"You've probably stirred up an ant-hill with the end of your stick before now," said Eric Lane, shading his eyes and shifting himself in bed until he could catch a glimpse of the Lashmar Woods in their riot of autumn colour. "I feel that's what the Almighty has done here; we're scattered in every direction, running about in wild confusion without knowing in the least what any one else is doing. I feel amazingly out of everything."

He had already been seven weeks in bed at Lashmar Mill-House and was white-faced and cadaverous, with bloodless lips and immense sunken brown eyes. This was the worst breakdown that he had undergone since he was a boy; but all danger was now over, and his voice was beginning to recover its strength and music. Jack had walked over to sit with him. It was their first meeting since they journeyed to Oxford together for their degrees; Jack had been training in London and was wearing for the first time the uniform of a second lieutenant.

"How soon are you going to be allowed up?"

"In another week," Eric answered. "I don't know when I shall be able to start regular work again. I've had to chuck the paper. I don't think they were sorry to get rid of me: there's been drastic staff reduction in Fleet Street since the war. It's rather a bore, though. If my play's produced in the spring, if it's a success, I may have some money; otherwise I must live on my hard-earned savings and try to find work. One of the government offices might take me. You know that Oakleigh's in the Admiralty?"

"Yes, and O'Rane's enlisted; and Jim Loring's a staff captain; and that swine Webster is driving a car for the Red Cross. Even the egregious Val Arden's taken a commission. I rather respect him—for the first time in my life; he looks three parts gone in consumption, but he got round the doctor. He wasn't going to have people saying that he was a funk, and I think he felt that he'd led a footling life and that this was the opportunity of shewing what he was made of. Most of us are feeling that we've wasted a good deal of our time.... What did they spin you for?"

"Overstrained heart. And, when I was examined, of course I was about half an hour removed from my final collapse—which I think we will not discuss.... Did you know Deryk Lancing? It was horrible about his death."

"Yes, I've been wondering whether it was an accident," said Jack. "He was so full of nerves that I should never have been surprised to hear he'd gone off his head. But what an opportunity the war would have been for him! Oakleigh told me that he was always worrying about his money and wondering what to do with it. Well, the beauty of being in the army is that you can't think about yourself; you're a tiny part in a gigantic machine, and your individuality doesn't matter a damn to any one.... When you think how every man and women you know was attitudinizing and thinking about his own personality—Jack Summertown, Val Arden, Deganway.... And the women were worse than the men. Everything sacrificed for effect. Every one looking for new emotions. Sensationalists.... You tried your personality on a new diet of excitement every day. How amazingly small it all seems when you measure it by a war of this kind! Even the biggest thing of all. A man devotes months and years of his life to engaging the affections of a woman——"

"Well, that charge can never be brought against you," Eric interrupted with a laugh.

Jack bent down and spent some moment in knocking out his pipe against the fender. His parents and sister still did not know that he was even acquainted with Barbara; but Eric might well have heard gossip from Oakleigh or a dozen others.

"Well, take Loring's case! He spent years over that business with Sonia Dainton. Then he got sane. Then he fell in love with Oakleigh's cousin—engagement announced, flourish of trumpets, an immense ball in honour of the occasion. The war comes along, and it all fades into the background. I suppose they'll be married as soon as it can be arranged, but the war's the important thing in his life now. He's transferring to a service battalion as soon as he possibly can; with any luck he'll get killed.... By the way, you saw that Jack Summertown had been knocked out? In the first casualty list of all. And Archie Stornaway. And Charles Framlingham. All three heirs to peerages, and two of them were staying with the Lorings at Chepstow when I was there. If you'd been told a year ago.... But, by Jove, this is pretty much what O'Rane prophesied ten years ago. What was his bet? One or two of us have gone under, one or two are dead—with more to follow. One or two married. One or two have made pretty fair fools of ourselves. O'Rane himself has done well. And you're going to be our new playwright. I wasn't doing badly at the bar.... It all seems so small now."

