissionaire: "Poor old Wallop will wail, but I've purged myself of the contempt of being a Food Hog. Great Snipe! to think of deserving to be called such an awful name. It made me feel all of seventeen stone, with a row of chins like saddle-bags!" She pinched her own dainty chin between a tiny finger and thumb. "Still, I've enjoyed the scrum," she went on, as the car slid towards Piccadilly. "It's bucked me splendidly! I shall know what to do now, when I want to lay my ghosts. You know one of them"—the little fingers twitched in Patrine's—"what's coming in November. The other started haunting me only a few days back." All the new-won colour had died out of the small oval face and the great dark eyes were tragic in their terror. "You're too good a pal to laugh. Well, then—I'll own up. Franky's my latest ghost of all!"

"But you have heard? You have had letters?"

The answer was strangled between a laugh and a sob.

"Letters. Three post-cards from Somewhere in France and a queer epistle all squares of blacking. Not much between—except that he is tophole and coming Home at Christmas and sends love to us both! That's Franky's way. He always talks as—" A shudder went through the little figure, and shadows were about the great wild eyes, and the pale lips quivered:

"Poor little Kittums!" said Patrine's big warm baritone. She slipped an arm tenderly about the little thing. Who could have dreamed that Kittums could care so about Franky—or any other man. "Are you worrying so badly, my dinkie?" she went on, soothingly: "Try not. It isn't wise!"

"I'm not worrying," came the weary answer. "I'm being haunted—that's all. Day and night since it started, his hands are on me and his eyes are looking at me. When I sleep, I'm wandering through desolate places looking, always looking for him! And thousands of other selfish, silly women are being haunted in the same way. Oh, Pat, be always kind when you're married to your Flying Man!"

"When!"—Patrine echoed. But what of sorrow or doubt her tone conveyed was lost upon Margot. She had told her own grief, and the telling had relieved her. Like the child with the kissed bruise, she could prattle of other things. She was twittering and chirping in the gay little voice Franky knew so well, as Williams, the respectable, turned smoothly into Short Street. There was a dense block at the corner by the Aldebaran Hotel, and amidst the swishing of the motor-engines and the fidgeting of plump carriage-horses, loathful of the sudden release of the pungent exhaust from escape-valves under their noses—a little piece of dialogue between two Cyprians on the near sidewalk drove home to both the occupants of the car.

One Cyprian was well-to-do, past thirty-five and expensively caparisoned for conquest, from the tall feather topping her stove-pipe hat and her burnished wig of Angora goat-hair, to her silk stockings of liberally-open pattern and the tips of her high-heeled, buckled shoes. Her hard eyes under their painted brows took critical stock of the other, younger woman, whose make-up could not hide ill-health, and whose flaunting fineries were the worse for wear.

Said Hard Eyes, indicating with a jerk of her powdered double chin, a procession moving down Piccadilly Circus-wards—a publisher's catchpenny advertisement of "WEEP NO MORE, MOTHERS!" ingenious in its employment of robust-looking matrons as bearers of the sandwich-boards plastered with posters of rose-colour and gold:

"You could give some of the swell West End ladies a tip or two, I reckon, Lallie, about that Purple Dreams dope?"

"Honest to God, I could! But I wouldn't!" The haggard eyes leapt viciously out of their languor. "Let 'em run up against it—same as me! Me that went all the way to Brussels to get the new treatment. Great Scott! When I came to I was black and blue and green all over. And my face! It was a fair scream!" She threw an appraising side-glance in a shop window. "No! My skin'll never be what it used, I reckon."

"But the"—the hard eyes between the elder woman's blued lids were hideously significant—"the Trouble, eh?"

"The Trouble"—Lallie's still girlish shoulders shrugged.—"Oh, that's all right! I heard no more of it! There's the one comfort. Good-bye, ducky. I got to meet somebody at the Cri."

"Well, better luck!" And as the block broke and the car moved on, the women nodded and parted. Margot and her friend Patrine did not look at each other as the car stopped before the Club.

A glance showed the vestibule crowded, the second pair of swing-doors thudded momentarily as members and their guests passed on into the Club rooms, without relieving the congestion that fresh arrivals renewed. Some doors above, a piano-organ in charge of two men was jolting out the last bars of the Russian National Anthem. One of the men, olive-skinned, grey-haired, and dressed in threadbare black, sang the words with perfunctory fervour in a cracked tenor voice. As the last chord banged out and the organist jerked the changing-lever over, and the Marseillaise summoned jangling echoes of its lyrical frenzy from the pavement and the surrounding walls, Patrine, meeting Sherbrand's eyes over the crowded heads of people, knew a sudden shock of apprehension in the strangeness of their regard.

