THAT WHICH HATH WINGS (continued 9)

He clinked three times, and emptied the glass thirstily. Sherbrand asked:

"Was the battle near Dinant a big affair?"

"Not big." He broke a roll and munched bread. "Not on the grand scale. A spectacle très intéressante, regarded from the—archaic point of view. An example of the ancient mode de bataille that will be dead as the Dodo in three months. Chasseurs à cheval and German Imperial Guard Regiments charging and meeting with shocks like thunder. Much slaughter. So fierce was the onslaught upon our side that the Germans were driven back across the Meuse. Many missed the bridge and were drowned. One French regiment followed them in pursuit for several kilomètres. They were led by the man of whom I have told you. A glass to his memory—and hers!"

They touched full glasses and drank. Raymond went on.

"My Flying Centre was near Maubeuge on the 16th. Some escadrilles of my command were engaged that day near Dinant. My faith! those côtellettes are slow in arriving." He munched more bread, and his blue eyes narrowed smilingly. "We had only the little bombs we used in Morocco, but yes!—we did some good work with the balles-bon. Flying low, at ordered distances—for to make War by Air successfully the science of tactics must assist the aviator.... What says your great Field Marshal, who has bent his neck to the collar-work of Administration—who has conjured an Army of trained soldiers out of your shops and counting-houses, and playing-fields,—and will make another and another when the time comes?"

Sherbrand quoted the words uttered by the great voice now quenched for ever in the bitter waters of the North Sea.

"Until aviators learn to fly, manoeuvre, and attack in regular formation, the Fifth Arm will remain a useless limb."

"Tonnerre de Dieu! but that goes to the point," said Raymond, "straight and sharp as a thrust from his sword. If we possessed that man we should make use of him. He should be Marshal of France, or President or Emperor—all we should ask of him would be to lead us. Notr' Joffre would not be jealous—they would agree like the hilt and the hand. But I was telling you of an attack by the fléchette.... You may imagine how the Uhlans loved that rain of steel. It changed the retreat to a rout. Only it spoiled so many German horses. Right through the man, you understand, into the animal! ... Sieves on four legs are useless as Remounts for French Chasseurs."

"And the German Field Flight?" Sherbrand interrogated.

"Their Fifth Arm was represented," said Raymond, sipping his burgundy, "by many Taubes and Aviatiks armed with the machine-gun and some ordinary bombs of schrapnel,—also a dirigible of 'Parsifal' type dropping big bombs. We were hampered in our offensive by a prejudice which does not trouble the Germans. To throw bombs upon friend and foe alike—that is not our idea of War. It annoyed me, and I wasted on that flatulent brute of a 'Parsifal' all my remaining fléchettes and little Morocco bombs. Aha, the côtelettes!"

A waiter set them before him. He tucked his napkin under his chin, and helped himself, and said:

"Thus, though I had damaged her steering-gear and riddled her outer envelope, and the Flying Pig wallowed in difficulties below me, I could not pursue the advantage I had got. When the pilot of an Aviatik launched himself to the rescue, all the ammunition of my carabine was exhausted. I had one cartridge left in my automatic revolver, and not a single bomb with which to return the compliments of the German's mitraille. My petrol-tank had been perforated. My single bullet missed him. The duel was too unequal, so I withdrew from the field, leaving him to cavalier the Flying Pig. We may meet again upon terms more equal, when French military aviators fight with machine-guns. And now to business. It concerns your gyroscopic stabiliser, the patent of which my Chiefs desired to buy for the use of our Service Aëronautique. You demanded, according to M. Jourdain's statement, £8,000 and a royalty for the world-patent. We will buy it of you outright for £12,000. Is it agreed?"

Sherbrand straightened in his chair, and said, looking the other squarely in the eyes:

"No, sir, thank you! You see, though the War Office wouldn't have anything to say to me——"

"It occurs to you that now you may find a market for your invention?" To the devil with this smug young British tradesman! thought Raymond behind his knitted brows. "Come!" he said. "Another proposal. Will you make and supply us with your hawk-hoverer? Or sell us the right to manufacture a thousand for the sole use of the S. Aë.? Name your price—I shall not be frightened. It is not State money, but my private fortune that I draw upon—with the approval of my Chiefs. It has been my whim to lavish on my escadrille what other men hang in jewels upon their mistresses. Efficiency is my vice. I have heard of worse!" He scrawled some invisible figures with a polished finger-nail upon the tablecloth and exclaimed, with a laugh and a shrug: "Sapristi! At even a hundred pounds apiece you would soon be a millionaire, even without the fortune you expect from your War Office! Upon occasion it pays to be a patriot. Decide, Monsieur, lest my patience run dry before my purse!"

"I've not asked you a hundred, sir," Sherbrand said with his disarming simplicity. "I can make and sell the hoverers at a profit for £60. It's the cutting and welding of the horizontal flanged screws with the acetylene flame that eats up that money. But for the cost of the process, hang it!—I'd have had more than seventy ready by me now."

"You have seventy, you say, laid by in readiness?"

"Laid by in grease," said Sherbrand, "at the aërodrome."

"Waiting the moment when the authorities at Whitehall awaken to the fact that you are a genius, mon ami! À la bonne heure! We buy your seventy equilibrisers!"

"I'll sell you ten," said the British tradesman doggedly. "And I'll give the Belgian Government another ten, if you think they'd honour me by accepting them?"

"Parole d'honneur! I can guarantee they will. And of the other fifty?"

"They are for England to take or leave," said Sherbrand. "No doubt I'm an ass, but a man must act according to his lights."

"They are stars, your lights," said Raymond with a crackling oath, "and they point the path of Honour!" He pulled a cheque-book and a fountain-pen from a pocket within his tunic and wrote a cheque on the Crédit Lyonnais for the price of the ten stabilisers, their packing, carriage and duty, saying as he signed, and tossed the lilac slip of paper across the tablecloth: "Your endorsement is my receipt. For the stabilisers—they must be sent not later than to-morrow. I would give something if I could fly back to France with a couple in my valise. But patience! In a week at most we will give the Germans news of us. Perhaps I shall have the good fortune of a rencontre with my Boche pilot-aviator. For—listen, lieutenant! He too possessed the device that solves for the avion the problem of stability. And—listen well!—he carried a young boy with him in the nacelle. It was the man who robbed you. Von Herrnung! Could you not have guessed before?"

It seemed to Sherbrand that he had always guessed. Raymond went on:

"When I read of the finding of the wreck of your 'Bird' in the North Sea, I knew what coup the Prussian and his confederates had carried out. We had met in Berlin, and at the Hanover aërodrome, and at Paris. And—I could have shot him the other day if it had not been for the child. The legions of the modern Attila employ women and babes as bucklers and breastworks, by their Emperor's order. Perhaps he carried the boy for protection!" His moustache bristled like an angry cat's as he added:

"A beastly idea, but the German Idea is bestial. Well, au 'voir! To-morrow, six demie, we start from the aërodrome!"

He rose, whisked his napkin over his mouth, and said, giving Sherbrand a hearty hand-grip:

"I shall be punctual. Do not forget. My compliments to Mademoiselle!"

But Sherbrand was occupied less by thoughts of his angry love than by Raymond's story of the boy in the German warplane. He telephoned to Sir Roland and to Saxham before he drove back to the Club thinking:

"Bawne!—It must be Bawne!—out there in the midst of all those horrors. If I could only meet that fellow von Herrnung! ... I've owed him no grudge because he robbed me.... But—for this—I could kill him now!"

CHAPTER LVI

LA BRABANÇONNE

"You saint, Pat!" Margot, amidst Raymond's polite excuses, had recognised Sherbrand's hatchet-face under the khaki cap. "You've stolen a whole morning for me from your Flying Man. Why didn't you tell me he'd come back to town? How perfectly tophole he looks in tea-leaves! Franky and I came across that French officer who was with him, last June, in Paris. We're been rubbing noses on the strength of having met before. Is Alan going to the Front? My poor Pattums, it'll be your turn to be haunted. Here's Rhona Helvellyn. Cheer, Rhona! Do tell us why you look so smudgy? Have you been hiding up the chimney of the House of Commons, or bombarding a Minister's front door with coal?"

She beckoned, and Rhona came stalking through the crush of marvellously got-up members, the round, fair, freckled boy-face that topped her long swan-neck and deceptively sloping shoulders pinched with weariness under the wreck of a Heath hat, her usually immaculate tailor-mades covered with the dust of what might have been a Claxton Hall conflict or a Downing Street Demonstration, and strange fires burning in her light-lashed eyes.

"Am I such a sweep? I feel one! But so'd you be grubby if you'd done the crossing from Folkestone to Ostend and back again to London without a dab of a puff. I'd an appointment here at three-thirty." Beyond anything in life Rhona plumed herself on her punctuality. "Mrs. Saxham—the Mrs. Saxham, had promised to meet me in the Chintz Room." The Chintz Room is the first-floor drawing-room securable for private teas and interviews. "We got in too ravenous even to wash for lunch. You should have seen us eat. My hat! the scrum on those boats. And the dirt. Nothing but a Turkish bath will get me clean again. As for Brenda, she's a nigger." Thus Rhona in her loud young accents. "Nobody'd believe she'd been born a white girl!"

"Is she here?"

"My Christmas! I should rather hope so! Upstairs scraping off the top-crust before I take her to Eccleston Square. Don't do to startle the Mater. She's been frightfully off-colour with worry over her precious youngest. You see, Brenda was due home for the Autumn holidays from the Convent of the Dames de l'Annonciation at Huin on the Sambre, when the War broke out. And—Huin's near Charleroi, where they say the Germans are—and we'd nary a letter, and no answer to a hailstorm of wires from the Mater. So I got passes and permits on the Q.T. and skipped over to Ostend—to see what might be done."

"And you got through?"