Lady Lane came in with tea, and soon afterwards Jack left. He was due back in London to dine with Loring, who had written mysteriously to beg him, as a great favour, to arrange a meeting the moment that he found a free night. Jack guessed that Barbara was in some way connected with the request, but he could not imagine what she wanted. For two months he had divided his time between drilling and being drilled; there were new friendships to form and new confidences to exchange; the questions that mattered were the etiquette of the mess and the ethics of saluting—as they had once been the code and spirit of a public school and, later, the tone and rule of decorous society. Was the battalion to be sent out as a whole or used for drafts? Undoubtedly you would secure greater unity and esprit de corps by keeping it intact; but the men were not all equally trained, and the latest comers would set the pace for all. There were heated debates between the rival sects, and the colonel was claimed by both sides alternately. Once or twice Jack stepped aside and smiled at the picture of himself working under a captain of nineteen and taking a warm interest in mess politics. It was hardly the end that he had imagined; but at least he had worked himself into iron condition until his nerves were under control and he was too tired for introspection. Loring's invitation was the first test of fortitude; the library recalled their debates of other days, and, if he went there from friendship, he was determined not to exhume something that had been killed at Chepstow and buried by the war.

"I'm glad you were able to come," Loring began. "I'll say what I've got to say and get it over as soon as possible. I'm not doing this on my own initiative. Have you seen Barbara lately?"

"Not since your party. Jim, I'd sooner not hear another word on this subject——"

"I'm afraid you've got to, old man, for my sake. She's in London and she asked me to give you this with my own hand."

He held out a letter, and Jack looked at it in silence. The envelope was addressed in pencil; the upright awkwardness in some of the characters told him that it had been written, like so many others, in bed; a few words were smudged, and this, with the bent corners, suggested that it had probably been composed some time before.

"I don't want it," he said after a long hesitation.

If the mere sight of familiar handwriting could hurt him, he was resolved to take no further risks with his painfully acquired fortitude.

"You must take it," said Loring. "I don't care what you do with it."

Jack shrugged his shoulders, unbuttoned a pocket of his tunic and slipped the letter inside, as dinner was announced.

"How soon are you chucking up your staff job?" he asked, to kill any further discussion, as they walked out of the library together.

When Jack returned to camp, Loring called on his cousin in Berkeley Square. House and family were in tumult, for, when the Abbey was handed over to the War Office, Lord Crawleigh was driven to spend the autumn in London and he returned to find that it was one thing to urge his younger servants into the army and another to be left without a single able-bodied man to prepare for his coming. His wife was wholly immersed in the management of her hospital; Barbara was training for her certificate; Neave and the two younger boys had been given commissions in the Guards, and daily life was so uncomfortable that he decided to share his discomfort with the nation and to explain the origin and meaning of the war in a series of addresses throughout the country.

"Well, Jack dined with me to-night," Loring began. "I gave him the letter."

"Yes?"

"He didn't want to take it at first, but I told him I'd promised to give it him with my own hand."

Barbara was unnerved by waiting, but she contrived to mask her curiosity with indifference.

"What did he say?" she asked.

"He put it into his pocket."

"He didn't read it?"

"Not then."

"And he didn't say anything? What did he look like?"

"He was like he always is; no one would call Jack demonstrative."

For all her studied indifference, Barbara shuddered involuntarily.

"I know. He frightens me when he's like that," she whispered. "If he ever flared up for a moment, I should feel that we were more evenly matched.... He will read the letter?" she persisted.

"My dear Babs, how can I tell?"

"Oh, of course you can't, but the waiting's so awful," she cried. "You know what was in it? I kept my promise—the promise I made on the Cross at Chepstow. If he wants me——"

"Well, if he does? You still don't love him?"

"I don't know. He fascinates me.... But that doesn't matter, I've given him my promise——"

"It seems to me to matter very much," Loring interposed drily. "I've grown quite fond of you lately, Babs, and I don't want to see you unhappily married. Or him, either. You say you don't know whether you're in love with him, but there's a simple test: if you were free in every way and could choose among all the men in the world, would you fly to Jack like an arrow to a target?"

"I don't know.... I think he might make me come to him."

"Against your will? Babs, you've either lost all your personality or else you're in love with him."

She shook her head in perplexity, frowning and smoothing out the wrinkles with the back of her hand.

"I don't know that it would be against my will. I can't make out. He never loved me as I wanted to be loved.... I never feel that Jack could be gentle.... Do you know what I mean, Jim? There are some people who seem to take loving for granted. They can't waste time on the little daily tendernesses that are the glorious great tendernesses...." Her voice faded away, and she sat staring in front of her until a change of thought made her face resolute. "But it's not for me to find fault. If he wants me...."