For day and night since that strange, impulsive visit she had made to the Confessional—"You must tell him. It is your duty to tell him!" had sounded in her ears. She set her teeth and determined that she would never tell him, none the less knowing that the revelation would be made. A Power infinitely stronger than her woman's will was bearing upon it. Her treasure was in peril, her fairy-gold at any moment might turn to withered leaves at a breath from her own mouth.

CHAPTER LV

NEWS OF BAWNE

"Pat!—what luck!"

Sherbrand was standing before her, tall and lean and masterful, saluting her with the touch of three fingers to a soldierly forage-cap with three buttons, set jauntily atilt on the broad tanned brow.

Ah! the delight of seeing the cold grey glance warm into sea-blue, the lean, eagle-face flash into smiles. For a little while yet he was hers, she told herself, as the hard hand gripped on hers that answered the swift fierce pressure, and her blood that the sickly chill of fear had stagnated, whirled on its crimson circle singing for joy. And then—a second glance, sweeping from the top to the toes of the tall manly figure, stopped the song.

"Alan! You—in khaki!"

"I suppose so," he said a little clumsily, echoing thousands of other men. "It's the universal wear just now, isn't it? We fellows must make good while we can—and we're all of us joining. Even Macrombie—you can't have forgotten Macrombie—has got his rating, and is acting a P.O.T. on a Destroyer in the North Sea."

Do you see the dour drunkard standing up, under the eye of the smart young inspecting Fleet Surgeon, naked save for the leather bootlace that held a battered silver locket round his harsh and swarthy scrag.

"Your age? ..."

"Ye micht ca' me forty," said the subject, with caution.

"I might, but I'd be a liar!" said the Fleet Surgeon, "so try again, my man!"

"Ye micht pit twa to the forr-ty," came rumbling from the hairy chest.

"And tack eight on to that," thus the Fleet Surgeon, tucking the hooked ends of the stethoscope into his ears, and deftly applying the microphone. "And then I'd be wide of the actual! Breathe deeply, will you!" The effort provoked a volley of coughs sounding like half-bricks pitched against the sides of an empty cistern and the Fleet Surgeon shook his head.

"Hough—hough—hough!—why didna' ye—hough! lat weel alane?" gasped Macrombie, with eyes blazing hell-fire through the moisture engendered by the cough. "Dinna ye ken I'll never no' be wanting to breathe deeply whaur ye're needing to send me? There is nae room whatever for lung-play oot o' the ordinar'," he added scornfully, "aboard ane o' thae kittle, cranky, tinpot Destroyers!"

"Hold out your hand!" commanded the arbiter of Destinies. He contemplated the extended member, wavering and fluttering like the indicator-needle on the dial of an atmospheric pressure-gauge. "Pretty wobbly, what?" he commented to the owner with the sarcastic inflection that advertised a keen advocate of Temperance.

"Man, O! man!" broke from Macrombie in a harsh rattling whisper, desperate appeal flashing in his burnt-out eyes, "you that are young enough to be my son, tak' me or leave me, ane or the tither—but shame me nae mair!"

Telegraphists were sorely needed, so Macrombie of the racking hoast and the shaky hand was passed as fit for Service, and duty rated as Petty Officer Telegraphist aboard one of the contemned tin-pots.

The Crown and winged double-thunderbolt must have nerved the arm they came back to. For, on the day of the Battle of Jutland, when a point-blank salvo from an enemy cruiser wrecked the bridge and searchlight platform, carrying away the forward mast and funnel of Macrombie's particular tin-pot, and men in respirators were fighting the smothering fumes of the fire caused by German shells of the incendiary description, a dour, stark man whose clothes were alight and burning on him, stuck grimly to his post among the wreckage of the shattered Wireless room, sending out the message last dictated by the officer who lay dead across the blistering steel plating—for the short circuit set up by the smashed searchlight had created its own separate conflagration, and the electricity was "running out of everything like oil."

When the tin-pot heeled over, and, having duly buried her steel chest and secret documents, went down with colours flying in a smother of oily steam, men who were saved on the rafts told this tale of Macrombie, who sleeps well, after Life's thirsty fever, at his post in the Destroyer's battered Wireless cabin, on the deep-ridged, sandy bottom of the wild, shallow North Sea.