"Did I? Not much! We don't get things properly rubbed into us—tucked away in our blessed old island. I forgot that Belgian trains wouldn't be running from Ostend to Brussels, now the Germans have got a grab on there.... As for getting South-East by Courtrai and Valenciennes—all trains were required by the Allies for military purposes. Perhaps if I'd been a hefty War Correspondent or an Army Nursing Sister or a V.A.D. in diamond earrings and a Red Cross armlet, I'd have had a chance. But I'm doubtful! Transport officers, English and Belgian, keep their mouths shut—and once they've opened them to say "No!" they never open 'em again. And"—Rhona breathed as though she had been running—"there were Official War News placards stuck up at the Customs Office, and on the quays and at the Préfecture. They said that the Germans under von Buelow have been having a scrap with the 5th French Army on the Sambre—from Namur to Charleroi—and that the French have been beaten back. And the hospitals are crowded with Belgian and German wounded"—she gulped and something twinkled on her pale eyelashes—"and trains crammed with more keep coming in and in. I've seen some sights, I tell you, that gave me horrors. That showed me, even more than those Ostend quays and wharves and squares and Places—packed solid with refugees—Great Christmas!—shall I ever forget 'em!—the devilish, hellish work of War!"

"Refugees.... Common people?" Margot was a little puzzled. Rhona nodded and repeated:

"Refugees. Swells and mechanics, rag-pickers and shopkeepers, sweeps, schoolgirls, lacemakers, and students. Professors, priests, and prostitutes. Madame la Comtesse and her gardener's wife, wheeling the babies in trams and go-carts. Dust-covered, dirty, done up, desperate, with faces that make you think of the damned in the Tartarus scenes of Orpheus and Eurydice. And someone squealed my name, and there was Brenda. Just got in, with three of the Sisters, and a baker's dozen of English pupils and a herd of other miserables, evacuated from Charleroi and Huin. Three-and-a-half days on the journey, travelling by fits and starts on branch-lines—tramping when trains weren't available. Eating whenever anything was to be had, and going without when there wasn't! Sleeping in barns and on the floors of railway-station platforms, or waiting-rooms, when they were lucky—such a pack of tramps you never saw in your life. But Great Scott! how thundering glad I was to get hold of Brenda and whisk her away from that Chorus of the Damned in Orpheus, pent up like cattle behind ropes, and moaning and stretching their arms out to the sea!"

"Why on earth the sea?"

A foreign voice, resonant and rather nasal, startled Margot by answering:

"Pardon, Madame. Because these most unhappy fugitives believe that salvation and safety may be found in England, from whence come those strong brown English soldiers who are fighting in Belgium now."

"Are there—" Margot was beginning. But Rhona was introducing the speaker at length as Comte d'Asnay, Capitaine Commandant and Adjutant of the Belgian General Staff, Attached to the General Staff on the Third Division of the Belgian Army, and d'Asnay was saying with a smile:

"Mademoiselle bestows upon me all my titles, possibly because we Belgians have so little else left."

"Except Honour," snapped Rhona.

"Except our Honour and our self-respect, and a few other non-negotiable securities," he said, "that do not bring us much of credit on the Bourses of Vienna and Berlin. But Madame was asking of the refugees. Many from Liége have escaped to Antwerp or into Holland, thousands are rushing from Namur into the bosom of France. But from Louvain and Brussels and Tirlemont they flock to Ostend. The steamers of the Channel service are crowded with those who have money and can obtain the necessary laissez-passers. Your town of Folkestone is encumbered with arrivals. Were stones pillows there would be a head for every stone. But those who have neither money nor passports—and many of these were rich a week ago—remain, as Mademoiselle has told you, to weep, and stretch their arms towards the sea."

"They'd rush the boats," declared Rhona, "only that the Companies keep up the gangways. I suppose," she grimaced, "the authorities at Ostend don't want a scare. They believe—I hope they may get it!—there'll yet be an Autumn Season. Hang these profit-hoggers! If I'd my way I'd lower every blessed gangway and let everyone who wanted walk on board. If Belgium hadn't faced the music there'd be Germans in England now, murdering and burning.... They've a right to come. Let 'em all come! Britain's big enough, I should hope!"

"Brava, Mademoiselle. Bis!" d'Asnay applauded noiselessly. "That is what you said to me on the deck of the steamer. Say it again, say it often, and the people will be let come!"

"Oh, I've my plan." Rhona's light eyes sparkled wickedly. "People here want waking up. They're kept in cotton-wool. Eyes bunged up and ears stuffed. What they want is—to see and hear. Well, a few of 'em are doing it. That," she nodded knowingly at d'Asnay, "is where my Distinguished Visitors come in."

The lips under the fiercely-waxed moustaches smiled. Margot liked the look of this officer of the Belgian General Staff, with the savage eyes and the smooth olive skin, the pointed chestnut beard, fiercely-waxed moustache, and the cool, polite manner. He wore the uniform of the Belgian Chasseurs à Cheval, and the vulture-plumes of his high shako were cut and broken and scorched in places, the gold braiding of his dark blue tunic was tarnished and weather-beaten, and the grey, blue-striped overalls and spurred black knee-boots were rusty with old mud and white with new dust. "You're from the Front?" she queried, as she moved with Rhona and the Belgian towards the glass swing-doors, giving access from the vestibule to the Club's big ground-floor drawing-room.

He answered:

"There are several Fronts—and I have the honour to come from one of them, Madame."

"With dispatches?"

"Possibly with dispatches, Madame!" He answered with an amused side-glance at the small, vivacious face. "Though there are swifter methods of transmitting intelligence than by entrusting letters to a messenger's hands."

As he moved beside her, courteously replying, she saw the crimson and green enamelled, purple-ribboned Cross of the Belgian Order of Leopold shining upon the dark blue tunic-breast.

"How are—things—getting on? Nobody tells us anything," twittered the humming-bird. "We might live at the North Pole."

"Madame might find even at the North Pole compensations for the low temperature and the lack of society." The vulture-plumes on the dark blue shako nodded as he turned his face to her. "In the fact that there are no Boches there," he added, and the smile that had curved the soldierly moustache vanished as though the word had wiped it from his mouth.

"Do tell me what are Boches?" Margot begged, kindling to interest. He answered with an intensity that dug deep lines at the angles of his nostrils, and puckered the corners of the eyes that burned under his frowning brows:

"They are a nation of beings, Madame, that are no longer men!"

"Germans you mean, don't you?" she asked after a little pause of bewilderment, staring with shocked, dilated eyes at the left side of d'Asnay's close-cropped head, now revealed to her as he removed his shako, and standing a little in advance of the two women, held back with the thrust of his broad shoulders a leaf of the drawing-room swing-doors. The four-inch square of white surgical plaster adhering to a place whence the chestnut-brown hair had been shaven, showed the outline of a deep, jagged gash. "You are hurt! You have had some awful accident! ... Was it a motor-smash? Doesn't it pain you?" Kittums asked breathlessly. For d'Asnay had touched the surgical strapping with his gloved hand, and his smiling face had winced.

"It is nothing, Madame," he assured her, "and it was not caused by an accident. It is merely a whiff of schrapnel—a love-gift from Messieurs les Boches."

"You are wounded?"

"Madame, that is what one calls it, when one suffers à coup d'obus. They are common, these little tokens, on our side of the North Sea. Mine has procured me a visit to London, and the pleasure of meeting you."

She looked at him like a grieved child, and her lips so quivered that he softened to her behind the crinkles of his smiling bearded mask.

"You speak like this because you think I am heartless and indifferent. Perhaps I have been—until to-day! We are so far from things. We see nothing. And we hear so little about the War!"

"Alas, Madame!" came the answer. "Forgive the cruel prophecy, that the moment approaches when you will hear too much!"

The swing-doors thudded behind them like guns at a great distance. The capacious ground-floor drawing-room, not usually crowded before luncheon, was thronged nearly to the walls. A vacant space in the centre presumably accommodated the Distinguished Visitors. But between these and Margot's quickening curiosity intervened a solid wall of backs.

The Distinguished Visitors must be Royalties, decided Margot, as she skirted the barrier, looking right and left for a peephole, recognising the vast back of Sir Thomas Brayham, the skeleton back of the Goblin, the willowy back of Trixie Wastwood, the backs of Lady Beauvayse, Cynthia Charterhouse, Tota Stannus, and Patrine Saxham with other backs pertaining to divers dear friends, consolidated into the rampart of humanity over which the towering feathers of Vanity Fair nodded and bobbed and waved.

"They're taking it in," Margot heard Rhona mutter, behind her. "'Somebody's playing off a joke on us,' would be the first thing that'd come into their blessed heads. Well!—let 'em think what they choose. Ask me why I did it, Comte, and I swear I couldn't tell you. Blue murder! how my arms ache. But so must yours. You nursed the biggest of the babies all the way from Ostend to Charing Cross."

"Mademoiselle is right!" The swift, fierce undertone was d'Asnay's. "They do not comprehend yet. Not yet!" He breathed hissingly through his nose. "Wait—and presently the Truth will leap at them and strike them entre les yeux. But a place must be found for the friend of Mademoiselle!" He came noiselessly to the side of Margot. "A chair, so. A footstool, so. Madame will step on the one and mount to the other. Permit, Madame, that I offer my assistance! Now Madame commands an excellent view of—shall I call it—the spectacle?"

The speaker's voice was drowned in an outburst of strident music. Barely two doors from the Club the piano-organ had broken out with "La Barbançonne." And as the walls vibrated to its shrill cries of triumph, and the wild disonances of a joy that touches frenzy, the cracked but vigorous tenor began to sing:

"Après des siècles, des siècles d'esclavage

Le Beige sortant du tombeau

A reconquis par son courage

Son nom, son droit et son drapeau.

Et ta main souveraine et fière

Peuple désormais indompte

Grava sur ta vielle bannière

Le roi, la Loi, la Liberté!"

"Sapristi! It is strange that!" d'Asnay muttered at the first bars. "Mademoiselle Helvellyn devised the tableau, certainly, but who arranged the entr'acte?"

The shrill, unbearable frenzy of the piano-organ abated, the voice of the singer was more plainly heard. It chanted in thin nasal tones, with missed-out notes in each bar that were like gaps where teeth had been in an old sorrowful singing mouth:

"O Belgique, O mère chérie,

A toi nos coeurs, à tot nos bras,

A toi noire sang, O Patrie——"

While Margot, a-tiptoe en her chair, peered through the screen of towering feathers at the Club's Distinguished Visitors,—wondering that within the wall of absorbed faces there should be so little to attract or interest. Nothing more intriguing than the homely figure of a Flemish peasant woman, with four young children huddled round her, and a baby at her breast.