"I wish to God I could do something to help," said Loring.

"I must just wait, I suppose. I wish I knew what I wanted.... Sometimes I feel I'm going mad, Jim. I can't get rid of his eyes, I can't forget the change that came over him when he began to understand what I'd done.... Has he gone back to camp? When d'you think he'll write?"

"My dear girl, you might just as well ask me how long the war's going on! Perhaps he won't write at all."

"What d'you mean?"

Loring sank lower into his chair and stared at the ceiling.

"I've been trying to think how I should feel in his place," he said. "If he was simply infatuated about you, he'd go on believing in you until you'd married some one else. On the other hand, he's ignorant enough of women still to idealize them; and there's no bitterness like the bitterness of your disappointed idealist. He may try to cut the whole thing out of his life; he may tear your letter up unread, he may read it and throw it in the fire without answering it.... What are you going to do then, Babs?"

"I belong to him until he throws me aside," she answered. "On my honour and oath——"

"I wish you weren't quite so ready with your extravagant oaths," he interrupted. "You'll get into trouble one day. Jephthah took a similar vow and lived to regret it.... Well, Babs, if there's anything I can do to straighten things out, let me know."

He got up and prepared to go. Barbara sat with her hands pressed between her knees and her head bent.

"I must wait," she whispered. "You go, Jim; I'd sooner be alone. You go! I'll—just wait."

Loring looked at her for a moment and then went downstairs. He could have sworn that she could see her own drooping head and tired eyes in a mental looking-glass and was enjoying her doubt and misery; as likely as not, she would describe it to Jack, if they met. "Jim went away. I said, 'You go. I must wait.' And I waited...." A little of Jephthah's daughter, the Lady of Shalott, Monna Vanna and Sarah Curran; tragic pathos, tragic constancy, tragic hopelessness. By giving her the cue of Jephthah's daughter, he had helped to destroy the illusion of sincerity....

Barbara sat by herself for a few minutes and then rang for her maid and began to undress. She had never dreamed that Jack would not answer her letter. Though written on the night after she had failed to find him at the Temple, she had kept it locked away for nearly two months, afraid to send it and unable to say why she was afraid. Then Sonia Dainton had called on her and, standing by the window with her face averted, had talked of Jim's approaching marriage. "I hear he's going out to the front fairly soon," she began. "I want to part friends with him—in case anything happens. D'you think he'd see me?" "You can only try," answered Barbara. That was a fortnight ago; some weeks later, on the eve of the wedding, Sonia called at Loring House to beg and to receive forgiveness. In the meantime Barbara profited by her own advice to force herself into communication with Jack. It was all that she could do, if she hoped ever again to know self-respect or even a quiet conscience. She could make amends and give him his chance to embrace or spurn her; that he would ignore her she had never imagined.

The hospital at the Abbey opened three days after her conversation with Jim; and Barbara at once volunteered for night work. Ever since the party at Chepstow she had been unable to rest; Jack's haggard face and fixed stare invaded her dreams, and, when she slept, it was to wake up repeating some phrase that she had used to him. By going to bed in daylight and lying with the blinds up and the sun on her face, she never wholly lost consciousness; her brain was sentinel enough to rouse her, if she began to dream of the banqueting-hall at Loring Castle....

When Jim's wedding took place, she wrote to offer him good wishes and added in a postscript:

"I have had no news."

He wrote back,

"I have not seen him since that night. In a case like this, isn't silence itself an answer? George heard that he was possibly going out with a draft, but I believe this has been contradicted. Is there anything I can do? I'll try to get hold of him, if you like, and ask him what he's up to, but, while I don't mind exposing myself to a rebuff, I don't see myself leading you by the hand to have your face slapped by any one...."

"Thanks, it's best to do nothing," Barbara answered. "I should be hurt if he thought I was forcing myself on him."

At the beginning of 1915 Jim wrote on his own initiative.

"I hear Jack's gone abroad. George is my authority; I didn't see him myself. I think you may feel that this squares the account. On the whole I'm glad; and, if you feel as you did when last we discussed this, it's the best thing for you."