Patrine felt her heart crushed as in the grip of a cold steel gauntlet. Her apprehensions had not been unfounded. She and Alan were to be parted, if not as she had feared.

"I—suppose I ought to congratulate you—" Her unwilling eyes admired the tall manly figure in the plain workmanlike uniform. The buttonless tunic with its Lancer plastron, the riding-breeches of ampler cut than the cavalryman's, the high spurless boots of supple brown leather, and the belt that carried a revolver and no sword. "What—what are you in?" she asked draggingly, and he answered with a smile and a flash of his grey eyes:

"I hope I'm in for some of what's going on!"

"How glad you are!"

"Rather. I should think so! Now that they've let me into the Royal Flying Corps as a T.S.L. Look at my wings!" He touched the white outspread pinions on the tunic-breast with a reverent finger-tip and went on pouring out his story without a break. "It's cost me some badgering of High Officials of Military Aëronautics at Whitehall, and a lot of time wasted in baby tests. Squad drill, Harris tube, bomb-dropping, air-signalling, Webley and Scott practice, and so on. Now I'm teaching trick-flying to Army aviators from 4.30 A.M. till 11 P.M. The Powers that Be have taken over the Flying Schools—Durrant's Café is our Officer's Mess now. You should see old Durrant in his glory as Head Waiter. And Mrs. D—" His white teeth flashed as he laughed.

"And they have known of this"—she nodded at the eagle-wings—"while I have been kept in ignorance! How long?"

"Not quite a fortnight. Don't be unreasonable, dear!"

The new tone stung. Did a yellow star upon the cuffs and shoulder-straps and a pair of white wings on the left breast mean so much to him that her just claims upon his confidence seemed wanting in reason now? Anger and resentment choked her as he added:

"I am here now, as it happens, because I'm crossing the Channel to-morrow at peep o' day." Something in her pale face made him add: "Don't worry!—I'm likely to be back again by nightfall. That's what I've rushed in here to tell you, though I've a man in tow, a Wing Commander of the French S. Aë. Hot from the Front and just landed at Hendon. I had to take him in my car to his Embassy, and now I've got to find him a room at an hotel. When I've done it I'm coming back here to talk to you. Where on earth has my man got to? Why, there he is, talking to Lady Norwater. The little chap with the grey moustache and the gold-banded képi."

"I am honoured by Madame's gracious remembrance," the person indicated could be heard protesting, during an instant's lull in the Babel of voices round. "But my own—a thousand pardons! is less accurate."

"Oh!" Margot expostulated, "but you can't have forgotten. That Sunday of the Grande Semaine—when you were in the Bois, timing a Flying Officer who was testing an English invention—a sort of a——"

"But assuredly, Madame!" His quick nod and the gesture of his gloved hand summoned up the scene vividly. "I remember, but perfectly, though much water has rolled under the bridges since that day. And Milord—Madame's husband?"

"He's at the Front," Margot explained, "wherever the Front is!"

"Unfortunately at the moment," returned the suave voice, "the Front is everywhere. It is easy to find without binoculars. Adieu, Madame. Merci bien de la souvenir si gracieuse, dites mes amitiés à Monsieur." And in another moment he arrived beside Sherbrand, exclaiming with his vivacious shrug and gesture: "My faith, my friend, your London Cercle des Dames is a veritable Paradise of Mahommed. Now in Paris, at least before the War—instead of ten thousand houris to every true Believer, one counted at least three Adams to every Eve. But I observe your search has been successful. Will you not present me to Mademoiselle your fiancée?"

And the dapper middle-aged Wing Commander in the gold-banded képi, whose dark plain uniform displayed the gold badge of the Service Aëronautique under the Cross of the Legion of Honour, was introduced as Captain Raymond by an off-hand young Briton who comprehended not in the least the immense condescension that had prompted the request.

"Sapristi!" thought Raymond, as Patrine gave him her large hand and assured him in her big warm voice that she was frightfully pleased to meet a friend of Alan's.—"A magnificent type of the human female animal to have paired with this bluff, simple English boy. Part femme du monde, part romping hoyden, part cabotine, she should have been a Duchesse of the old Napoleonic regime, or at least the effect that lies behind a cause célèbre of the Paris Law Courts of modern days. And she will be expected by this honest fellow to live in a stucco villa at Kensington or the Crystal Palace, and bear and rear his children, and live and die in all the deadly respectability of the British middle-class milieu!"