CHAPTER LVII

THE BELGIAN WIFE

Desolate advance-guard of the vast army so soon to invade the shores of Britain, how familiar the figure is now that was then so strange to us in the quaint old-world fashion of its homely garments, the thick white dust and travel-stains that covered it, from the linen coif to the wooden shoes.

She was not old, the woman who sat with her little flock gathered about her, on the Indian stool that had supported the superb person of von Herrnung, what time he had held forth to Mrs. Charterhouse and Lady Wastwood upon the loftiness of German Kultur, the perfection of German female beauty, and the overwhelming mental and bodily superiority of the German Superman. A Walloon peasant from a village near Jodoigne where she and her husband had worked upon a tiny farm.

Perhaps a dozen words of French were hers: "Tout brûle!" and "En Angleterre où il n'y a pas de Boches!"

We were to learn to reap terrible meanings from that hoarse, faint parrot-cry. Truths that raised the hairs upon the flesh and chilled the blood were to be imaged for us in the blank vacuity of her unseeing stare. We were to learn why all her children squinted, from Vic, the sturdy man of seven, and Josephine, his junior, possibly by a year, down to Georgette of the chubby cheeks and crinkly, roguish eyelids, and Albert, of the round blue stare, the big white-haired head, and the marvellous bow legs.

In their dull stunned quietude and their clayey pallor, the mark of the Beast was branded upon them, down to the livid baby in its little cap of soiled linen, swaddled in the old red shawl, that bound down its arms. You might have thought it dead, but for the flutter of a muscle in the cheek, and the faint movement of its lips, feebly sucking at the breast that had been large and bounteous, and now was lax, and flabby, covered by a network of darkish violet veins.

"Who are they? ... What are they? ... Where do they come from? ... Why were they brought here? ... Does no one know? ... Will no one tell? ..."

The silence of amazement was now breaking. The mouths belonging to the faces under the nodding feathers, old and young, handsome and ugly, vacuous and clever, silly and intellectual, were all prattling interrogations like the above. Pride of Place and Joy of Life, Thirst of Pleasure, Lust of Power, Gaiety and Weariness, Wisdom and Folly, Humbug and Sincerity, Meanness and Generosity, ringed-in the dusty group of wooden-shod mysteries and most frightfully wanted to know! And nobody offered any solution of the puzzle. The piano-organ was playing half a dozen doors below the Club, the cracked old tenor quavering to its accompaniment:

"Nous le jurons tu vivras!

Tu vivras toujours grande el belle

Et ton invincible unité

Aura pour devise immortelle——"

The music suddenly broke off. A policeman had ordered the organ to move on....

"Tout brûlé!"

Hitherto the Belgian woman had not looked up, nor changed her listless attitude. Now she lifted her empty expressionless eyes, and hoarsely iterated her parrot-cry. The suckling at her breast whimpered and let go the nipple. She glanced at it, saying in her own thick Flemish tongue:

"Daar is geen melk."[1]

[1] "There is no milk."

She rocked the baby for whom she had no milk. Its feeble whimper was not stilled. She went on to that accompaniment:

"De Duischer kwamen. Zy hebben alles gebrand! De geburen,—mijn voder—mijn man is gedood! Zy hebben hem in het vuur geworpen!"[2]

[2] "The Germans came. They burned everything. The neighbours, and my father, and my husband are dead. They threw them into the fire."

The baby's whimper became a wail of feeble protest. It fought and struggled frantically under the old red swathing shawl. The shawl loosened, slid to the floor, and the wizened arms rose free and jerking. One arm, tightly bandaged below the elbow, ended in a raw and bloody stump. She regarded it with her drained-out stare, not trying to replace the strappings that had bound it, saying in the heavy voice of a sleep-walker:

"Dees ook hebben ze gedaan. God sta ons bij!"[3]

[3] "This too they did. God help us!"

And sobs and weeping broke out around her, as though that little handless arm had been a veritable rod of Moses bringing water from the living rock. But no sigh lifted her bosom, nor were her dry eyelids moistened with the dew of tears. Prussian militarism had wrought its work upon her. She and hers had been trodden as grapes in the Hohenzollern Winepress. Those emptied eyes had seen things done that might well make devils laugh in Hell.

The Club walls vanished away as we looked, and behind that stricken figure spread the devastated plains of Belgium, the Sorrowful, the Glorious, who has endured agony and shame unutterable, that her neighbours might go free. We had a vision of the Son of Man descending in a blood-red, rainy dawning, and heard Him saying to the apostles of German Kultur:

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these ... ye have done it unto Me!"

And not a woman among us who had a man with the British Expedition, but prayed in her soul, fervently:

"Vengeance is Thine, for Thou hast said it. But make him Thy scourge, O Lord!"

CHAPTER LVIII

SHERBRAND BUYS THE LICENCE

The spell of silence was broken. Excitement seethed as Patrine escaped out of the crush in the drawing-room and returned to the vestibule. There, subsiding into one of the tall-backed chairs beside the table that held the Members' Register and Visitors' Book, she waited, hoping against hope that the tall figure in khaki might reappear under the Club portico.

"Patrine!"

"Oh, Alan!—you came back after all!"

Her gloom changed to radiancy. She rose up as the tall figure of Sherbrand passed under the portico, and hurried to him, emptying her budget of regrets. "I've behaved like a cad. Do forgive me! Don't be wrathy. But you can't be—or you'd never have come back."

"You dear, it's all right!" He caught the outstretched hands in both his and wrung them. "Forget—and let's be happy." The truth about Bawne tugged at him as he said the words, but he had determined not to torture her with that horror. He went on, with the frankness that she found so lovable, "I was vexed, but it was idiotic of me not to have told you about the Commission before."

"And the man. Your French sossifer," she went on, "who looked at me as though I ought to live in a cage at the Zoo? What must he have thought of your taste in young women? What mustn't he have said when he got you out of the way?"

"Oh, not much!"

"Go on. Rub it in!"

"Well then"—Sherbrand's mouth was steady, but the laughter in his eyes was not to be controlled—"he saw I was fearfully sick at your having shown temper before him. And he told me not to be chagrined because a handsome woman had made me a little drama."

"F'ff!" She winced and set her teeth on her crimson underlip. "He knew I'd ask and you'd tell me. He saw me—squirming—in his mind's eye. Oh! and how he's hit me off. For I was awfully like the heavy leading lady of a tin travelling theatre-company. Aren't you ashamed of me? Don't you loathe me?" she wooed with entreating eyes.

"Frightfully. Tell me—where can we have a cosy talk together? I've got a whole hour before I'm due at Hendon," he said.

"The Rose-and-Green Divan—but there are sure to be people smoking there. Oh!—I know. The Little Library. Nobody ever goes in, and it's got a door opening into the Divan. Friends of Members aren't admitted into the Library—but if you're caught there—you say you were coming out of the Divan, where outsiders are allowed—and opened the wrong door—do you switch on?"

He nodded, repressing the desire to ask in whose company she had been caught there, and followed the tall lithe figure down a short corridor leading to the back of the ground-floor. The corridor ended in the Little Library, a studious apartment of bathing-machine dimensions, walled with curiously new-appearing books of information and reference, and containing two small writing-tables, each supported by a rosewood-stained Windsor, a brace of baskets, and two deep, cushiony, Rothmore chairs. A Member of mature years and mountainous proportions slept placidly in one of these, with Whitaker's Peerage balanced at a perilous angle on the vanishing indications of what must once have been her lap. The subdued murmur of voices trickled in from the adjoining smoking-room with vaporous wisps of Turkish and Virginia. Save for the stout slumbering Member the lovers were beautifully alone.

"Good! Oh, boy!—to have got you back again," Patrine said breathlessly after their kiss. She dropped down noiselessly into the springy embraces of the vacant Rothmore, and Sherbrand smiling, perched upon the chair's broad arm.

"This is an unbecoming contrast—isn't it?" She leaned her beech-leaf tinted head against the plastron of the khaki tunic as his strong hand crept behind her supple waist. "But I don't care, I can't think of anything but you, Alan. When do you start to-morrow, and from where? I suppose you mustn't tell me?" She sighed, rubbing her cheek against him as the strong arm embraced and held her. "Oh me! What it is to be the sweetheart of a soldier. Why—Alan!"

She lifted her head and looked at him, frowning, and her long eyes were black between the narrowed lids. "Do you know how your heart jumped when I said 'soldier'? Does it mean as much to you as all that?"

He began to stammer a little.

"Oh—well!—you see—we Sherbrands have worn the King's coat for ages. Ever since there were any Sherbrands—going by the portraits in the gallery at Whins—where my father lived when he was a boy. He used to describe them to me until I knew them as well as he did from the Sir Alan who fought with Talbot against the French at Castillan Chatillon as a boy, and got killed at Bannockburn thirty-five years later, down to the jolly old Sir Roger, who fought like a Trojan at Badajoz. He was my great-grandfather, so I suppose I've always had a secret hankering for the Service. Like the inherited nostalgia Hillmen's children have for the mountains, or sailors' for the sea. The kind of feeling that sets the little Arctic foxes in the Zoo howling at the first sprinkle of snow in December. Only I knew I mustn't yield to it. You know the reason why!"

"You told me, and I answered that that kind of reason couldn't affect you."

"Now you shall hear a plan I've been nursing." His arm again engirdled her. "Do you know Seasheere? It's a little grassy, cliffy, shingly village on the South-East coast, three-hours' journey from Charing Cross. There's a Naval Air Station there that was a Seaplane School not long ago. We used to send 'em pupils from Hendon: there's a cottage where they take lodgers not far off. I spent three weeks there last summer, fishing and motor-boating when I wasn't making friends with Goody Two Shoes——"

"Who's Goody Two Shoes?"

"The hydroplane!" His voice broke in laughter. "Did you think I meant a girl?"

"I'm an idiot. Go on about your plan, dear."

"Oh—well! The cottage I stayed at was jolly comfortable, and the landlady the tidiest old woman that ever grilled a chop. Now suppose—to-morrow, or a week, or two months hence you got a wire from Somewhere in France or Belgium saying: 'Seasheere—such-a-day-and-such-an-hour—Alan'—would you pack your kit for a week-end and hop into the train, and come?"

"Without asking—without telling—Aunt Lynette or Uncle Owen?" She asked the question breathlessly.