A few weeks later Jim went abroad himself. So long as he was a channel of communication, Barbara waved away the necessity of deciding what to do if she were left with what he called a "cheque drawn but not presented." Without him, loneliness sapped her courage; and she wrote three extravagant letters, which, in the act of writing, she knew that she would never send. Then she tried to forget. Then she centred her hopes on seeing him, when he came home on leave....

A week before he was expected in England, Amy Loring called in Berkeley Square to say that Jim was "missing." George Oakleigh had the news from the War Office, and every one might be told except Violet, who was expecting a baby.

"At this rate I sometimes wonder who will be left alive," Lady Crawleigh wrote to Barbara. "Sonia has had one of her brothers killed and the other wounded. Valentine Arden has been killed. Young O'Rane has come back slightly wounded but without his sight. No one can ever take their places. They are all equally splendid.... Poor Mr. Arden and Jack Summertown.... Though a man may have been frivolous before, that does not seem to keep him from shewing his true worth when the occasion arises.... The war has been a great opportunity...."

Barbara's first thought was that, if Jim too were killed, there was one person the less to share her secret. She was aghast to find herself even playing with such consolation; but, as the weeks of silence became months, she lost hope. With every new death or mutilation she was becoming less and less equal to the great opportunity. Though she could work as hard as any one, she came no nearer to justifying herself or making atonement. The officers in the hospital sometimes refused to let her do anything for them, because she had already worn herself out with doing so much, but she was never tired enough to forget. Until she had placated Providence, she would not be allowed to forget. And Providence rejected her offering.

In the summer she heard that Sonia Dainton was engaged to be married to David O'Rane.

"He and I were sort of engaged when I was sixteen," Sonia began. "Of course, neither of us took it seriously. At least I didn't, as soon as I was old enough to think at all; perhaps HE did. He SAYS that he always knew he was going to marry me and that for all practical purposes we WERE married from the time when I was sixteen. When I was engaged to Tony Crabtree—I wasn't properly engaged; I don't believe I ever thought I should marry him; but I was very young, and it was exciting to be engaged. I believe NOW that Tony only wanted to marry me because he thought I should be such an asset to him in his career; thought of course he was very much in love with me—David says that he knew all about it and didn't trouble himself more than if his wife were flirting with a man at dinner. Poor darling, he was very unhappy about Jim, because he thought I might really marry him; but yet—he says—at the bottom of his heart he always knew I shouldn't. Aren't men ridiculously vain? But, Babs, isn't it wonderful to think of him waiting all those years, standing aside, never trying to influence me, always quite certain that ONE day he'd marry me? Some time I'll tell you the whole story and how he came into the HEART of Austria, when war'd been declared, to rescue me. He was terribly wounded at the beginning of this year, and the doctors say there's no possibility of his ever getting his sight back. You can imagine what that means; but he says he'd go through it all again, if that were the only way of getting me! George told me that, when David was delirious in hospital, he kept calling out my name night and day. It's wonderful to be loved like that!

"We shan't have any money worth speaking of, and darling David thinks he's committing the most awful crime in wanting to marry me at all. 'A blind man with no visible means of subsistence ought to be quietly knocked on the head,' he says. When he got back to England, he wouldn't come near me, he wouldn't let me come near him; he says he couldn't trust himself. And, poor lamb! I'm getting quite tired of hearing him say that I'm throwing myself away and that I MUSTN'T marry him.... But, then, when he tells me that, ever since he was blinded, he's never seen anything except me, there's no arguing about it, is there?

"He's gone back to Melton as a temporary master, and we're going to be married in the school chapel. I should insist on your being one of my bridesmaids, if I were having any, but it's going to be the quietest wedding in the world. But I want you to think of me, Babs darling, and offer me your blessing. I'm so very happy...."

Barbara read the letter twice and tried to forget it. Sonia could not tell her too often how many men had been in love with her and how much David adored her; there was little mention of love on the other side, only the eagerly snatched tributes to a colossal vanity. Every one knew that she had no heart. She justified herself and explained away her early engagements and broken promises with a light brush. Women would justify themselves, whatever they did! And Sonia was marrying with both eyes on the auditorium, listening delightedly to the protests that she was wasting herself. She was enjoying her sense of reckless generosity; and, perhaps, like Val Arden and the others who hoped to atone by one sacrifice for an empty life, she would welcome the sacrifice even without the audience....

It was a heartless, horrible letter. If Barbara had been invited to the wedding, she would have refused to go. She wished that she had been invited.... Yet Sonia was only doing what she had failed to do. Jack's devotion was no less than O'Rane's, and she had thrown it away; she was trying to atone for everything in one sacrifice, as Sonia had already done. She might have been happy, like Sonia; she might have outstripped Sonia by discovering a heart. Every one was falling in love and marrying; it was time to discover a heart. Val Arden told her, when she was sixteen, that this would be her greatest emotion....

The next day Barbara asked for leave to go up to London and choose a wedding-present. She avoided her family, for her looks did not court inspection and she could not afford to be torn away from the hospital. The life at Crawleigh Abbey suited her too well to be disturbed; though sometimes, as she came off duty and undressed in broad daylight, she wondered when and how her strength would break. The other nurses never wearied of telling her that she looked ill; the mirror shewed that her body was wasting, even if she had not felt that even her stockings hung loose. And there was a cough which had come mysteriously and as mysteriously refused to go.

On her arrival at Waterloo she telephoned to George Oakley and invited him to lunch with her. He, if any one, would have news, he was fond of her; and, ever since Sonia's engagement, she had felt that something was wanting until she commanded an equal devotion and gave an equal surrender. Of her, too, people were saying that she had no heart; she was ready and more than ready to fall in love.

"My child, you do look a little wreck," George exclaimed, when she called for him at the Admiralty. "This is a sad business about Jim. I was very sorry for you all."

"You don't think there's any hope?"

"I tell his mother and sister that he's sure to turn up. If you ask me whether I believe what I say.... It is a holocaust and a half! O'Rane, Jim, Tom Dainton, Summertown—Lady Maitland's eldest boy is back wounded. And with the rest you feel it's only a question of time. Val Arden lunched with me three days before he was killed, and I felt that he wanted to be killed. The thing had got on his nerves till he knew he couldn't stand much more of it without going out of his mind. Other people, again, seem to take the war like a game of rather irregular football." He hesitated and then tried to go on without allowing a change to come into his voice. "Jack Waring came to see me last week, and I'd swear that he was enjoying the whole thing."

Barbara's pulses hammered at sound of the name, and she dreaded to seem too nonchalant.

"How was he?" she asked, though it was rather of Val Arden that she was thinking. Perhaps Jack, too, welcomed the chance of having everything ended for him. She remembered that his eyes had suddenly shone, when George came, grave-faced, into the banqueting-hall; he was making plans for taking a commission three days before war was declared and three minutes after he left her. It was in truth a new emotion to feel that she might have driven him to constructive suicide....

"Positively keen to get back," said George. "Didn't...?" He was going to ask, in some surprise, whether she had not seen him; the ball at Chepstow seemed to have healed any breach between them. But it was not his business. "Your mother tells me that your hospital is being closed," he substituted.

"Closed?" Barbara echoed in dismay.

"The War Office finds it difficult to work."

"But mother never told me! Oh, George! that's too awful! I can't get on without it. I must have something to keep me busy. If I start thinking——"

His eyes opened so wide that she checked herself.

"My dear, the war's getting on your nerves," he said significantly. "Doesn't Lady Crawleigh——?"

Barbara blamed herself bitterly for letting her voice get out of control; it was always happening....

"George, promise me you won't say you've seen me!" she begged. "I didn't tell them I was going to be in London. I know I'm disgracing you by looking like this, but, if mother saw me, she'd take me away; and I should die, if I didn't have work to do."

"I see. Well, I'm not a doctor, but you'll die remarkably soon at your present rate. D'you know what I'm going to do when we leave here?"

"Drop me at Cartier's, I hope."

"If you like. And that's handy for Berkeley Square. I'm going to your mother and I'm going to tell her what I think of your general condition."

"George, if you do that, I'll never speak to you again! And really, you know, it isn't any business of yours."

"Except that I happen to be very fond of you. And, if you get ill.... Dear Barbara, to please me, will you see your doctor before you go back to hospital?"

Barbara had so long looked on George as a kindly and comfortable bit of universal family furniture that she was startled by the unexpected softening of his voice. Perhaps he, too, felt that it was time to cultivate a heart and to fall in love. She smiled with an approach to happiness. Any hint of tenderness in a man's voice made her like a flower opening its petals to the sun.

"D'you like me, George?" she asked.

"Not when you're looking like this. Now I only want to slap you and send you to bed. Will you go to your doctor?"

"If you like, I'll say that I'm going to him——" she began.

"That's all I want," he interrupted. "If you gave a promise, however extravagant, I should know that you'd always keep it."

She raised her eyes to his and looked swiftly away.

On the day after her return to the Abbey, the hospital was filled with rumour and gossip. No new cases were to be taken; and, as soon as the last bed was empty, commandant and doctors, nurses and orderlies were to be transferred to the new government hospital at Sunbury. Lady Crawleigh came down without warning to arrange for the reconversion of the house. In the middle of the afternoon she went into Barbara's room to find her with drooping mouth and wet eyes, crying in her sleep. The commandant was flushed from her office and invited to explain; without waiting for the hospital to be closed, Barbara was personally conducted to London and sent under the care of Lord Crawleigh's sister to the sea. She made no resistance; she did not even tell her parents that she was twenty-one and that she refused to be ordered about. She seemed no longer to matter either to herself or to any one else....

Before coming off duty for the last time, she said good-bye to each of her patients and found herself presented at the first bed with a pendant.

"We had to get it in rather a hurry," explained the spokesman. "But we hope you'll like it. We all wish you weren't going, Lady Barbara. It's not worth being in hospital without you."

"You dears, I wish I wasn't going," Barbara cried with a quaver in her voice. "Good-bye, and bless you all! No, I won't let you kiss my hand! I'll kiss yours."

She walked from bed to bed, smiling until she reached the door; then her composure deserted her, and she ran out crying. It was her fate to make people fall in love with her, whether she tried or not—her fate, too, never to be in love with any one herself. Jim, of course, would have called this another experiment in emotion; he would have been very scornful about the presentation and her tearful farewell, reminding her that Florence Nightingale, her great prototype, had her shadow kissed, as she passed down the ward. And next day, as she might almost have foreseen, there were photographs of her in uniform: "Lady Barbara Neave, who has been doing splendid war-work at Lady Crawleigh's hospital in Hampshire." For the first time in her life she wanted to be left alone and unnoticed, so that she could get into a train or walk about in London without being recognized.

Under the hourly care of a doctor she was no longer allowed to keep herself awake for fear of dreaming. But there was nothing to occupy her by day, and she brooded eternally on the workings of Jack's mind. A letter from Sonia started the train.

"Bobs darling, the bracelet is divine! Thank you ever so much for it! I didn't write before, because we've been so frightfully busy. I expect you saw that we were married last week. Babs, I'm so happy! I'm at PEACE now. With David I feel so secure. I always USED to think that I should feel circumscribed, but the COMPANIONSHIP'S so wonderful that I don't want anything more. At least, I want to have children—lots and lots of them; and I want David to go on loving me, as he does now; and I want it always to be summer. But I wouldn't change David for any one in the world; and I wouldn't be NOT married.

"Looking back on it all, I don't REGRET anything and I suppose I enjoyed myself, but it seems rather hollow now. We shall lead a very quiet, humdrum life and we shall be frightfully poor, but I think that's where the PEACE comes in. If I'd married poor Jim—though I know he'd have been the most adoring husband—I don't believe the privilege of being 'the beautiful Lady Loring' (if anybody had troubled to call me that!) would have compensated all the ceremony and fuss. I never felt a thousandth part of the love for Jim that I feel for David. I suppose that's the difference. All I ask now is to have David's love for ever and to give him every ounce of mine and to make our lives one. It's a silly thing to say, but, before I married, I never imagined how extraordinarily two lives DO become one. We each of us know what the other's thinking of; we carry on conversations where we only seem to SPEAK one sentence in three—everything else is understood. My dear, we are so happy! You know how I love you, Babs; I only hope that you'll be as happy as I am."

For all its irritating italics and ill-defined emotion, the letter unsettled Barbara. She, too, would like to have children—"lots and lots of them"; the papers pretended that this was an age-old world-instinct and that Woman—in the abstract—was being impelled by an abstract Nature to repair the life-wastage of the war; hence they deduced the absurd scandal of the "war-babies," thus they explained the abundant crop of "war weddings." Barbara's intelligence rebelled against world-instincts as much as against abstract Woman and abstract Nature. She wanted children because she wanted something of her own to love, and her untapped reservoir of devotion had overflowed when she was nursing the boys who pretended that nothing was the matter, when she could see their eyelids flickering with pain. She yearned to lay their heads on her breast and tell them to cry because it would do them good and because she wanted to comfort them.

And she did not see why Sonia should have so much happiness.... "We were married.... We've been so frightfully busy.... We shall lead a very quiet, humdrum life and we shall be frightfully poor.... We each of us know what the other's thinking of...." Barbara writhed at the possessive, participating plural. She was ready to be poor and to live a quiet humdrum life, if she could share it; she appreciated the peace of marriage, so often underlined by Sonia, because it was what she hungered to feel. Eight months had passed since Jack went abroad, twelve since they parted. When she heard that he had been home on leave without communicating with her, she felt sure that he would never communicate with her; but, when the war ended, she must tender her promise again. In the meantime she might fall in love with some one else....

The memory of Jack in the banqueting-hall at Chepstow was replaced by a picture in which he stood, silent and forbidding, between her and some one whom she strove passionately to reach. The image haunted her until she jettisoned her last fragments of pride and wrote to him again.

"I sent you a letter nearly a year ago and I have never had an answer," she began. "I don't think you can have read it, because it would be such a horribly cruel way of punishing me, if you read it and paid no attention. I don't think I asked for mercy or forgiveness, because I didn't deserve either; but, though I behaved unforgivably, I DIDN'T appreciate until it was too late quite what I was doing and quite how much you loved me. I don't want you to think I'm EXCUSING myself; I want you to understand that perhaps I do appreciate rather better now and that I'm ready, as I was then, to do anything in the world that you ask. I've taken a solemn oath. You may accept it generously or refuse it generously; or, if you like, you can just humiliate me—you know I'm vain and you know that's where you can punish me best. Don't play with me! Sometimes I think I'm going out of my mind. I want you to be just and, if you can, to be generous; it will be generosity, if you are able to say that you forgive me, and it will be justice, if you remember that I apologize and ask to be forgiven and offer to do anything that you want—and that there's nothing more I CAN do. I don't DESERVE consideration, but I need it."

Barbara knew that she was too uncertain of herself to trust her own judgement, and the letter was put aside until her mood of abject humility had passed. When she read it again, the terms of her own abasement set her cheeks flaming, but there was no other way of winning peace. She allowed five days for the letter to reach him and another five days for a reply. For the first two nights she never slept; on the third day Dr. Gaisford was summoned, and that afternoon she was despatched to the sea for another three weeks' rest. While there, the tenth day came and went without any reply. Barbara added an eleventh, because letters lost a day in forwarding. It was no less barren than its predecessors, but news came in an unexpected form on the twelfth.

"George has been dining," wrote Lady Crawleigh, "and I'm sorry to say that he was once again the bearer of bad nexus. Poor Jack Waring is the latest. He is reported missing. George had it from the family, though it hasn't appeared in the papers as yet, and he told us in case we wanted to send a line of sympathy. I don't know Mrs. Waring, of course, but I felt I had to tell how sorry we all were. She replied at once with what I thought was a very brave letter. It's a great shock, but she's quite convinced that he's all right. Well, I'm afraid that, after our dear Jim's death, I don't put any faith in these 'missing' cases...."

Before she got to the end of her mother's letter, Barbara knew that her first and strongest feeling was relief, though she dared not put it into words. She wondered for the thousandth time why she had allowed Jack to gain so strong an influence over her, then ceased wondering for fear of persuading herself that perhaps, after all, she had loved him.... And, if there were immortal souls, if a man died with a lie to God still unexpiated....

On her return to London she sought details from Oakleigh, but he could only tell her that the company had been almost entirely wiped out. Two subalterns were reported to be prisoners; but the Warings had received no news of Jack, nor did the subalterns mention him.

"I'm afraid he's gone, too," George sighed. Then he took her hand and pressed it gently. "I can't say anything that will do any good——"

"When will they know for certain?" Barbara interrupted. She was shocked to find him treating this as her exclusive, personal loss.

"Well, you never know for certain until some one reports that he's actually seen him dead. That, of course, was what happened with Jim. Until then, I suppose, one is justified in hoping...."