But he made his beautiful bow and murmured some civil phrases. In the spring, at the Hendon Flying Grounds of M. Fanshaw, he, Raymond, had been interested to meet the friend of Mademoiselle. Had been profoundly impressed by the displayed inventions of a young man so gifted as aviator and engineer. Had had the good fortune subsequently to obtain the consent of his own Chiefs of the S. Aë. F. to a test of an invention—the value of which had been hall-marked by the approbation of Messieurs les Allemands. True, M. Sherbrand had been the victim of their unscrupulosity. But Fortune, who knew? might be kinder in the near future. This War so grievous, so brutal, so deplorable, waged by the Prussian against Civilisation and Progress, would open up not only le métier des armes, but countless other avenues of prosperity to thousands of ardent and gifted young men. Like M. Sherbrand. To whom Raymond said with an authoritative glance of his blue eye: "My friend, we keep your auto waiting at the door!"

"Ah, but stay!" Patrine began, with a sense of hatred towards the well-used little Ford runabout standing in much grander company by the kerb outside the Club: "do stay and lunch and smoke and tell us things about the War, won't you?"

"A thousand thanks, but impossible, Mademoiselle!"

Raymond shrugged, conscious that her look of disappointment was for Sherbrand, and pleaded fatigue as an excuse.

"For these are iron times, Mademoiselle," he went on in his smooth, musical accents, "and we who live in them are unfortunately of flesh and blood. When the War is done perhaps there will again be social pleasures like the lunch you were so kind as to offer me. That I am tempted to accept I will not conceal from you. I have not eaten since I flew from France at la pointe du jour—one of the smallest of the little hours of this morning, and then I broke fast on two fingers of little red wine, and a hunch of soldier's bread."

"You mean to say you're fresh from flying the Channel?"

"Crossing the Channel came near the end of my journey, Mademoiselle. I should have arrived earlier"—he shrugged indifferently—"had not some German aviators caused delay."

"Oh-h!" Her vexation passed like a breath from a mirror. Her long eyes danced with delight under her hat-brim. Her breath came quick, her red lips curled, and a sweet faint pink showed under her creamy skin. "You're a knight of the skies hot from a fray with two flying dragons—and you were going without saying a word! What do you think we Englishwomen are made of?"

"Very desirable flesh, some of you, at least, Mademoiselle," occurred to Raymond, but he suppressed the equivoque and answered with professional brevity:

"Mademoiselle, I regret there is but little to tell you. The enemy possesses an aërial organisation of great effectiveness which is being chiefly employed in the killing of harmless civilians and the destruction of unfortified towns. But small success has hitherto attended his efforts in the Channel. Your British Expedition was conveyed across the water without the loss of one piou-piou, or any damage received by the explosion of a German bomb. As for the German aviators of whom I speak, their attitude towards myself and my pilot was modest. Flying their double-seated military Taubes, of which the wings and tail resemble those of the dove after which they have been named, they pursued our biplane half-way from Calais to Dover before deciding to attack."

"Then—" She hesitated, softly clapping her palms together and dimpling like a big child over the telling of a new fairy tale.

"Then one climbed, possessing the advantage of a powerful engine, and dropped a bomb from a height of some 600 mètres which exploded without hitting us and went to the bottom of the sea. While the second aviator, who was armed with a repeating-carbine, wounded my pilot so severely that it was only by a miracle of endurance he preserved consciousness long enough to land without a crash. So I left him at Dover and—with a pilot mechanic from the Air Station, completed my passage, descending at Brooklands at twelve demie."

"Was your pilot hurt very badly? Will he be able to fly back to France?"

"Mademoiselle, being a pious Catholic, he has already flown to Heaven."

"He is dead.... And you can joke!" Patrine reproached him. His face was very wrinkled as he smiled.

"Mademoiselle, if a soldier could not jest at Death upon occasion, Life for a soldier would be impossible! Of verity, the loss of a good pilot-aviateur is not a thing to joke about, but fortunately I have your friend to fill his place."

"Alan! You must not—I will never consent to it!"

All taken aback, her colour banished, she fixed Sherbrand with blazing imperative eyes. He reddened to the hair and his mouth shut firmly. For the first time there was a clash of wills between the pair.

"Alan, why didn't you ask me?"

He was redder than ever.

"Because it wasn't for you to say. It is an order from my Chiefs—don't you understand?"

She did not care that the French officer was smiling. She would have liked to have struck him in his merrily-crinkled face. Wretch! to have blurted the truth at her that Alan had hidden. What was he saying:

"Permit, Mademoiselle, that I make my adieux. I go to secure an apartment where I may repose myself." He looked at Sherbrand, saying in his cool tone of authority: "The Aldebaran,—that is in the next street and a good hotel, is it not so? A little sleep will not come amiss after a cutlet and a demi-bouteille. And whilst I eat we will settle our affaires. Eh, mon lieutenant?"