"We'll tell the Doctor and Mrs. Saxham directly afterwards." He leaned his cheek on the beech-leaf hair and his arm tightened about her waist possessively. "You said my heart jumped just now when you called me a soldier. How it will jump when I pick you out with the glasses, a tiny black speck on the cliffs at Seasheere, waiting with the sunset behind you, or the dawn in your eyes to welcome me back from over the sea. Oh, my girl!"—his voice wooed her irresistibly—"I've dreamed wide awake of the joy of such a greeting.... It's up to you to make my dream come true!" He kissed her hair. "And we'll watch the day die, and sup together, and you'll sleep at my nice old woman's cottage. And I'll turn in at the Air Station—and next morning we'll be married at Seasheere Catholic Church!"

"Married—that's your plan? Ah, Alan! shall we ever be married?" she sighed.

He laughed softly, pressing her against him.

"The little Catholic Church I've mentioned was built for the very purpose. Perched on the cliffs as though it might spread its rafters any minute and flap away to sea." He kissed her hair again. "Don't think I'm spinning fairy-tales. I've got a Special Licence, so there's no need to bother about time, or previous residence in the district, or anything stuffy. Nothing's wanted but Opportunity, the church, and the priest. And that the local Registrar should put in an appearance. That's necessary, as we're not of the same faith—yet!"

She freed herself from his embrace, rose to her superb height, and stood over him.

"You've arranged all this—without consulting me for a minute. You and your landlady—and your Licence and your Registrar! Boy, I am sensible of a great desire to box your ears soundly for this!"

"I'd rather take a clout from you than a kiss from any other woman."

She tapped him lightly on both ears, and said, putting a butterfly touch of lips in the middle of the broad, tanned brow:

"There are both clout and kiss. Now show me the Special Licence."

He thrust his hand into a pocket behind the plastron of the khaki tunic and pulled out a note-case she had bought and given him. The shiny square of parchment-paper bearing the signature of his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury drew both their heads together over it. In a compartment meant for stamps was a hard, thin, metallic circle, shining yellow through tissue paper folds.

"The—Ring?" she whispered.

"The Ring!" He nodded, smiling, as she bent her face over it, kissed the tissue paper reverently, stuck the Licence back in its compartment, and gave him back the case.

"And you had these in your pocket this afternoon when I was such a horrid beast to you?"

"They were burning a hole right into my chest. Why, Pat, you're—crying!"

She half turned away, mopping her wet eyes with her flimsy little handkerchief.

"Because—because—it's so blessedly sweet and dear of you to have planned this. Do you—do you really want it so much?"

"More than anything under the sky," said Sherbrand. "And, don't you see, it settles the question of providing for you, splendidly! If we're married, and I get—pipped—Somewhere at the Front—" He stopped short, for one of her large hands firmly covered his mouth.

"I won't have it. You're not to speak like that, ever!" said a muffled voice above his head. "If you were killed—don't you understand—everything'd be over for me! It's a kind of nasty little Death—only to have you hint at it."

"All right!" he mumbled penitently, and kissed the hand. It was withdrawn, and he went on:

"I have my little fortune, though Flying has made a hole in it. And I'd naturally like—as my mother is provided for—the stuff to go to my wife."

"Oh! if I only were—good enough, I would be your wife to-morrow!" she groaned.

He got up and took her masterfully in his arms.

"No more of that. I can't stick being made out a—bally pattern. You are a hundred times too good for me!"

"But not at all patriotic," came drifting back upon him in the voice of Raymond. His embrace never slackened, but he asked of her a question, looking for the answer to lighten in her eyes: "Pat—you've not said yet that you're glad they've given me my Flying Commission!—that you're British enough to give your man, if it came to giving—for the Old Shop! I know you are!—of course you are!—but say it—I'd like to hear you."

"I—I——" She caught her breath and her eyes wavered miserably under his steady gaze. "I'm not a little bit o' good at telling decent proper lies. I love England—but I love you heaps, heaps, heaps best!" He felt her pant between his arms.... She writhed her long white neck like a creature in desperate agony. "I want to eat my cake and have it!" she wailed, evading his eyes. "Now you know me, you'll despise me. But it's the truth—anyway! I'd like a man to send to the War—and a man to keep for myself!"

His arms wrapped her closely and his heart plunged madly against her bosom. He kissed her on her yielded mouth, and the kiss was a living flame.

"That will be when we are married and you have a son!" he whispered, and a drowning horror enveloped her. She cried out and thrust him back, and might have sunk down at his feet and told her dreadful story then....

Whitaker's Peerage intervened, sliding from the lap of the obese, reposeful Member, and falling to the carpet with a resounding thump. The indignant eyes of the awakened lady glared at Sherbrand over her gold-rimmed spectacles. She demanded, snorting:

"Since when has this room—hr'runk!—been thrown open to visitors?"

"I'll inquire," Sherbrand stammered, and the guilty couple fled. That night Patrine wrote on a card "Seasheere," and thenceafter wore it in her bosom. But many weeks were over her head before the Call came.

CHAPTER LIX

THE WOE-WAVE BREAKS

Meanwhile everybody who could get near the Belgian refugees excitedly pressed hospitality upon them.... The desolate mother was termed "Poor Dear" in a dozen different keys of sympathy. But she only looked with dull vague eyes in the faces of would-be philanthropists. When kindly hands tried to draw the little ones away, she grabbed them and held on.

"She doesn't understand us, the Poor Dear Creature!" Thus the Goblin, gulping within her rows of pearls, red-eyed under her towering osprey panache. "What she has suffered! It shatters one to realise. Can one credit that dear Count Tido could have belonged to such a race? Miss Helvellyn claims her by right of discovery, I believe, so farewell to my plans for her benefit! But Belgians, I understand, are to be had in any quantity, and Belgians I must and will have! Think of those rows and rows of new cottages standing empty at Wathe Regis, and that huge caravanserai that nobody can live in at the corner of Russell Square! Do you hear me, Sir Thomas? Oh, how clever of you, Lady Eliason! Sir Thomas, listen! Lady Eliason positively promises that Sir Solomon shall interest himself in this. Of course there must be a Fund, and a Committee, and a Headquarters! The Fund must be Huge, the Committee Representative.... Dear Lady Beauvayse is to be our Hon. Secretary.... With your legal knowledge and influence, and your passion for philanthropy, Sir Thomas, don't tell me You are going to keep out of this! You are damned if you do! did you say? Bless you! Who are these queer people coming in?"

Two nuns in the familiar habit worn by Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity, little black-robed figures with starched white coifs, broad white guimpes and flowing black veils, had passed the Club windows a moment previously. A tall, slight woman in Quaker grey had seen and hurried in pursuit of the Sisters, recognised as members of a Belgian Community, to whom Mrs. Saxham explained the situation, speaking in her exquisite French. The Sisters replied in a less polished accent, their discreet eyes ignoring curious glances as their guide ushered them into the crowded drawing-room.

The crowd parted before them, revealing Rachel and her children. The nuns moved forwards and stood within the radius of those heavy, vacant eyes. Life leaped into them. She cried out in her thick Flemish tongue and was answered, and rose up, the children clinging to her. In a moment the Sisters had advanced upon her, taken the baby from the cramped arms that now resigned it, taken the mother also into a pair of black-sleeved arms. And she was weeping on the bosom of Charity, and telling them the dreadful story that is told anew every day. Presently she and Vic, Josephine, Georgette, and Albert the big-headed, were eating cake and drinking coffee under the sheltering wing of the Sisters, but though some elderly Members still hovered in their neighbourhood, the question of a Fund and a Committee had usurped the attention of the Club.

Lady Eliason and Lady Wathe were selecting a Quorum.... Rhona Helvellyn had proposed to Lynette an adjournment to the Chintz Room. They had reached the swing-doors of the drawing-room, when with violence they banged open to admit Brenda Helvellyn in the maddest spirits, escorted by Doda Foltlebarre and Sissi Eliason and half a dozen of the wilder, younger members of the Club.

Said Rhona, barring her junior's way with a long thin arm as Brenda rollicked past her:

"Mrs. Saxham, let me introduce my sister Brenda. Brenda admires you frightfully!"

Brenda, staring with wide bright eyes at the object of her alleged admiration, offered a pink, moist, recently washed hand to Lynette. At Rhona's indignant exclamation she started and pulled away the hand, stammering:

"They wouldn't let me! ..."

"Wouldn't let you change into decent clothes when I'd 'phoned Home to have some sent here? Tell me another!"

"Well, then, the things hadn't come!"

"And if they haven't, why not have stayed upstairs until they do come?"

"All alone.... Oh! I couldn't! Anything awful might happen up there...." The peach-face of sixteen winced and the eyebrows puckered. "And Doda and Sissi simply love me in these things. They said I must come down and be seen!"

Doda and Sissi and the guilty six exchanged rapturous winks and grimaces. Certainly a damsel of sixteen, whose superb crimson tresses are crowned with the squashed ruin of a muslin "Trouville" hat, and whose slender form is draped in the wilted wraith of a light green aquascutum, is more than likely to create a succès fou, on her appearance in a London drawing-room.

"'Seen!'" Rhona snorted. "Well, you are a sight, there's no denying. From your head to your feet—My merry Christmas! what have you got on your feet?"

Brenda tittered nervously, poking out a slim foot in a huge golosh lined with wearied red flannel.

"They're the Mère Économe's. There wasn't time to dress properly. We were turned out of the Convent, haven't I told you!—just as we stood. It was early in the morning. Seven o'clock Mass was just over. We were trooping in to the Réfectoire for coffee. We went to Mass and did our lessons, in spite of the awful guns. Then ... all at once—" She began to laugh, and a mask of fine glittering dew broke out over her peachy face from the temples to the upper lip. "The earth began to shake. The French were retreating from Charleroi. They streamed past and past, horsemen and guns and marching men, just as they'd gone by two days before when we waved and cheered them from the garden. Only this time there were wounded men.... The ambulance waggons were heaped with them—all bloody and dreadful.... Oh! And then the shells began to fall ... among the waggons and on the Convent! "The Germans are coming," the soldiers called to us. 'Fly while you have time!'"

"Shut up!" Rhona ordered the girl. "Haven't I told you not to talk, you stoopid! There weren't any shells—it's all your silly nerves. There might have been—but there weren't!"

"But the shells were hitting the Convent walls ... and bursting. The house was on fire. And the French Commandant said to the Maitresse Générale: 'It will be rasé over your heads if you remain, Madame. On n'y fait quartier à personne—les Allemands! They are advancing in incredible numbers. The road to Calais lies open before them because of the Great Catastrophe of yesterday. Our hearts are sad, not only for our own losses, but for the misfortunes of our friends across the——'"

"WILL you be silent! He never said so!"

With her scarlet head surmounting the shiny waterproof, Brenda rather reminded one of a Green Hackle, the likeness to the splendid gauze-winged fly being increased by the brightness of her eyes. Very round, very wide open, and with strange lines radiating from the pin-point speck of pupil to the outer band ringing the hazel irids, they stared from that crystal-beaded mask of hers. "But, Rhona," she reiterated, bewildered by her senior's vehemence of contradiction, "he did say so! And the Convent was burning when we left!"

"If it was, you're to forget it—d'you hear me? And look here, if you dare to talk like this at home——"

"I won't. I know the Mater mustn't be upset! Look here, I'll swear I won't, if that'll do! Only don't say I've got to stop upstairs, will you? They're so gay here," Brenda pleaded humbly—"it'll help me to forget!"

"All right!" and with a warning scowl from Rhona the sisters parted. Lynette Saxham asked, looking after the little bizarre figure of Brenda with wistful tenderness in her eyes:

"Will she recover from the shock of the horrors she has seen the more quickly because you forbid her to speak of them?"

"I don't know.... I haven't thought.... It's my mother I bother most about.... You see, Roddy's Battery—Roddy's my brother—has gone with the Expedition. If Brenda talks rawhead and bloody-bones—but I'll take care she don't, the little fool!"

The eyes of both women followed the funny little figure. Lynette said as it was absorbed in a crowd of laughing friends:

"Would you prefer that we finished our talk here?" She glanced at the settee in a glass-screened angle near the fireplace, and Rhona assented with evident relief. Her Chiefs of the W.S.S.S., she explained, were anxious that Mrs. Saxham should consent to speak at the Royal Hall Mass Meeting of Protest Against the Delay of Parliament in passing the Woman Suffrage Bill. The Meeting was fixed for the middle of October. Mrs. Saxham's sympathy with the Movement was to be gathered from her writings. A personal expression would be valued by the W.S.S.S.

"I am in sympathy to the extent of joining in any form of protest or any description of organised Demonstration that is not characterised by violence," said Lynette. "To brawl at public meetings"—Rhona wondered whether she had heard of her own baulked attempt to heckle the Bishops at the Guildhall Banquet?—"to assault public personages and damage private or public property is not the method by which the Franchise will be gained. To make war upon men is not the way, I think, to win their suffrages for women. But I will gladly speak at the Meeting, please be kind enough to tell the Chiefs."

"It's awfully sporting of you—when you've been in such trouble. It must have been quite too awful," bungled Rhona, "about your boy!"

"About my boy! ..." Lynette caught her breath and nipped her lower lip between her teeth to keep back the cry that else must have escaped her. "You are kind.... You will be infinitely kinder if you say no more!"

"I beg your pardon. I'm frightfully clumsy!" apologised Rhona. "Roddy—my brother who's at the Front—once told me that I had the tact of a steam-cultivator and the discretion of a runaway motor-bus." She added: "I'm afraid you think I was rough on Brenda. But the Mater's heart-trouble keeps us all on tenterhooks, and for her sake—no matter what horrors are hinted or whispered—nothing shall make me believe—anything but the Best, until the Worst is brought to my door! You understand, don't you? ... What's that? Young Brenda——"

A gust of laughter drew the eyes of both women to the Green Hackle, who, surrounded by an appreciative circle, including Margot and Trixie Wastwood, Cynthia Charterhouse, Doda and Sissi, was performing the maddest pas seul that ever held the floor. One huge golosh flew off, shaving a gilt-and-crystal electrolier as she finished with a daring high kick, and dropped down breathless and panting between Margot and Cynthia Charterhouse.

"You crazy child!" cooed Mrs. Charterhouse, patting one of the pink hands.

"I feel crazy!" gurgled Brenda, while Doda picked up her battered Trouville hat and Sissi retrieved hairpins scattered over the Club carpet. "Oh, my stars! You don't know, you'll none of you ever guess what it is to me to find you all so gay!" She bounced on the springy seat until her red locks tossed like the mane of a Shetland pony. "Now I really can believe—really!—that the whole thing's been a bad dream! Like you get when Sisters have been too busy to boil the potatoes soft, or take the cores out of the stewed apples." She turned her head and the sparkling mask of tiny beads broke out again over her flushed face. "Who are those Soeurs de Charité?" she asked, for the circle of elderly Members had melted away and the two Religious were now going, taking with them the Belgian mother and her children, to whom—of course at the Club's expense—they were to afford a temporary home. "What are they here for? Why, that's the woman who came with us on the boat from Ostend! Ah, my God!—it's all true! I can't tell lies any more! Do you hear, Rhona?" and the bizarre little figure leaped up and stood before them, defiant and panting. "Not even for you and Mother!" The voice broke in a wail. "Oh! how can you bear to see everyone so gay when the Guards and Gunners have been killed at Mons? Seven thousand lying dead, the French Commandant told us. Thousands taken prisoners—and we sit laughing here——"

Lynette Saxham caught the little body as it doubled on itself and dropped like a shot rabbit. She carried it to one of the settees, and knelt by it, loosening the clothes, working with swift and motherly hands.

The piano-organ had come back, or another like it,—and was jolting out the popular pseudo-pathetic strains of "Good-bye, Little Girl, Good-bye!" The swing-doors had thudded behind the nuns and their charges. Lady Wathe was just saying to Lady Eliason:

"Then you, dear, will personally apply to the Foreign Office and the Home Office and the Belgian Ambassador and the County Council. Pray count on me for all the rest! Sir Solomon is a Tower of Strength! You agree with me, don't you, Sir Thomas? Mercy on us! What a commotion! Who has had a telegram from the Front? Who says the Guards and Gunners have been annihilated? Who says the British Expedition has been overwhelmed by numbers and forced to Retreat? Will nobody stop that horrible organ? Will nobody answer me?"

It was the tragic crowning of that day of trivial happenings that the Iron Curtain that had baffled us so persistently should rise to the tune of a music-hall ballad at the touch of a schoolgirl's hand. Long before the huge funeral broadsheets broke out in the gutters of Fleet Street, the Strand, Pall Mall, and Piccadilly, screaming of the RETIREMENT OF THE FRENCH FORCES FROM NAMUR AND CHARLEROI, DISASTER TO THE BRITISH EXPEDITIONARY ARMY, DECIMATION OF FAMOUS REGIMENTS, AND THE RETREAT FROM MONS, the Tidal Wave of Mourning that was to sweep the United Kingdom from end to end had crashed down upon the Club.

Ah! how one had underrated them, those dead men who, living, had seemed to hold themselves so lightly. Who, submitting to be outclassed in Sport even while holding it the thing best worth living for, had smilingly accepted those hateful records of 1912-1913.

Theirs is a glorious record now. Above the huge Roll that is wreathed with bloodstained laurels, droop the Flags of the Allied Nations, their heavy folds all gemmed with bitter tears. Each nightfall finds the endless Roll grown longer. Each day-dawn sees the Hope of noble houses, the pride and stay of homes gentle and simple swallowed up in the abyss that is never glutted! How long, O Lord? we cry, yet comes no nearer the End for which the smallest children pray.

And the women.... In the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel we read of a valley of dry bones over which the Spirit of the Creator breathed. When that Wind from Heaven stirred them, the dead white bones put on Life and rose up. A change as miraculous has been wrought in Woman since the Black Deluge left a deposit of new-made widows and mourning mothers, red-eyed sisters and silent wan-faced sweethearts, sitting about the little tables where the empty places showed as awful gaps.

The bereaved did not shed many tears. Their grief was too deep to be emotional, their newly-awakened spirit too lofty for complaint. Their pride in their dead men was their upholding. Their bleeding hearts they only showed to GOD. Before then, He was for many of us non-existent: for many more a remote, passively observant Personality but tepidly interested in the affairs of the human race. Would these have learned to know Him, think you, if there had been no War?

And those whom every newspaper unfolded, every knock at the door might smite with dire intelligence, right bravely they bore themselves through that fortnight-long, hideous pipe-dream of the Long Retreat South. For many of these the torture of suspense was to give place to cruel certainty, after that unforgettable Sunday of the Sixth September, when at a distance of twelve kilometres from Paris the retirement of the Allied Armies suddenly changed to an Advance, and the columns of German Guard Uhlans in hot pursuit of the British Force, were routed by Generals Gough and Chetwode with our 3rd and 5th Cavalry Brigades. For many, many others, the strain has never since slackened. They lie o' nights as they lay through those nights of September, 1914, and feel the bed shaking, and the floors and walls vibrating, as the outer rings of vast concussions spread to them through the troubled ocean of atmosphere. And in the mornings they will tell you calmly:

"Oh, yes. He is alive, but where he is there is terrible fighting. I heard the guns." ...

No arguments of people whose sons or husbands are not with the Army in Belgium, or France, Italy, or Palestine, will convince them that they do not hear the guns. Or that, borne upon the waves of a subtler medium than air are not conveyed to them finer, more mysterious vibrations.

Thoughts that meet thoughts. Mental appeals—demands—entreaties.... The hands of their souls, reaching out through the dark hours, clasp those of other souls in greetings and farewells.

CHAPTER LX

KULTUR!

The Belgian village-town had been so sorely knocked about that the names of its faubourgs, boulevards, and thoroughfares were obliterated. Hence, one is fain to substitute others, such as the Street Where The Naked Body Of The Little Girl Hung Up On Hooks In the Butcher's Window, the Passage Of The Three Dead British Soldiers With Slit Noses And Pounded Feet,—The Square Of The Forty Blindfolded Civilian Corpses, and the Place Of The Church Of The Curé They Crucified For Warning The British By Ringing The Bells. Of this sacred edifice—Romanesque and dating from the tenth century—little remained beyond the crypt and the stump of the tower. Some calcined and twisted bones, a scorched rag of a cassock, represented M. le Curé, that faithful shepherd of souls. Of M. le Curé's flock, not one remained to tell the story of the tragic episode that had reared the grim pile of blackening corpses in the Market Square, and added seven hundred homeless refugees to the rivers of human wretchedness ceaselessly rolling South.