His gloved hand took Sherbrand neatly by the elbow. He was skilfully steering him towards the doorway when Patrine, white and flaming, placed herself in their path.

"My affairs come first!" she was beginning.

"Shut up!" came from Sherbrand, in an exasperated aside whisper. "My duty comes before you—or anything in the world. It should come first for you if you cared a damn for me!"

No one but Raymond had overheard the curious, fierce colloquy. She felt literally scorched by the hot look of anger. She knew an agony like the tearing of the tissues of the flesh when Sherbrand passed her and went out with that gloved hand of authority upon his arm.

"Women are the devil!" he thought bitterly, as he opened the door of the runabout Ford to admit the French Staff Officer. "She'd had a shock in being told the news so suddenly; but to ballyrag me—to make me look such a thundering idiot before him!"

He swung the crank with violence and wrenched angrily at the levers when he took the driving-seat. A gloved hand patted his arm, and Raymond's voice said in his ear:

"Bah! You are chagrined, my friend, because a handsome woman has made you a little drama. Think no more of it! I have forgotten, for my part." He added, as they got out at the Aldebaran: "I propose to detain you but a little while, mon ami. When we have completed arrangements for the start to-morrow, you will be free to return and make your peace with Mademoiselle."

"Thank you, sir. She was rattled at my telling her so suddenly about my Commission," said Sherbrand, still beclouded. "Women are all like that, I suppose?"

"Except in France," said the agreeable voice of Raymond, "where the love of Country is stronger in our women than the love of lover or even of child. It was so before 1870. They have remembered through the centuries, as their sisters of Britain have not. They—the women of England are patriotic—oh yes! but patriotism is not yet a religion to them. It will cost millions of lives, and of blood an ocean to kindle that flame within their souls. Then, they also will hold the bayonet to the grindstone with their soft white hands and say: 'Become sharp, to drink the blood of Germans!' And they will mend the soldier's ragged breeches and clean the soldier's dirty rifle, and when they do they will not be less womanly. No, by my faith! nor less beloved by men. Try one of these. You will not find them too bad."

He offered Sherbrand a cigarette and took a light from him as they stood under the Aldebaran's tall Corinthian portico.

"One should always be accurate. When I told you that in France there lived no woman who was not patriotic, I was in error. Such a woman existed since three or four days."

He blew out a puff of smoke and watched its mounting spiral. Then he resumed:

"She was very young, very pretty, the bride of a month, and passionately enamoured. When her husband received orders to proceed with his Regiment of Chasseurs to the Belgian Front, she made him a scene of desperation. She would do this and that mad thing if he did not take her. Then she became calmer. She had exacted a promise from her doting cavalryman. She should visit him at the Front at a suitable opportunity. She chose her own moment, my faith!—and what a moment! She appeared in her husband's quarters in the French cavalry camp near Antoineville when the Germans were attacking Dinant. When the Cavalry Division of the Prussian Guards, and the Cavalry of their First Division, with some infantry battalions and machine-gun companies crossed the Meuse, and we were to attack, she was lying in his arms, the little idiot! He told her to go and she would not. Then he entreated her—a fatal error that!"

The cigarette was burning crookedly, forgotten between Raymond's fingers.

"Then he commanded her. She laughed, and kissed him. He gave back the kiss, drew his revolver and shot her dead. Then he ran out—in time to mount and wheel to his place as second in command of his squadron, before the Regiment swept on to the charge. Fate was kind to him. He charged like a Centaur, and died like a soldier of France the Beloved. Tell the story to Mademoiselle Saxham. She is magnificently handsome, but forgive me! not a patriot. And a woman without patriotism is—an altar without a Sacred Host and a lamp without a flame."

They went into the hotel. When the Frenchman had secured a quiet bedroom on the fourth floor, and intimated that no German was to serve him, they went together into the dining-room.

"Pfui! It smells of soot, and petrol, and drainage, this London air of yours," said Raymond, as he chose a table in a quiet corner. "You will eat with me? No! Then smoke and share my wine." He ordered cutlets, petit pois, a sweet omelette, and a bottle of Beaujolais, and, filling his own glass and one for Sherbrand, touched brims gaily and said with a smile: "To France and her Allies, Victory! On earth," a clink, "by sea," a clink, "under the sea," another clink, "and in the Air!"