In the bright sunshine of the fine October morning that had followed a night of rain and thunder, the grimly-altered shadows of shell-torn buildings lay black on the ripped-up pavements and shrapnel-pocked walls. A sandy-white cat lapped gratefully at a puddle, a dishevelled fowl pecked between the cobblestones, a pigeon or two preened on the broken ridge-tiles. To the eye of a skilled observer hovering hawk-like in the hot blue heavens, raking the streets through high-powered Zeiss binoculars, nothing human remained alive in this Aceldama. Yet when the two-seated bomb-carrying Taube with the big man and the small boy in it had banked and climbed, and hummed away Southwards on its aërial mission of ruin and destruction, one British officer, sorely wounded, lay in what had been the ground-floor living-room of a well-to-do baker's shop.

A Captain of a Guards infantry battalion belonging to a Brigade of the First Division of the First Army Corps. Marching, counter-marching, digging, and fighting rearguard actions had kept the Brigade's hands full during those blazing days and drenching nights of August and September, whilst the battered Divisions that had borne the brunt of the huge German offensive, reduced to one-twentieth of their effective, had hurried Southwards, leaving a trail of blood.

"Those other beggars have had all the luck!" the Brigade had growled when it had any time for growling. But it had won shining honours at the Marne, and had been heavily engaged at the Aisne, losing many of its men and officers. In the Aisne battle, particularly, the man we are concerned with had won special mention in Dispatches for a deed of great gallantry. Three days previously, an order from General Headquarters had moved his battalion on the little village town.

Their R.F.A. Battery had been posted a quarter-mile distant, commanding the north-east and east where the Germans were known to be. Machine-guns were placed at the principal road-ends debouching on the west where the Germans might be: the main streets had been barricaded with transport-waggons and motor-lorries, all the Maxims left had been hidden behind the sand-bagged windows of a factory—a gaunt, brick sky-scraper, long a thorn to the beauty-loving eye of M. le Curé—the walls of houses ending streets leading to the country had been loopholed for musketry, and a howitzer from the battery and a machine-gun had been spared to protect the bridge south of the town, a little place resting in the elbow of a small babbling river. Watches and patrols had been set and pickets placed, and then these war-worn Britons had dispersed into billets, or gone into barracks, too weary to eat, craving only for sleep.... That big mound of blackened ruins near the railway station, left intact for strategic purposes by the enemy, now stood for the barracks—just as that calcined heap of masonry, and twisted iron girders at the town's north angle now represented the hospital. Both had blazed, two huge, unquenchable, incendiary-shell-kindled pyres, to light the retreat of the battalion south.

Secure on those points of menace, north-east, east, and west, the exhausted battalion had slept like dead men. The townspeople, relieved in mind by the presence of so many English soldiers, slept like Flemings—very nearly the same thing. The Burgomaster slept; M. le Maire followed his example. M. le Docteur and M. l'Avocat slumbered profoundly too. Only M. le Curé, being restless for some reason or other, resolved to spend the night on the church-tower in the company of his breviary, an electric reading-lamp, a bottle of strong coffee, and a battered but excellent night-glass, the property of his late maternal uncle, an Admiral of the French Navy.

Four hours they had slept, when a furious clangour from the church bells awakened the sleepers. Shrill whistles screamed, bugles were sounded, Staff officers and company commanders clattered out of their quarters—the battalion jumped like one man to its feet. Voices talked over the wires of the field-telephones. An artillery patrol-leader had ridden into the advance of a column of heavy motor-lorries approaching the bridge that crossed the river, carrying the highway that had brought the battalion from the south. Lorries heavy-laden with—French infantry!—for an outpost's flashlight on the advance had revealed the Allies' uniform. Well, what of it! French troops were in the east upon the Yser. But still the crazy church-bells jangled and clanged and pealed, shrieking:

"REVEILLEZ-VOUS, MESSIEURS LES ANGLAIS! VOUS ÊTES SURPRIT, LES ALLEMANDS SONT ICI! RÉVEILLEZ-VOUS! AUX ARMES! AUX ARMES!"

And another broad arrow of dazzling blue-white light showed motor-lorries packed with spiked helmets and green-grey tunics, behind the képis topping men in blue coats and red breeches. The gunners of the howitzer, spared for the point commanding the road south of the bridge, were picked off by German sharpshooters before they could fire. The officer with the machine-gun was bayoneted and the gun itself seized. Revolvers cracked and spat incessantly, bayonets plunged through the darkness into grunting bodies. Britons and Boches strove in a mêlée of whirling rifle-butts and pounding fists. And by the light of star-shell, shrapnel, and machine-gun-fire from the other side of the river began to play indiscriminately on the assailants and the assailed. Under cover of this fire, the Germans would have rushed the bridge, but for the Factory stuffed with machine-guns, pumping lead from its windows, and the howitzer—Oh! bully for the howitzer! thought the wounded man.

His company had been entrenched as a reserve near the bridge in the mouth of a faubourg running westwards. They had doubled out to support the bridge-party in the moment of alarm. He had been shot then in the right arm and had gone on using his revolver with the left hand. It was not until some well-timed shrapnel from the R.F.A. battery north-east of the town began to burst among the green-grey uniforms, and the Kaisermen took to their motor-lorries and went off, carrying their wounded and leaving many dead—that Franky had been sensible of any pain.

"You've been pipped, old man," had said the commander of the bridge-company, mopping a smudged and perspiring visage with a handkerchief that shrieked for the wash.

"By the Great Brass Hat! so I have, but I'd forgotten all about it," said Franky, surveying the carnage in the golden sunlight of the newly-minted day. "Look at these fellows in French uniforms. It's an insult to the Allies to bury 'em like that. Couldn't we take off the blue coats and red baggies before we stow 'em underground? And the prisoners. What beauties! Whining 'Kamerad!' to our chaps, and putting their hands up for mercy. Do they suppose——"

The speaker ceased, for the brother-officer who had commanded the bridge-company was absorbed in looking through his binoculars at a silvery speck in the western heavens. It grew into a British R.F.C. scouting biplane, that came droning overhead at 4,000, circled, fired a white rocket for attention, dived nearer, circled again, and dropped a scrawled message in a leaded clip-bag.

"Enemy-column—infantry with motor-lorries and two guns crossing river—bridge a mile to the West of you—hurrying hell-for-leather North. Dropped them two bombs. Bigger column advancing from North with more motor-lorries and howitzers. Look out for squalls that direction. Roads to South all clear."

"Those crossing the bridge to west of us will be the gentlemen who came round that way to leave their cards!" said the Lieutenant-Colonel Commanding as the biplane sang itself away. "Probably a column detached for the surprise from the bigger force to the north. Well, we seem to have finished top-dog. Let's hope they won't tackle us again until the men have had their coffee. 'Phone the Brigadier at Zille! And 'wireless' the news of the scrimmage to the Divisional Commander at Baix and Marwics thirty miles south of us, and get a message through to Sir Kenneth"—he named the General Officer Commanding the A.C. to which the Brigade belonged. "And give details to the G.H.Q. at St. O., don't forget! Not that we'll get much credit over this." The Colonel scowled, surveying from the sandbagged window of Headquarters, situate in the Factory, the long lines of stretchers being trotted off by the R.A.M.C. bearers to the town Hospital. He rubbed his finger under the bristles of his close-clipped moustache with a rasping sound that conveyed his irritation as he went on: "That's the worst of these rotten little Advance-guard actions! They're expensive, infernally expensive. The casualties are heavy and the credit nil."

"Possibly, sir, but at any rate we've wiped out a lot of these Boche beggars," said the Battery Commander, optimistically. "Halloa! Bird over! And it's a Boche plane!"

A two-seated Taube, shining silver in the morning sunshine, had come out of the golden mists to northward, rolling up the landscape under its steel belly with wonderful steady swiftness. At some 3,000 above the town, it hovered, making a queer buzzing noise.

"I've heard that song before," said the Adjutant, his eyes glued to his binoculars. "You remember, sir, at Fegny?"

"The spotter our fellows christened the Buzzard. At his old smoke-signalling tactics." The Colonel snatched the Field-telephone, spoke, and from a gaping skylight at the top of the tall, square, many-windowed Factory an extravagantly-tilted Maxim began to pump lead skywards in a glittering fan-shaped stream. "Queer effect, uncommonly! Looks as if it were raining upside down.... Gad!—I believe that hit him!" he added, as a small dark object fell from the Hunnish monoplane. But it was only the inevitable miniature parachute with the smoke-rocket attached to it belching gouts of black vapour. The Buzzard ceased buzzing, banked, and climbed gracefully out of view.

And then, with a leaping of green-white tongues of flame away in the north, beyond a long sunlit stretch of level country fringed with poplars and streaked with canals, and patched with brown cornfields and golden-tinted woods and apple-laden orchards, and dotted with little towns and villages, the heavy German field-guns and 11.2-inch Krupp howitzers began to shower shrapnel and big steel shells of High Explosive upon the devoted little town.

The Kaisermen had got the range from their spotter. Half of the single Field battery of 18-pounder quick-firers were put out of action in the twinkling of an eye. The little town became a storm-centre, canopied by soot-black smoke, stabbed by the fierce blue glares of the shell-bursts. The houses were toppling. The ruins were blazing. The gasometer near the station was hit and blew up with a fearful explosion. The streets were full of shrieking, stampeding, dying townspeople and children. "Save us! Take us with you!" they screamed to the Englishmen. For the Divisional Commander at Baix and Marwics had telegraphed "Retire," and the battalion was preparing to evacuate the town.

A great shell wrecked the Factory, killed the Adjutant and many of the machine-gunners, and slightly wounded the C.O. The Romanesque church-tower, whose bells had shrieked alarm in the little hours of the morning, rocked, staggered, and collapsed over its famous chime.

Again, men had melted as you laid your hands on them, blown into crimson rags as their mouths opened shouting to you. It had been Hell, Franky remembered, sheer, absolute, unvarnished Hell. The Battalion Surgeon-Major had been dressing his wounded arm in the open street when the Death-blizzard had broken upon them. A lump of shrapnel hit Franky in the ribs on the right side and some R.A.M.C. bearers carried him, vomiting blood, into the baker's shop. Possibly they were killed—for a shell hit and burst, and wrecked the house in the instant of their leaving it—and they never came back again. Their charge, in his helplessness, had escaped death by a narrow shave. The plank flooring of the upper room, dropping from the broken joist at the fireplace end, had formed a penthouse over him—lying on the blood-soaked stretcher on the tiled flooring—shielding him from the avalanche of household furniture, glass and crockery, descending from overhead.

Thus he had lain, partially unconscious, when what was left of the battalion marched out of the town. Most of the population followed on the blistered heels of the British soldiers, helping to carry the stretchers of the wounded and crippled men who under that blizzard of fiery Death had been got out of the burning Hospital. Not all had been got out. Franky, lying bloody and smothered with plaster, and helpless under the penthouse of planking that had saved him, had heard the screams of these—such pitiful, heart-rending screams.

Then the bombardment had stopped, and the mere relief from that intolerable torture of outrageous sound was Heaven. The screams from the burning Hospital had ceased, but when the earth had shaken with the approach of a great host, and German cavalry in green-grey uniforms with covered helmets had ridden through the ravaged streets, and the tottering walls had trembled at the passage of colossal motor-tractors dragging 11.2-inch Krupps and carrying huge loads of German gunners, engineers, and infantry—and German voices had shouted harshly up and down the streets—and German heads were thrust from open windows—and the work of Pillage, so dear to the German heart, was being carried out with German thoroughness—the screaming had begun again.—Cries of women and children, shouts of men; pleas, expostulations, prayers for mercy in French or Flemish, brutal laughter, German oaths, threats, and orders; subsequently, to the accompaniment of "Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles"—the popping of corks and the breaking of glasses—Hochs for Kaiser and Kronprinz, fierce disputes over the divison of booty, more shrieks of women and girls.... To the funeral adagio of picks and mattocks upon the cobblestones of the Market Square. A volley then, and shots and more shots.... Subsequently Private of Infantry, Max Schlutter, made these scrawled entries in his note-book; testifying to the Sadism prevailing among the troops of the Attila of To-day:

"October —th, 1914. Great day of loot and plunder! We shelled the cowardly English—a whole Army Corps with a brigade of heavy Artillery—out of the village of H——. The Hospital, Barracks, Church, and many houses destroyed by our guns. The Mayor, the Burgomaster, and the Registrar shot for harbouring our enemies. The priest tied up to his church-door, tortured, and then burnt, for ringing the bells to warn the English of our approach. Lieutenant Rossberg had a little girl butchered like a pigling, and pounded the feet of some lame English soldiers we found hiding, to teach the swine how to dance. They too were shot. Decidedly the Lieutenant is a funny fellow. All the people who had not run away brought out of their houses and shot. They filled the air with their lamentations. After a grand gorge and a big swill, we now all drunk and slept on the pavements by the light of a magnificent silvery moon. Burned more houses, and continued the march next day with a hellishly bad head."

"How long before they find me out?" Franky had wondered. But the plaster-whitened brown boots sticking stiffly out under the penthouse of broken flooring must have looked as though they clothed the rigid feet of a dead man. "Presently they will come!" he had promised himself. But though they had sacked the baker's shop and visited the other rooms in the dwelling, no one had entered the ravaged little parlour, split open from floor to ceiling by the upburst of the High Explosive, and offering its ravaged, worthless interior to the scrutiny of every passing eye.

Worn and spent with fierce exertion, hard fighting, and loss of blood, delirious with the rising fever of his wounds, he was conscious in whiffs and snatches. The conscious intervals made fiery streaks across broad belts of murky shadow, a No Man's Land wherein Franky wandered, meeting things both beautiful and hideous, knowing nothing real except thirst, racking cramps, and stabbing pain.

The second day passed. At sun-high a distant fury of guns broke out. Through the terrible drum-fire of Prussian Artillery he fancied he could hear the British field-guns, hammering out Death in return for Death. Suffering agonies for lack of water, he sustained life with scraps of chocolate broken from a half-cake carried in a breast-pocket. To move one hand and carry it to his mouth was possible at cost of ugly pain. Night fell, a night that was rainy, and windy, full of cool drippings that wet Franky's clothes without visiting his baked lips, and still the cannonade went on ceaselessly—so that the crazy walls that sheltered him shuddered and the earth vibrated, and the eeriness was made more eerie with the sliding of tiles from broken rafters, and the creaking and banging of broken doors, slammed by ghostly, invisible hands. Pale splashes of light,—reflected stabs of fire from the muzzles of those unsleeping guns in the south and west, made the darkness yet more dreary. Rats scrambled and squeaked, close to him in the obscurity, evoking horrible suggestions of being gnawed and bitten as one lay helpless there.... He gritted his teeth to keep back the cry that nearly broke from him as one rodent crossed him, its hooked claws rattling against his straps and buttons, its cold hairless tail sliding snakily over his hand. He fancied that he saw its eyes shining in the darkness—he was certain that it had moved and lopped round behind him—he felt its whiskered snout cautiously approaching the throbbing artery beneath his ear.... Then his nerve left him, and he croaked out feebly, though it seemed to him that he shouted:

"S'cat, you brute! Get, you beggar! Halloa; Halloa! Belges au secours! Ici un Anglais, grievement blessé! Is anybody there?"

But there came no answer save the muffled thunder of guns in the distance, the crackle of fire in houses that were burning, the gurgling of a broken water-main, and the distressed miaowing of a cat. It came nearer. There was a rustling sound, and the light descent of a furry body on padded feet; Pussy had jumped in where the window had been, alighting not far from Franky. He could see a pair of green eyes lamping in the darkness, and called, seductively:

"Pussy, pussy! Come here, old girl!"

The purr came near. Franky, with infinite torment reached out a hand, felt and stroked a warm, furry body. He said, cautiously feeling for the appreciative, sensitive places at the nape of a cat's neck, and under the jaws:

"Good old girl. Don't know what they call cats in Flemish, but Pussy seems to be good enough for you. Stop and scare the rats away, give 'em fits, eh, Pussy? You're agreeable? Good egg! Oh—I say!"

For Pussy had walked, loudly purring, on to the chest that heaved so painfully, and proceeded to knead the surface scientifically, preparatory to curling down. Franky set his teeth, and bore the ordeal. Thus they kept company until morning, when Pussy, who proved to be a lean white Tom with patches of sandy tortoiseshell on flanks and shoulders, withdrew by the fanged opening where the window had been. A moment later Franky heard his late companion lapping noisily from a street-puddle and knew envy, in the anguish of his own unrelieved thirst.

He wandered then for a space of hours or instants, in the days of his own lost childhood. He was in the night-nursery at Whins, suffering from some feverish ill. He felt the prickling as of innumerable ants running up his limbs and the sweat upon his forehead, and called meaningly to Nurse for drink. But it was his mother in her dinner-dress, with shining jewels crowning her dark hair, and wreathing her neck and starring her bosom, who came to the bedside and leaned over him, put the rumpled hair from his hot forehead, and held to his lips the cup of milk. Then a droning sound made the room vibrate, and he was back with his company in the hastily-dug trench across the mouth of the west-running thoroughfare, and church-bells were clanging and the telephone-buzzer was calling for the reserve to double out and reinforce the men in the trench enfilading the bridge....

Then he was awake and the sun was high. Those guns in the west were silent now, though from the south and south-east came heavy thuds and long vibrations. Through the rents in the flooring above him by which the rain had dripped upon him in the night, he was looking at the blue sky. A big white bird hovered there. Not a bird—a Taube. The Taube, and he had not dreamed the buzzing after all.

Oh, but it was queer to lie there under the keen scrutiny of that eye in the heavens! It made the prickly ants swarm up Franky's thighs and sides until the sensation grew unbearable. Hate, fierce hate of the murderous, beautiful thing droning up there in the azure sky above its curious misty circle made him see everything red, made him want to yell and shriek. For Margot was in danger, somehow—somewhere—while one lay helpless as a log....

"Steady, old child!" whispered Franky to himself, warningly. "You're going off your chump. Hold still!"

And he held still. The Buzzard ceased to buzz, and floated on, droning. He fancied that he felt its shadow darken and pass over him, moving from his head to his feet. The noise of the tractor stopped. Reflected in the area of a skewed wall-mirror he saw the machine volplane down, and alight without a falter in the Market Place—before the smoking ruins of the Town Hall.

CHAPTER LXI

LYNETTE DREAMS

Upon that same night in October nearly five weeks following the breaking of the Woe Wave, Lynette Saxham had a strange dream.

It seemed to her that she saw piled up in one colossal heap the riches of all the world, the world we know and the world we have forgotten; the treasures of all ages piled up higher than Kilimanjaro, or Aconcagua, or the cloud-mantled peak of Mount Everest. To her feet as she stood spell-bound amongst the foothills, rolled jewelled crowns, and huge barbaric torques and diadems of rough gold, precious cups, vases, and chargers; outpoured treasures of precious stones and wrought gems of inconceivable beauty and vileness, wondrous fabrics, marvels of sculpture, weapons, armour and coins of age beyond the ages—rude discs of tarnished gold, stamped with the effigies of forgotten kings. Orders, decorations, the paraphernalia of Pomp, the stage-properties of Power, the symbols of every religion, save One, were mingled in the stupendous pile, and a terrible Voice cried:

"Gone is the age of pride in possession! Chattels and fardels are no more! The days have spilt like pearls from a broken necklace! Time has eaten the years as the moth a garment of wool! Foredone, foregone, finished! Who now will gather riches from the Dustheap of the World?" And as new avalanches of treasure rolled downwards to the reverberation of that thunderous shout, a Hand of Titanic proportions hurled down upon the heap a war-chariot of beaten gold, with great scythed wheels, and jewelled harness; and that vision changed, and the dreamer was drowning, deep down in clear green seas, under the rushing keel of a huge barbaric War-galley that was all of gold, arabesqued and bossed with jewels, and coral, and pearl.

And the sense of suffocation passed, and a wonderful cool peace flowed in upon Lynette. She seemed to be led by a beloved hand that had been dust for years, into a bare walled place through which a thin breeze piped shrilly. Someone was there, doing some manual labour. He turned, and with a shock of unutterable rapture Lynette was looking in the face of her lost boy.

Bawne had grown thin and seemed taller. His temples had hollowed, his plume of tawny-gold hair hung unkempt over his wide white forehead. But his blue eyes were as sweet as ever. She had never realised how like they were to Saxham's in shape and colour, and in expression, until now. He thrust his lower jaw out and knit his brows slightly, as though her face were fading from his vision, and he wished to fix in mind the memory of its well-loved features:

"Stay, Mother! Oh! Mother, don't leave me!" he cried, and stretched out his hands to her, and she awakened, weeping for sorrow and joy.

It was broad day. Her husband was not there. She rose and bathed in the cold water she loved, and dressed in the simple Quaker-like grey that set off her fairness, and went out to Mass.... The day's Preparation was taken from the noble prayer of St. Ambrose, Bishop and Confessor:

"And now before Thee, O Lord, I lay the troubles of the poor; the sorrows of nations, and the groanings of those in bondage; the desolation of the fatherless; the weariness of wayfarers; the helplessness of the sick; the struggles of the dying; the failing strength of the aged; the ambitious hopes of young men; the high desires of maidens; and the widow's tears. For Thou, O Lord, art full of pity for all men: nor hatest aught of that which Thou hast made."

He even loved von Herrnung, who had taken her boy, and kept him in slavery, and robbed the joyous light from his sweet eyes, and set amongst his red-brown hair one sinister streak of white. She saw the bleached forelock dangling before her eyes when she shut them and tried to pray for the Enemy:

"Oh God! forgive that evil man, and turn his heart towards mercy and pitifulness, and give me back Thy precious gift, for the love of Her who is Thy Mother!"

It was yet early when she returned to Harley Street and passed at once into the Doctor's consulting-room. There, where her lips had first kissed him, sleeping in his chair, she found Saxham sitting at his table, with his sorrow of heart revealed in the stoop of his great shoulders, and his greying head resting upon his hands. Not a sound did he utter, but the attitude was more than eloquent:

"Oh my son!" it said. "Oh me!—my little son!"

"Owen!" she said, coming to his side and touching him. Then, as he started and looked up: "Bawne is alive!" she cried. "I have seen him in a dream, and he has spoken to me. He was in a bare high place with corrugated iron walls, whitened. It made me think of the Hospital at Gueldersdorp in the old days, and of a hangar.... His clothes were soiled and torn, and his hands were blackened. One other thing I saw—but I will not wring your heart by telling you.... It is enough that I have seen our boy.... alive. Oh! thank God!" She stopped, and the rose of joy faded from her cheeks, and only the tears were left there. Her eyes widened with a terrible doubt. "You knew! ... It is in your face! You had heard ... something, and you did not tell me!"

"I had not the courage. Despise me, for I deserve it! I had news of Bawne at the end of August. He is with that man who stole him—" He clenched the hand that rested on the table until the knuckles showed white upon it and his hair was wet upon his forehead and his mouth was twisted awry. "Taken with him on errands of aërial reconnaissance—carried helplessly into battle as a Teddy bear or a golliwog might be fastened on the front of a racing-plane. And, when I remember that I bade him risk that journey—" Saxham broke off, and turned his face away. She came nearer to him and said:

"But he is alive!—alive, even though he be in danger. My dream was sent to tell me so. Did not the Mother come to me in my sleep and lead me to him? Just as when she came and sent me here to you. Now I will atone for these days of selfish grieving. Only give me work to do!"

"Have you not enough upon your hands already? Too much, I have sometimes feared."

"Only the Hospice and the Schools," she answered eagerly, "and the Training Houses for the elder women. And, thanks to you, these are excellently staffed. If I were to die it would make little difference. Things would go on just the same."

"Would they?"

She stooped, lifted his hand to her lips and kissed it. He looked at her keenly as she did so, and the over-bright flush upon the thin cheeks and the hollows about the beautiful eyes, like the burning touch of her hand and of her lips, told him their tale of woe.

"Not for you. Nothing would ever be the same for you or for Bawne. Therefore—give me more work."

"There is plenty of work, unhappily," he said, "because of this calamity that has fallen upon the nation. We have notice that a hundred wounded men from the Front—many of them cot-cases—will arrive at SS. Stanislaus and Theresa's at three this afternoon."

"I shall be there!"

"I am not going to try to dissuade you. I will not keep back what God has given to me from those who have given so much for England. There is another quarter where you will be of use." His eyes were on the triptych frame before him. "I speak of that little Lady Norwater—Patrine's friend—I think you have not met?"

"Oh, but I have. We were made acquainted with each other some weeks ago at the Club." Her delicate face contracted. "That day when the news came about the British losses. Just before that poor child Brenda Helvellyn blurted out the dreadful truth. Owen, it was tragic. She had known it from the beginning——"

"And the sister forbade her to breathe a hint of it. That is the attitude of the fashionable Sadducean," said Saxham bitterly, "who not only denies the Atonement and the Resurrection, but will not admit of Death."

"But," she asked him, "what of Lady Norwater? Patrine tells me she is ill."

"She is ill. Lord Norwater—at first reported missing after an action north of Ypres on the —th is now said to have been killed."

Lynette was silent. Her husband knew why her head was bent and her white fingers sought a little Crucifix she wore. She was praying for the dead man. Presently she said:

"He was very brave, I believe?'

"He had been recommended for the Victoria Cross for a special service of great gallantry—rendered during the Battle of the Aisne. He was a brave and simple young man, and very lovable. His wife received the official intelligence of his death yesterday. They 'phoned Patrine, as you know, and sent for me later. Lady Norwater is expecting her confinement at the end of November—and they were alarmed for her."

"Poor little soul! Her baby will be a comfort to her!"

Saxham remembered under what circumstances he had made the acquaintance of Lady Norwater, and his look was rather grim. In his mind's ear he heard again the sweet little voice saying in its fashionable slang jargon:

"Oh no! I rather cotton to kiddies. It's the bother of having 'em doesn't appeal. It puts everything in the cart for the Autumn Season."

Still, the recent remembrance of her piteousness softened the Doctor's never very adamantine heart towards her, the humming-bird broken on the wheel of implacable Fate. Not unnatural, after all. More of a woman than one would have thought her. How she had clasped her tiny hands together and entreated him, when the worst was feared for her, to save, to save her child.

"Franky's child. Perhaps—the boy he hoped for. Oh! to have to say hoped, hurts so dreadfully. Yes, yes! I will be brave and good and quiet.... I will do everything that you say. Ah, now I know why all these days I have felt Franky near me, and seen his eyes looking at me out of every stranger's face."

Margot did not cry out in her pain and loneliness for her friend Patrine to come to her, though she sent loving, grateful messages whenever Pat called or 'phoned. But she had said to Saxham, only that morning: "Doctor, I met your wife at the Club not long ago. She is more beautiful, but so much sadder than the portrait you showed me. Ah, yes! I remember why. When I am better, would she come and see me? Perhaps it is inconsiderate that I should ask. But the world is so huge and coarse and noisy and empty"—the little lip had quivered—"and there is something in her face that is so sweet, I have been fancying that it would"—-she hesitated—"be good for me and for my baby if she would sometimes visit me. Do you think she would mind?"

Saxham had answered:

"I will ask her." Now he gave the piteous message, and Lynette warmly agreed:

"Of course I will go. Whenever you say I may!"

"Not for some days. She is to see no one yet, and your hands are full with Madame van der Heuvel and Marienne and Simonne." The Doctor referred to an exiled Belgian lady and her young daughters, who had been received at Harley Street as guests. "And—there is the Hospital—and to-night you have to address this Meeting of Suffragists at the Royal Hall. It is the only decision of yours, let me tell you," said Saxham, "that I ever felt tempted to dispute. My wife upon the same platform with Mrs. Carrie Clash and Fanny Leaven! A triple force of Metropolitan Police on duty, and detectives at all the exits and amongst the audience. It's—" Words failed Saxham.

"It is unspeakably hateful in your eyes. Dear Owen, I know it. But I should be hateful in my own sight if I were to break my word. On the day I first met you we spoke of these views of mine. I hold them still. Marriage has not altered them. It is not in me," said Lynette, "to change!"

"You are the soul of faithfulness in all things!"

"Then do not be grieved that I keep to my given promise. Those who have honoured me by asking me to address them are aware that my convictions are opposed to theirs at points. But while I oppose I admire their ruthless devotion and their magnificent, unswerving policy of self-sacrifice——"

"But these felonies," he protested, "these incendiary attacks upon property——"

"In nine cases out of ten, and I believe the authorities know it as well as the W.S.S.S., such outrages have not been committed by Suffragists at all."

"By whom, then?"

"Have we no enemies without our gates even now when we are at War?"

"Germans...." A light broke in upon Saxham. "It's not impossible. As for scattered literature being evidence—that can be bought anywhere. But granted the blackest sheep of the W.S.S.S. to be proved—piebald, that will not make me less anxious for you to-night."

He touched a heavy plait of the red-brown hair with a tender hand and said to her:

"I grudge that the pearls of my wife's eloquence should be thrown before Suffragists."

"We disagree, dear love," she said to him, "but we do not love the less for it. When the Franchise is accorded to Women, should I vote for one Party and you for another, will that matter a whit to you?"

"Not a whit," he said, as he kissed her. "You may give your vote to whom you choose, so long as the voter remains mine. Who was that?" Saxham's quick ear had heard a footstep in the hall. "Madame van der Heuvel coming back from Mass?"

"It is Patrine!"

"Patrine off and away at this hour?"

"I told her I would explain to you."

"She has explained to you," said Saxham, "and that should be enough."

"Dear Owen! ... I am sure she wished you to know of it.... She has gone down to Seasheere, a little Naval Flying-station on the South-East coast, to meet Alan Sherbrand on the home-flight from Somewhere in France."

"I see in to-day's Wire that he has been gazetted Lieutenant," said Saxham. "One rather wonders, all things considered, that it has not happened before."

For not once nor twice in the past weeks the big smudgy contents-bills hung upon railings and worn as a chest-protector by newspaper-vendors, since paper became too scarce an article to line street-gutters with, had trumpeted the name of Sherbrand; and the big black-capitalled headings had set forth his deeds of daring. Only to-day they had announced: