The girls at his billet
Date: 2025-06-29T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Young women -- Fiction; Love stories; Sisters -- Fiction; Soldiers -- Fiction; Aunts -- Fiction; World War; 1914-1918 -- Great Britain -- Fiction

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Title: The girls at his billet

Author: Berta Ruck

Illustrator: Edward C. Caswell

Release date: June 30, 2025 [eBook #76419]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: A. L. Burt Company, 1916

Credits: Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GIRLS AT HIS BILLET ***

It came to the last round. I put down my card.
The Queen of Hearts. Good omen, eh? (Page 21)

THE GIRLS
AT HIS BILLET

By BERTA RUCK
(MRS. OLIVER ONIONS)

Author of "His Official Fiancee," "In Another
Girl's Shoes," "The Wooing of
Rosamond Fayre," Etc.

WITH FRONTISPIECE
By E. C. CASWELL

A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York

Published by Arrangement with Dodd, Mead & Company

COPYRIGHT, 1916
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I  The Hen-Party
II  The "Boy at Last"
III  The Incubus in the House
IV  The Strange Case of Mr. Curtis
V  The New Interest
VI  The Disgraceful Party
VII  The Lonely Subaltern Again
VIII  The Frightful Row
IX  Another Shock!
X  The Zeppelin Night
XI  The Making of a Man-Hater
XII  The Anything-But-Joy Ride
XIII  The Search for the Bride
XIV  Mostly About Relations
XV  The Bride Writes Home
XVI  Something Quite Unexpected
XVII  An Evening of Thrills
XVIII  A Day of Despair
XIX  Out of Danger
XX  I Play Providence
XXI  Nancy to the Rescue
XXII  Two More Engagements
XXIII  The Visit
XXIV  A Middle-Aged Romance
XXV  Love's New Name

THE GIRLS AT HIS BILLET

CHAPTER I

THE HEN-PARTY

Imagine three really pretty girls like ourselves—and then this hole of a place that we live in!

Oh, dear! Why on earth did we have parents who disapproved of early marriages?

They married early enough themselves, goodness knows. Father was twenty-one, and had only just taken on the big yacht-building business in this place. Mother was seventeen. A whole year younger than I am now, if you please. (I am what they called at school "a precocious eighteen.") Just because I've read a lot, and thought a good deal about what I've read. But what price Mother's precocity? which really seemed to be a distinct success. I know she and our good-looking Dad were awfully fond of each other, and awfully happy for the ten years of their married life. So why on earth did they make that absurd stipulation in their will?

That has been at the root of all our troubles!

Why did they say that Aunt Victoria (Mrs. Verdeley) was to take charge of their three daughters (that's us) "until they arrived at the age of twenty-five, in order that the said daughters may not plunge recklessly into the dangers of a too early marriage"?

Since this was what they wished (for Evelyn, Nancy and me to remain old maids until we are twenty-five) they've certainly done the right thing in sending us to live here.

Let me try to describe the sweet spot.

Imagine a village, a God-forsaken village on the bleakest part of the East Coast of England.

Imagine mud flats and wind-swept marshlands, and a sea that crawls out over miles and miles of shore that looks like nothing on earth but sheets and sheets of wet brown paper.

Imagine a street or so of small, red-brick houses. Imagine several boat-building yards, throw in a village green, a post-office, a church, a few better houses, and a railway station, where the trains go twice daily as far as "Nowhere," which is the junction to this place. There you have the delightful part of the world in which we live!

Its name?—well, perhaps the Censor might not like me to tell you its name. So I shall call it "Mud Flats," which is certainly descriptive enough of it.

And now imagine a house that's like a bell without a clapper. In other words, a house full of women, without any sort of a man at all about it. Unless you count Penny, our gardener, who walks lame with rheumatism and who's as deaf as a post, and at least 156 years of age. Poor dear, he's so old that he thought it would stand in his way of getting a job Even Here, so he always wears (over what I suppose is a pink Easter-egg of a head) a bushy raven wig that a baby could see through. He told me it had cost him no end of his savings to buy. Pathetic, isn't it?

A tragedy of old age, my dears. But no more pathetic than our own, which is a tragedy of youth!

To go back to it:

Imagine a life where nothing, absolutely nothing ever happens!

Imagine getting up in the morning and looking out of the window at the brown, flat shore and at the distant sea, with a few fishing-sails dotted about on it. Imagine dressing for the day in country clothes that it doesn't matter what they looked like exactly, considering that nobody ever looked at one, or saw whether one was plain or pretty, dowdy or smart. Imagine coming down to breakfast, always the same breakfast—porridge, fish (for Aunt Victoria won't have bacon in the place), toast, marmalade, and tea. We never have coffee. It is too much trouble to make for just a household of women. That's the keynote of our lives!

And now imagine looking round the table and seeing, morning after morning, the same faces. One old one, that's Aunt Victoria, and two young ones, my sisters, Evelyn (aged twenty-two) and Nancy, who is going to be twenty-one next month.

Also, if I craned my neck a little to look into the gilt-framed mirror over the mantelpiece, I could see a third young face—my own. Really, I sometimes get as tired of that view as of the view out of the windows.

Nancy and I often say what a mercy it would be if, one morning, one could look in the glass and suddenly see a perfectly different face staring at one! The face of quite another girl: dark instead of fair, say. (For all of us are sickeningly fair! I get so tired of it sometimes: tired of the gold and blue and pink and white colouring.)

Or, better still, if the face of one of us suddenly turned into the face of a young man with a nice, firm, jutting-out chin, and a toothbrush moustache! Really, it would be a comfort! Anything for a change, in fact.

Even a change for the worse! Not that there could be anything worse than this stage of absolute deadly monotony. For we never catch a glimpse of the world outside, even though it's no more than a two and a half hours' journey up to London. Aunt Victoria never lets us go. Also she is very, very "difficult" about when we get invitations to stay from girls we were with at school. It would be awful if we went and actually SAW anything of Modern Life! We can only read in the papers about what is going on. And isn't that a flavourless way of getting to know what's on at the theatres, and what sized hats people are wearing?

Even the war, when it came, seemed to have nothing to do with Mud Flats. For months and months after everywhere else was seething with excitement and military, nobody here seemed to think of going to join the Colours. The few young men in the place seemed only busy fishing, or whistling about the boat-building yards as usual. No khaki here—except in the colour of the beastly landscape! No drilling, no route-marching, no doings of any kind!

As I said to the girls: "I don't believe it would make the slightest difference to this hole even if the Germans did land: even if the Kaiser did go into residence at Buckingham Palace and ran that beastly Spread-eagle of his up in place of the Union Jack! Even that couldn't make it any more absolutely mouldy than it is now!"

So you see the state of mind we were in up to about a fortnight ago.

And now perhaps you will have some idea of what the inhabitants of our house (the "Moated Grange" we call it) felt like when the Great News came to Mud Flats.

* * * * * * * *

When I say the "inhabitants," I mean, of course, we three girls, Evelyn, Nancy and me. You couldn't expect any feelings in Aunt Victoria, who is sixty-two, and has a Roman nose, and a figure like a padded armchair. Unless you count feelings about mud on the carpet, and scratches on the mahogany, and the wear and tear of the hearthrug, and her new "Patience" that the Doctor's old-maid sister has just taught her, and so on.

But about the Great News!

I've been chattering on so about other things that I've forgotten to put that first, as I should. It's this kind of thing that has given me my nickname of "Rattle." Everybody calls me that who knows me at all, absolutely ignoring the fact that I have got a most pompous name of my own, and that I have had my hair up for six weary months (ever since I came back from school to drag out an existence in this swamp!). You could only call it a swamp, and an unhabitable one at that, until the great——

Oh, yes! The Great News!

Well, the great news is this: Mud Flats is to be turned into a camp of instruction. Soldiers are to come here in batches, with their officers, and stay for six weeks at a time, undergoing a course of training in making bridges and pontoons, and blowing up houses, and all sorts of thrilling things that they'll have to do when they get out to the front. And when one batch goes another batch will come in and do it all over again.

The long and short of it is that Mud Flats, this awful spot ten miles from Nowhere Junction: Mud Flats, this backyard of beyond, where we live because there are only a few old people and some boat-builders and other civilians in it—Mud Flats is going to be positively crammed with men!

"Men, my dears!" said I to the girls. "Do you understand? Real live young men in trousers (khaki ones, my beloved sisters!) with puttees, and enormous boots, and pipes, and deep bass voices, and by-Joves, and swaggering strides and spurs and tobacco-pouches, and all those things that we've been panting and pining for the merest glimpse of in this desert!"

"Rattle! I do wish you wouldn't allow your high spirits to run away with you like this," said Evelyn to me when she heard me giving vent to those expressions of delight upstairs in the bedroom the day after we had heard the news. You know Evelyn's the eldest and the prim one. She thinks she has to set an example, poor long-suffering dear. She said to me, "Sometimes you become positively vulgar!"

"Vulgar?" I said indignantly. "Why is it vulgar to show I'm delighted that we are all going to have some sort of a change in our lives at last? You know you and Nancy are both as glad as I am that there is now a chance that we shan't have to live the rest of our lives in this perpetual hen-party of four! Even if the new state of affairs does only last for a few months, we shall have had some fun! We shall have had some youth and tobacco-smoke about the place at last!"

Nancy's face went all quivery in her attempt not to let it crumple up into smiles. She has the prettiest face of the lot of us, I think. And we all three are as decent-looking as they make them, though I say it, in our large, blond, Greek-goddessy style. I never did hold with mock modesty, and considering that all nice girls are in duty bound to consider themselves frights, which is what seemed to be the fashion in Aunt Victoria's time. Why should it be correct for a girl not to realise that her skin is white-velvety, and her eyes like corn-cockles with dew on them, and her hair like yellow silk and masses of it?

She would be expected to notice those things quickly enough if they were on another girl, wouldn't she? In fact, she would be looked upon as stupid and unobservant if she didn't.

And if I pretended I didn't it would be merely insincerity, and insincerity is a thing I don't hold with. I told Evelyn so. I am afraid she is just a little inclined to be given to it. I suppose she thinks it's always an eldest sister's duty to look shocked at what the two younger ones say.

"It isn't as if it need make any difference at all to us, even if the village is full of soldiers," Evelyn went on, pouring cold water over my glee. "We shan't get to know any of them, just a houseful of women like ourselves."

"Shan't we!" said Nancy, from the glass where she was trying on her last Spring's hat, which she had retrimmed with a quite smart and rather military-looking "pom-pom." "Shan't we, indeed? Now I will burst upon you another bit of news that I have just heard at the post-office. These men and their officers that are going to come—where do you suppose they are going to live? There aren't any barracks for them: there aren't any tents. And they are not going to be in huts either. No," she finished impressively. "They are going to put them all into billets."

You know, until this war, we were all so benighted that I don't think any of us would have known what a "billet" was. Perhaps we should have imagined that it was a piece of wood. So it is, in the dictionary.

But now, of course, we realised exactly what was meant. It meant that every house in the place would be expected to put up some of these soldiers, to have them to board with them.

"And we shall have some one, see if we don't!" I said exultantly. "This Grange is one of the biggest houses in the place, in fact the biggest next to the Admiral's and the Rectory and the Doctor's. There's the quite big spare room where nobody ever sleeps. The drawing-room makes quite a good sitting-room, and there is the girls' Lair that's simply crying out to be made into a man's smoking-room, and——"

"And you may as well wake up from these rosy dreams at once," said Evelyn, quenchingly, "because there is at least one very good reason why we shan't have any soldiery billeted here with us."

"Why?" I asked quite blankly, and Nancy turned from the glass.

Her hands were still held up to the reorganised hat, which any one could see she had been imagining herself fascinating the New Army with! And she echoed, "Why on earth not?"

"Because," said Evelyn, "we are not forced to take any men if we object. We can refuse. The Authorities allow that, if there are only women in the house, as there are here in the Moated Grange. You can be pretty certain that Aunt Victoria won't want to have any great men with pipes trampling in huge Army boots all over her well-preserved stair-carpets: now, will she?"

I felt my face fall a yard. No, it was not at all likely that Aunt Victoria would agree to take men into her precious house! Why, it was all the lawyers could do to persuade her to take Nancy, Evelyn and me when Father and Mother both died together of German measles. You see, Aunt Victoria is one of the most hopeless types of old maids. Namely, the old maid who has got married to another old maid, and who has added a lot of the "he-old maids'" fads to her own, and who has then become a widow with the last state worse than the first!

"Wild horses," said Evelyn, "will not make Aunt Victoria say they can billet even one of the Camp of Instruction officers here."

"Wild horses isn't a very good way of getting any one to do anything," I said, picking up heart again. "There is a much better way of getting a person like Aunt Victoria to do what you want."

And for ages I wouldn't tell them what I meant. However, to save time, I will tell you now. It is to go on exactly the opposite tack and to make her think that you don't want what you do want. For instance, the whole of lunch-time to-day my conversation has been this sort of thing:

"Oh, Aunt Victoria, isn't it awful to think that almost everybody in this village will have to have soldiers foisted on them soon! Fancy having a strange man in the house whether you wanted to or not. Fancy having to have him to meals, and tramping all up and down your passages! I do think it is an imposition!"

For I knew that was what she had been thinking herself. As usual, she turned slick round.

"Dear me, Elizabeth! What did you say? An imposition, indeed!" she repeated, looking at me most severely over the top of her lady-mayoressy-looking black satin blouse. "A great many people would consider it an honour to be able to do so much for their country, let me tell you. Personally, I think that any Englishwoman worthy of the name should be glad to do what she can for the comfort of these noble fellows. Remember that but for what they do for us we should have no homes to-day, no roofs over our heads, certainly no carpets under our feet! Remember Belgium!"

With much more in the same strain.

I listened, inwardly shrieking with delight, and stamped hard on Nancy's toes under the table at the same time.

Of course, I truly agreed with every single word that Aunt Victoria was saying! Of course, all that about what every Englishwoman should feel was exactly what Nancy and Evelyn and I do feel about soldiers, only more so!

However, it wouldn't have been the least use letting Aunt Victoria know that, not it! The "contrary" old thing would immediately "have taken the offensive," as it says in the newspapers, and would have said: "A great deal too much fuss is being made over these soldiers nowadays. After all, they are only doing their duty! They are only doing what they are paid to do by ratepayers like ourselves. I do not see why we should have the added burden of housing and feeding the creatures!"

So I went on sowing the good seed by saying:

"Well, I suppose that's how one ought to feel! But I am rather glad that the doctor and the admiral will have the bother of the officers, and that the Higginses and the Eltons and all the people in the little houses round about will have the men foisted on them, and chalk-marks of their regiments and companies all over their doors! Anyhow, we shall be left in peace and quiet without a single soldier or officer or anything in our house!"

"And why should you be so sure of that, Elizabeth?" my Aunt Victoria boomed out at me in her stateliest contralto tones. "How do you know that we shall not be asked to harbour some of these brave men?"

I put down my spoon and looked at her in a mildly docile, puzzled sort of way, after having exchanged a glance with Nancy, who was only keeping herself from open giggles by counting the damson stones on her plate.

"Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor!" She counted up to "soldier" again, and then I said to Aunt Victoria: "But, Auntie, you know we won't be expected to put anybody up, as you are a widow-lady living alone with three single nieces in the house. You will be allowed to refuse."

"Refuse! I hope I should not dream of doing anything so unpatriotic!" said Auntie fussily, while I no longer dared meet Nancy's eye. "If any soldiers are suggested to me as visitors to the Grange, I can only say that they will be made welcome to the limit of my modest means!"

So that settled that.

This afternoon the whole thing was fixed up.

An officer came round to arrange about billets for the first draft. We, of course, were absolutely thrilled when we heard his ring at the bell. He gave his name in to Beeton, our housemaid, as "Major Lawless." A lovely name, I thought!

And though he said he wished to interview Mrs. Verdeley, meaning Aunt Victoria, I did manage to be coming through the hall when he passed, and to be looking for something in the drawing-room when he was there. I was aching for the first sight of khaki! Anyhow, I contrived to get in a good hard look at the gallant major. I hoped he'd be like the one in "Jones of the Lancers," "When I'm booted, and trousered, and spurred—MY WORD!"

And I can only tell you that he was absolutely disappointing. To begin with, he was as old as the hills, and I should think he'd learnt his drill before the Flood, or, at any rate, just at the Flood. Embarkation officer, perhaps. Putting the animals through it, you know: this sort of thing: "Beasts of the field—form fours! Form four feet! ... Birds of the air—two flights to the Ark, forward—FLAP!" and so on.

He couldn't have been a day under forty, and not at all the sort of figure that you always imagine a soldier must have: smart and well set-up, and broad-chested and flat-backed.

Oh, no! He was quite round-shouldered, as if he were more accustomed to sitting in an office and bending over desks than doing any real military work! And he was pale. He wore such a worried look, too, as if he had the cares of a whole campaign on his narrow shoulders! The voice in which he talked was so resigned and melancholy.

I heard him say to Aunt Victoria: "Thank you, very much.... Most kind of you, I am sure.... Then the young man will be turning up here about tea-time on Thursday."

Armed with this glad tidings, I scuttled back to the other girls in the Lair, behind the dining-room.

The Lair is quite the nicest room in the house. It is very "girly-girly," but almost as comfortable as if it belonged to men. You know, I always imagine men, as a rule, have things cosier than we have.

The lazy-chairs are very old and very shabby, but they are springy and comfortable still. The broad window-seat is well padded with turkey-red covered cushions, and there is a big curtain of the same stuff to draw and hide the view when it rains, and the mud flats and the lead-paper sea and the weeping grey skies get altogether too depressing.

There is a cottage piano, with a stack of ancient songs about "The Gipsy's Warning" and "In the Gloaming, O My Darling," and that type of thing, as well as our own slightly more modern ditties, and a whole pile of stamp-papered and thumbed dance music—the only chance we ever get of hearing any dance music down here. Woe is me!

Then, in the corner there is a red calico-covered wirework shape for us to make our blouses on. There are our three work-baskets, all rather chaotic, I am afraid, and Evelyn's everlasting knitting. On the walls there are bookshelves, quite full of all sorts of books—my old school histories and geographies, and a long red row of sevenpennies, and the blue Service Kiplings which we clubbed together to buy last summer. The top shelf has got all old novels from mother's and grandmamma's day; also poetry: Keats and Shelley and Byron and Scott. That's how it is I come to be so awfully well-read.

On the walls we have got a queer mixture of pictures, just the ones we like. There is Maurice Greiffenhagen's young shepherd kissing the girl among the poppies: which always comforts Nancy and me to look at, because the girl has such a very big foot, bigger even than ours, and we take sixes! Then there's a tear-off calendar with a picture of Romeo and Juliet, and a quotation for every day in the year.

Then there is a big photograph of the statue of the Venus de Milo, who is such a duck, we think: so good-natured-looking! Rather like my face, I think. And, last of all, there is a framed coloured supplement from the Graphic of the year One, which I do so love. Do you know it? It is a picture of about six girl sisters, all dressed alike, in navy-blue jerseys and kilted skirts with crimson sashes and their hairs down, crowded round a nurse who has got a long-clothes new baby in her arms. She is showing it to the family. And the title of the picture is, "Mamma's Christmas Present: A Boy at Last."

Isn't it appropriate to us in this house? Better days are in store! I feel it in my bones! I skipped into the Lair, where Nancy was busy over a new camisole which she was making out of a summer muslin skirt. Evelyn was sitting by the table, knit, knit, knit.

"'A Boy at Last!'" I quoted the title of the picture to them. "Girls, the major says the young man is to arrive on Thursday next, at tea-time. The question is," I concluded impressively, "THE question is, which of us is he going to fall in love with?"

"My dear Rattle," gasped Evelyn in a really scandalised voice this time. Even Nancy, who generally doesn't mind, murmured, "Really, Rattle, you are too perfectly disgraceful sometimes."

"Why?" I asked, sitting on the table and swinging my feet. "Why shouldn't I mention things that everybody knows are very likely to happen? Have you read all the short stories that they are putting nowadays in magazines about the young soldier who always falls in love with the girls at his billet?"

"All of the girls?" asked Nancy, twinkling over the camisole again.

"Oh, well, one of them. You know what I mean. There is always a romance, an engagement, and a war wedding at the end."

"But that's in magazine stories, you absurd child," said Evelyn again, trying not to laugh. "That's not in real life."

"Real life is so much more like magazine stories than it used to be before the war," I declared. "I am sure there is much more romance all over the place. As for the war weddings, you can't say that's all fiction. You can see photographs of them in the Daily Mirror and the Daily Sketch every morning of your lives. I think it would be perfectly lovely to have one from this house, between one of us and the young officer who's coming here to be billeted! Yes, and never mind the bothering old will about not rushing into early marriages!"

"Rattle, you really are awful!" the two girls said together this time, and again I said: "I am not awful, I am only frank. I only say out in a quite unabashed voice what you know other people are thinking all the time. It is not that I am worse than other people! It's only that I am much more honest."

"It is that you are such a child that you don't really know what you are talking about," Evelyn went on superiorly. "You're only a flapper, after all."

"Flappers are 'in' just now, according to the papers. So he might like me better than any of you in the long run," I said. "Wait and see!" And I hummed the old song, "Maybe the lad will fancy me, and disappoint you all!"

"He may not 'fancy' any of us," said Nancy, sewing away busily at her camisole. "He may be so busy with his classes and his bridge-building and signalling. He won't have a look or a thought for the girls at his billet."

A thought struck me suddenly.

"Let's tell fortunes about it," I suggested, "and see what really is going to happen according to the cards."

And I opened the table-drawer, and brought out the rather cockley pack of cards that we had learnt to play "Beggar My Neighbour" with about five weary years ago, when we all were recovering from whooping-cough, and couldn't go out.

"Let's see," I said, "which of us is what poetry books call the 'destined maid.' And then, which ever comes out the one the young soldier is to have, well!—the other two can just take a back seat and allow her a fair field."

"Rattle, what absolute nonsense," said Evelyn severely. "What bosh! As if anybody believed anything of that sort——"

"We needn't believe it," I said. "It won't 'mean' anything. But it will be just something to pass away the time with before the tea-bell rings. It's a most loathsome afternoon, so we may as well have something to amuse ourselves." For the rain dashed heavily against the windows outside. The melancholy view was the limit. I drew the red curtain. Nancy stirred up the fire, and even Evelyn (pretending she wasn't going to) put down her book, and drew nearer to the table where I was shuffling the cards. And murmuring to myself a poem that I'd just finished. You know, I write verses sometimes. I'll tell you these ones. I call them "Fate." They're about engagements.

"Never chortle when you hear—
That your school-friend's troth is plighted
To a man with spectacles
Or a man the King has knighted.
If he stutters in his speech,
If his years are more than forty,
Even if his head is bald
Do not laugh at her; it's naughty.
Fate has probably reserved
Something worse in store for you!
How would you like a——"

"Oh, come on, Rattle: those are shuffled now!"

"All right. You cut, Nancy," I said, handing the pack to her. She cut, and Evelyn dealt. "Now! It's for the one who is left with the highest card in her hand," I said.

We played out the cards on the old ink-spattered table, laughing and chattering together. For it's all very well to say how dull this place has been, and what a howling wilderness Mud Flats, is, and what a hole of a place the Moated Grange: but we have had quite a lot of fun among ourselves. We three have always got on well together. Nothing can spoil that.

It came to the last round. I put down my card.

The Queen of Hearts. Good omen, eh?

Nancy threw down the Two of Diamonds.

The Nine of Spades was Evelyn's.

"Aha! you see," I said triumphantly, "I take this trick. Young Lieutenant Whatever-his-name-is will be the fate of the flapper!"

"We ought to try it three times," said Nancy. So again we gathered up the cards and cut and dealt.

I saw the faces of the other two girls growing quite excited over the game, utter nonsense as it was.

This time Nancy had the King of Diamonds, I had the Two of Spades, and Evelyn the Ace. Eldest first, in fact.

"Now again," said Nancy. "Why d'you laugh, Rattle?"

"I'm thinking," I said, "of 'our' possible fiancé."

I wondered what that unconscious young officer, now at his depot, would have thought if he could have taken a little peep at the scene in the country house which was to be his billet.

I wondered if he would have been amused at the picture. The cosy, untidy, red-curtained room, with the trio of pretty girls, all tall, all fair, gathered about the table with their three golden heads bent eagerly above their absurd game. If he could have guessed that the game was supposed to decide which of the players was to become his "destined maid"! Ha! If they all guessed about this sort of thing, what would happen?

There was silence, this last round.

Silence broken only by the little "talking" noise of the flames in our old-fashioned fire-grate, and by the rustling sound of the cards as they flew one above the other just as the autumn leaves outside were dropping from the big sycamore on to the path.

The last card fell.

This time the score stood thus:

Nancy, King of Clubs.

The vulgar Rattle, Three of Diamonds.

The lady-like Evelyn, Five of Hearts.

"Ah, now each of us have come out top once," said I. "How is that supposed to count?"

"Why, that we've all got an even Fate, I suppose," suggested Evelyn, sweeping up the cards and tossing them into the table-drawer again. "Probably that the young man who's coming to be billeted here won't have anything to say to one of us."

"Always look on the bright side," laughed Nancy. "But I believe that the first round was meant to count. Rattle, Queen of Hearts. Child, your elder sisters will retire into the background like Cinderella the other way round, and give you, as you say, a fair field with the young man."

"Thanks, awfully. I would do the same for you, any time," I said gratefully.

And then we all three burst out into shrieks of laughter over our own seriousness about what was only fun.

Now we've got a week to wait and see what the young man's going to turn out like.

Nancy, who is rather sentimental, though she tries to hide it by pretending she's talking bosh—Nancy calls him "the possible Prince Charming."

His real name, according to a quite solemn and ceremonious little note that he's written to Aunt Victoria, is Frank Lascelles.

Auntie says "Lascelles" is what she calls a "good" name, but Nancy says never mind, there are all sorts of ramifications of even the goodest families, so that he need not be one of the very high and mighty ones at all. Auntie says they are always called "Frank" for some reason.

"Frank" is nice.

I wonder whether he is?

* * * * * * * *

(Later.) No! he isn't!

He's come—has this young—— Well, I haven't thought of anything bad enough to call him yet, this young officer that we've got to put up with at the Moated Grange for six mortal weeks.

Oh, how am I going to stand it?

It'll be perfectly ghastly.

However, perhaps I'd better begin again at the story of that awful day when he arrived.

CHAPTER II

THE "BOY AT LAST"

To begin with, when people say they're going to turn up "at tea-time," why don't they find out first when tea-time is?

At the Moated Grange it is always five o'clock.

Aunt Victoria is so embedded in her old-fashioned, old-maidish ways that she doesn't realise anybody else could have it at any other time. She didn't dream of altering her hours, or her habits, or even her afternoon siesta, as she calls it, just because to-day was The Day. I mean the day when the first draft of camp-of-instruction soldiers were to come down to Mud Flats. Even yesterday there'd been some signs of life about the place.

A big car full of khaki had driven up to the "Pearl and Oyster," which is the one-eyed hotel of our hamlet. It's now the headquarters for the officers of the permanent staff. Meaning, the instructors of the classes they're going to have here for destroying houses and blowing up bridges and wrecking railways and whatever else they have got to do.

It sounds all very jolly and destructive, doesn't it?

The butcher's wife said, with a grave waggle of her grey head, that she "reckoned Mud Flats would never be the same place again after all this."

We do so hope it won't.

There has been a general buzz going on in all the little shops of the village here. The talk has been about nothing but how many men Mrs. So-and-So has got to find room for in her place: also which particular lot are paying two-and-sixpence a day and which three shillings. Also about the difference it will make having to cook for these lads, and the preparations that will have to be made....

Plenty of preparations, for example, at the Moated Grange.

Aunt Victoria had still got on what we call her "Paroxysm of patriotism," brought on, of course, out of perverseness, just because I had pretended to be "so against" the billeting.

I am against it now, considering what has happened, but I am coming to that presently.

We had made the spare bedroom, which was to be given over to the young officer, into a perfect vision of comfort—snowy curtains, the best towels, a huge tablet of scented soap on his washing-stand. As a last touch Nancy had put the pink eiderdown from her own bed, if you please.

"Charity blankets would be quite good enough for a mere woman," she declared. "We simply must have the best of everything for our brave defenders."

"He has not begun to defend us yet," suggested Evelyn, in her rather squashing voice.

But I know she is just as keen as anybody on making things nice for him. For at that moment she was arranging in an old cut-glass finger-bowl upon his dressing-table a bouquet of all the flowers we have got left now that it is autumn. Namely, some bright yellow button chrysanthemums, a spray of red berries, and the last pink monthly rose that I could find blossoming over our porch. We had put a fire in the bedroom, too, in case he found the air of Mud Flats too chilly after Salisbury Plain. Mrs. Miles at the post-office said that "a tidy few of them" were expected to come from Salisbury.

As for the tea which we had prepared for the creature—well, it was a case of nine whole pennyworth of cream to start with. Then we had brown bread and butter and white, with no end of butter spread on it. Evelyn had made a gingerbread cake, which she is very good at, and I had made lemon cheese (which, if I had only known then the sort of person I was making it for I shouldn't have squeezed a single lemon!). Then, again, Cook, usually the grumpiest old soul alive, who grudges any one "mucking about" in her lovely big warm kitchen—even Cook unbent until she wasn't one bit the cross old thing that she seems by nature! She herself volunteered to make delicious sandwich-paste out of the cold fish that was left over from breakfast.

"There's nothing that gentlemen fancy more than some sort of a little relish with their tea," she told me as she went to the cupboard for the red pepper. "They'll give all the sweet things that's going for something savoury in the anchovy line, or a nice taste of potted ham! Yes, you mark my words, young ladies, it will come in handy to you some day when you have got a house and gentlemen of your own to provide for.

"Dear me!" she went on quite expansively, "there will be some satisfaction in cooking meals now, such as there never is when it's just a parcel of ladies, that is content to make a meal off the top of a breakfast egg and a teaspoonful of raspberry jam! There will be a difference in the order I shall have to give to the butcher as soon as the young orficer-gentleman arrives."

The one thing that all of us hoped about him was—well, what do you suppose? That he was dark. For if you have lived all your life in a household of fair heads (even Aunt Victoria is fair turned to grey—a most depressing tint) you will realise how one simply pants to see an opposite colour. Evelyn is golden blonde: Nancy is much lighter, a regular ash-blonde. I am betwixt and between: in fact, what they call "a honey-blonde." "How lovely!" a lot of people would say. But what I think is, "How insipid!"

"I hope the young man is going to be as black as jet," I said decisively, "with midnight eyes like pools of—of black currant tea: and an olive skin and a black moustache like the mark of candle smoke on his upper lip. That'll make all of us look so dazzling by contrast. A fair girl one can put up with, after all. But what I say is, there's no devil in a fair man."

"Rattle!" remonstrated Evelyn in her best "shocked" voice.

"Sorry if I've said the wrong word again," I apologised. "When I said 'devil' in that sense, of course what I meant was 'individuality.' I should never dream of marrying a man who hadn't got plenty of that."

"You'll wait till you're asked, like everybody else," said Evelyn, who is really very simple, in spite of being the eldest. "And that depends entirely upon the young man himself."

"Oh, does it? Oh, does it?" I cried, taking a taste of hot lemon-curd out of the spoon as I talked. "I bet you the young orficer-gentleman won't have a chance against Little Me if I take it into my head it's me he's got to fall in love with. Didn't he come out mine first of all in the cards? And doesn't Shakespeare say the same thing?"

"Shakespeare?" echoed Nancy.

"Yes, Shakespeare. I don't understand what half of those sonnets of his are about as a rule. But this one I mean is pretty clear. Something about:

"'For when a woman woos, what mother's son
Will rudely leave her till she do prevail?'

"So you see that if I intend to 'prevail' upon this Mr.——"

"Really, Rattle, one would think you had been engaged at least three times already," said Evelyn, "instead of never having had the vaguest hint of a love affair, you absurd child."

"Makes no difference at all to a person of any imagination," I told her cheerfully. "Haven't I had the run of all the novels in the house? And isn't it just the same as if I'd met all these eligible young heroes I've read about? Yes. I'm so well up in the love scenes by this time that I know exactly what the most successful sort of young girl does at those emergencies.

"You needn't think I shouldn't know how to handle the situation. You needn't think that just because I've lived in this little mud-puddle, with nobody but my sisters to talk to, that I shouldn't be perfectly capable of coping with a fascinating young man. Oh, dear, yes. I should be very offhand with him, too," said I, warming to my subject. "I should start away by saying to him, 'Now, Billet Boy'——"

"Now WHO?" demanded Nancy, rather startled.

"'Billet Boy.' That would be my name for him," I said, raising my voice so that they should hear what I said as I stood with my aproned back to them, stirring away at my double-cooker over the fire. "I should say, 'You know, I'm going to call you Billet Boy, because I think Mr. Lascelles is too long and pompous a name for a mere junior subaltern. As for Frank, it's too affectionate.'"

Here Nancy, quite suddenly, gave a loud cough. I thought it was just the red pepper that cook had left on the table. So I took no notice. I went gaily and recklessly on, talking as quickly as I stirred.

"You see, girls, the affection will all have to be on the young man's side. Anyway, at first. Perhaps, a good deal later on, at the end of the six weeks that he's going to be here, perhaps then I shall turn round and——"

Here, with the lemon-curd spoon still steaming in my grasp, I did turn round to sort of give point to the remark....

Point?

Oh, horrors! If you only had seen the point that the remark had unconsciously taken!

For what did I behold? My two sisters standing there quite paralysed with embarrassment. Evelyn crimson and Nancy magenta with blushes.

And beyond them, having just pranced in through the back kitchen door, was a small, red-haired figure in khaki, with a floppily-soft cap, high brown boots, and a Sam Browne belt.

In one horrified flash, of course, we had all realised who it was. The young man who was coming here to be billeted. Second-Lieutenant Frank Lascelles himself!

* * * * * * * *

(Here follow some impressions of Francis Lascelles, Esquire, Temporary Second-Lieutenant R.E.)

Jolly ripping billet this! Startling contrast to what I'd expected, namely, a bleak, tumble-down villa kept by the oldest inhabitant as ugly as sin. Anything but, by Jove! Found myself landed in a bright, cosy kitchen full of a heavenly smell of cooking and a regular beauty-chorus of tall girls. Two of them very pretty. Can't think why girls don't always wear white aprons and trot about in red firelight. Suits them A1. Third girl (seems to be the youngest), Some Peach. All of them goddess-built with smothers of golden hair. Just as I blew in The Peach was holding forth to the others. All about my humble self and what she was going to call me when I arrived.

Personally don't care what she calls me as long as can persuade her to let me take her out in the side-car of my motor-bike: but afraid I dropped rather a brick by way of a start.

(Here the youngest girl resumes.)

The brute: the little brute! Eavesdropping, I call it. It's all very well for Nancy to say she did cough to let me know he was there. It's all very well for Evelyn to say it wasn't his fault that I would go gabbling on.

Why did he laugh?

That's the unforgivable thing!

If he'd behaved like a gentleman and pretended he hadn't heard anything, then perhaps I could have thought no more about it. I could have overlooked his really dreadful personal appearance— But I'm coming to his appearance later on. When I've got time to spread myself on it.

I'll go back to that first awful minute when he stood framed in the open doorway of our back kitchen, creasing up his eyes and showing all his teeth, and rocking with idiot laughter, while we stood like three Lot's wives, turned to pillars of salt, in aprons.

Evelyn was the first to collect herself.

Evelyn came forward, rather pink still, but holding herself as dignifiedly as if she had swallowed both rolling-pins as well as the kitchen poker. I really felt proud of Evelyn as she turned to the intruder. She said, in a voice that sounded just as if it were quite a swagger party in her own drawing-room, "How do you do? It's Mr. Lascelles, I suppose?"

"Yes, it is," said the odious little creature. He pulled himself together, looked up from one to the other of us as he put his hand to his floppy cap and saluted briskly before he took it off.

This was the first time any of us girls had received a salute from a man in uniform.

I knew exactly how the other two girls felt about it. I could read it on their faces.

They were thrilled. Wasn't it funny? They were simply tingling with the pride of it from their hair down to their toes.

As for me—No, thank you! I shall wait until something a little more attractive salutes me before I feel anything but annoyance at the cheek of its daring to look at me.

He said, "How d'you do? I say, I am so awfully sorry, don't you know, at bursting in upon you like this. I know it's round the other way. But I did go to the front first, and I couldn't get the servant to hear me."

That was because cook had gone over "to row that butcher," and Mary, our housemaid, had what she calls "popped up-street" to the post-office-and-drapery to get herself a fresh Peter Pan collar to wear in honour of the new arrival, not realising how much too soon he was going to arrive.

I shall never forgive either him or her for that!

Evelyn, becoming more and more the credit of the family, was smiling graciously down upon the little horror, and telling him that it didn't matter one scrap, and that she was very glad to see him, and that she hoped we should be able to make him comfortable.

To which he replied, without a moment's hesitation, "Oh, thanks awfully. I'm sure you will. Are you Mrs. Verdeley, may I ask?"

"No," said Evelyn, growing about an inch visibly before our eyes with pride at being taken for Married. "My aunt, Mrs. Verdeley, is usually asleep at this hour of the afternoon: that is why she did not hear your ring. I am her niece, Miss Evelyn Verdeley, and this is my sister Nancy."

Here Nancy dimpled at him, and apologised for her gingered, floury hands.

"And this," Evelyn went on, turning to me, "is my youngest sister."

Here she paused. She said afterwards that it was because she forgot for a moment what my other name was besides "Rattle."

And I think I could quite well leave off that nickname now, and pass it on to the creature that we have got to have billeted with us.

For he is a "rattle," if you like. At least ten times more so than I, and a far sillier kind of one. For he actually began to hum that tune out of the Alhambra revue that we have got the music of:

"Here's my youngest sister. Take a look at her. Take a look at her——"

At the same time he was taking a look at me, and twinkling all over himself in a way for which I simply longed to boil him.

"It's too sweet of you," he then said, "to be making lemon cheese on purpose to please me. Absolutely nothing I like so much, I assure you——"

I determined then and there that I'd never make another eggspoonful! And I said in a truly forbidding voice, "I don't think I was making it on purpose for you exactly."

"What? Not for the Billet Boy?" he said. And tried to make me smile at him. Me! I could have taken the double-cooker full of hot curd and flung it over his red head! (Wait: I'm coming to his red hair presently.) I gave him a look that—well, I can't describe it. You should have seen it. Anyhow, I gave him a look that chilled him. For he left off twinkling at me at last, and turned to the two other girls.

And actually had the insolence to ask in a plaintive voice if it would be possible to have the first detachment of tea now, in the kitchen. It was then a quarter to four. Of course, he ought to have been told tea would be ready in an hour and a quarter. I'm ashamed of Evelyn and Nancy.... In less time than it takes me to write about it they got the creature's tea.

They fetched out the best afternoon tea-cloth. They laid it on the kitchen table. They spread it with all the lovely things we'd been preparing, including my lemon-curd, I'll trouble you. I left off counting how many slices of bread-and-butter, plastered with it, the young man ate: going on from that to cook's fish-paste, then to the ginger-cake—ginger was appropriate enough. Then back to more lemon-curd, washing it all down with great gulps of hot, sugary tea. At last he said, "You girls must think I'm a cormorant."

Girls! Before he'd known us twenty minutes.

"The fact is," he said, "I didn't manage to snaffle any tiffin on the way down to this God-forsaken—I mean down to this place. And after we arrived—Thanks. Was that my sixth cup? Seven is a lucky number.... Yes, there was only time to get our lads fed."

By the look in Nancy's eyes I could see exactly what she was thinking, namely, how splendid it was of him to see about getting his men fed before he thought of having lunch himself. I could see that she was within an inch of melting into tears over the idea. I think that I mentioned before how utterly sentimental Nancy is.

And, of course, it was absurd to think anything of that. Naturally an officer thinks of getting his men fed first. It is only his duty, after all. Why make a fuss about it?

Why, men with horses have to attend to them first. I shouldn't have thought much of this little Lieutenant Frank Lascelles if he had gone and gorged himself instead of attending to his Tommies. Goodness knows, he was making up for lost time now.

I didn't see why I should stop in the kitchen and watch him do it. He's going to have plenty of attention and spoiling without me.

So, humming a careless tune, I left that orgy in the kitchen and came away to sit by myself in the Lair. The Lair where we'd had so many conversations about what "our billeted officer" was going to be like. Little did I ever think how painfully unattractive the young man would be!

I said so to Evelyn and Nancy to-night, when they came in to brush their hairs and gossip as usual before we all went to bed. They were all flushed and sparkly ... evidently their first impressions of Mr. Lascelles were very different from mine. I told them what I thought of him. "To begin with, so small!" I said disgustedly. "So shrimpesque!"

"Nonsense! He's five-foot-six-and-a-bit. He said so. That's not a bad height," said Evelyn. "It's only because we're such a family of young giantesses that he may look a little short——"

"A little!" I scoffed. "He's what I call two teacups and a rim high! He's tiny!"

"Small men make the best fighters," ventured Nancy. "Look at Nelson. Look at Napoleon."

"How can I possibly? Don't be so silly," I said. "All I can look at is the creature and his awful looks. His hair! That hideous shade of ginger! And sprinkled with freckles all over his absurd face!"

"Still," Evelyn reminded me very unkindly, "he did 'come out yours' in the cards!"

"I abdicate," I said, tying a bit of pink ribbon found the ends of my plaits with a jerk. "Not any, thanks," I said, imitating the curate's voice at tea. "I resign my first chance. I'd rather marry dear old Penny the gardener. Even a black wig is better than carrots grown on the premises——"

"Rot——"

"And I've just made up a lovely poem about it, too." I ignored them. "I call it 'Repudiation.' Here it is:

"'Oh, I will never marry
A man who is shorter than me,
A man who has not enlisted,
Or a man in the N.C.C.
The R.A.M.C., or a red-haired R.E.,
Would be likewise definitely barred by me.'

"So if one of you wants to get up Our Great Khaki Romance with the Lascelles lad, ending in a war-wedding and an arch of swords, prrrray don't let any thought of your youngest sister stand in your way. Do you hear, Evelyn?"

"I hear you talking more nonsense in half an hour," said Evelyn, "than ten ordinary girls get through in a day. Who began the idea of a Khaki romance? Not I——"

"Then perhaps it'll be Nancy's," said I, skipping into bed and drawing the pillows well down into the nape of my neck. "Blush, Nancy; the bride's always supposed to. I shall be merely the bridesmaid. No! I shall be the 'Best Girl'; that's what they have nowadays. The best man always has the ring to find when it drops through a crack in the floor; so I suppose my job will be to keep the bridegroom from getting lost? Goodness knows he'd be small enough," I said, cruelly. "And I don't see how there's going to be room for anybody to sit on his knee ever, not in our family. But anyhow the game is between you two girls now. Good-night. Good luck!" And I curled myself up to my well-earned rest.

CHAPTER III

THE INCUBUS IN THE HOUSE

I say, dear readers, have you ever had to live in the house with a person you absolutely hate? It's awful.

I've had some experience of it already.

When I was at school, it was our German mistress whom I loathed with a black and bitter hatred. I can't tell you how every detail about her used to get on my nerves, from the way she did her tow-coloured hair in plaits round her head (that you could see was never washed) to the way she used to stump into the classroom on her large flat feet and call out in her odious Hanover accent: "Elizabet, I shall r-r-report you! Elizabet, why zis noise? Sit immediately down and write out two hundred times, 'I shall not talk in Preparation: I shall not talk in Preparation.'"

Do you know, when I left school I simply cried for joy, just because I was leaving "Fraulein"! (I wonder how many English schoolgirls have felt that delight!) Never again should I hear her murder the King's English! Never again should I behold her everlasting red check blouse that always smelt of the golosh cupboard! Never, never again should I have to sit next to her in church and feel myself tingling all over with the exasperation of being anywhere near a person I so disliked!

When they read of the atrocities in Belgium, some people said they would never have believed such things of the Germans. They'd always considered the Germans a noble, brave, splendid, intelligent and all that sort of thing Nation. They were surprised. I wasn't. I'd believe ANYTHING of a nation that produced people like our "Fraulein" at school.

My goodness, how I detested her!

And now that old, well-known feeling of exasperation and dislike has come back to me here, at the Moated Grange, Mud Flats.

All because of the person I once imagined was going to turn out such a ray of sunshine in our house: all because of this horrid, red-haired, giggling, school-boyish microbe of a little officer-boy that we've got to have billeted on us. He's been here a week now.

For seven whole days we've had the Grange sort of permeated with him. We've had him taking up the bathroom for hours and hours the first thing in the morning, as well as when he comes in caked with mud in the afternoon, and using absolutely all the hot water and leaving his disgusting shaving-brush face downwards on the soap, always: we've had him whistling and singing the whole time, too.

The sounds of his splashing and wallowing like a grampus are always accompanied by the sounds of his bellowing bursts of song. His favourite seems to be that Gaiety thing:

"Oh, please don't try to flirt with me:
Don't try to flirt with me——"

(As if one could imagine anybody wanting to!)

Then we have him doing what I call "the New Army stamp" downstairs. We have him at breakfast, odiously chirpy and gay: "Morning, Mrs. Verdeley! Morning, Miss Evelyn! Morning, Miss Nancy!" in the kind of voice that sounds as if he might just as well say "My dear girls" and have done with it.

To me he just says "Good morning," in quite another tone of voice. (Thank goodness, I have managed to snub Mr. Frank Lascelles into that!)

Then, no sooner has he dashed off to what he calls his work than he seems to be dashing in to lunch again, mud to the eyes, and monopolising all the bathroom again first and all the conversation afterwards. The house is never free of him and his cigarettes and his matches. And his floppy khaki cap seems to be always flung down in three places at once.

I don't know how Aunt Victoria can stand the new state of affairs. I don't know how anybody can stand it.

Curiously enough, everybody at the Grange seems to like him except me.

They all take his part!

Nancy frowned like a thunder-cloud at lunch because I said something about the "REAL Army," meaning the one that was here before the war, and before they took to making officers out of young men-in-the-City and secretaries of suburban tennis-clubs. I heard the Incubus say he'd been all that. He used to be a Bank Clerk, too, before he became what he calls a soldier.

I don't call what he's doing here "soldiering." Do you?

My idea of soldiering is leading charges at the head of your men, with a drawn sword flashing in one hand and a revolver in the other, and you shouting, "Come on, lads! Let 'em have it! No quarter for the Prussian Guard! Remember Wittenberg!" Or else being found covered with blood standing with your back propped against a listening-post, or whatever they're called, with half your company dead at your feet, holding up a battalion of Germans with one dummy machine-gun.... Not much of that sort of thing about Tem. Sec. Lieut. Lascelles' duties. Well, of course there couldn't be, here, but he doesn't even seem to be preparing for it. Instead of that, he goes in for the most footling jobs.

Feeding the men is the funniest. A great G.S. wagon comes along the Junction Road, heaped with their victuals. Revolting masses of raw meat, girls, just like at the Zoo. Loaves, stuck together in fours. Sickening great lumps of cheese. Millions of tins of Tickler's jam. Well, these things are all carted into the empty cottage next door to the post-office, where our old gardener Penny used to live. Here these half-oxen and other raw joints are hacked and sawn and chopped up and flung at the sappers as if they were a lot of hungry jaguars. They tuck these rations away under their arms, or in their haversacks, or string-bags, or anyhow, and tramp off to get their landladies to cook them—the lumps of meat, I mean. Of course, it's the Quartermaster-Sergeant who's supposed to be responsible for all these disgusting proceedings, but the Incubus is most fearfully faddy about seeing that he does it all right. Absurd of him. I hate a man to know anything about housekeeping.

Then he (the Incubus) has the men's billets to pay once a week. Oh, my dears, that Day! The importance of the Ker-reature!

The amount of talk we have about "Four hundred pounds from my Company on me this moment!" And then the fuss-fuss-fuss over Sapper Stick-in-the-Mud, whose billet has been moved and who's got to have breakfast fivepence down on one form, and dinner one-and-a-penny down on another form! It bores me, stiff. I don't know how you can possibly look upon as a real soldier a being who, if you please, has to be always seeing about boots. For we always have yards about those, too. Lance-Corporal Thingammijig's boots, and how they have to be sent off to the London, Chatham and Dover regimental boot-maker to be soled and heeled, and how the bill's come in and had to be sent to Headquarters with a solemn inscription: "These repairs are rendered necessary by fair wear and tear. F. Lascelles."

I call him a mixture of a kitchen-maid and a cashier and a nursery-governess!

And when I said so to Aunt Victoria she actually said quite sharply, "Nonsense. He is a young man who has taken on a number of duties that are entirely strange to him, and I'm sure he is doing them very conscientiously and well, and, Elizabeth, I won't have you talking about 'real' soldiers: they're all alike doing 'real' work and they'll be in 'real' peril of their lives, presently, just like the others, and, Mary, tell Cook Mr. Lascelles likes the beef a little under-done."

Even Aunt Victoria!

It must be because she's deaf and can't hear half the noise he makes and doesn't understand the other half.

As for Evelyn and Nancy, they're sillier and sillier about him. I must admit it's not the "lovey-dovey" Khaki romance kind; no, even they seem to have grasped the fact that nobody could possibly be attracted in that way. But their chummy sort of way is just as annoying. They laugh at all his petty jokes! They listen to his stories, even the ones that we heard from a girl at school that her brother told her in Nineteen Thirteen! They keep on saying, "What a dear he is to have in the house" (dear at any price!) and "Doesn't it make one feel how much we've missed all these years, not having any brother of our own," until it makes me feel literally sick.

I shall be really rude to him one of these days. I shall be driven to it, I know I shall!

* * * * * * * *

(Here follow some comments by Second Lieutenant Frank Lascelles.)

Whew! I said the youngest girl at this billet of mine was a peach. A lemon would have been nearer the mark. Ever since I've been at Mud Flats she's gone out of her way—I swear she has—to be a perfect little beast to me.

Don't know what I've done. The other two girls are the best of pals with me. But this little—well, I'd better not say it. The Peach—for she is a Peach to look at, all the same!—the Peach seems to think it'll hurt her to give me a glance. Whenever I'm about she turns away. Never see anything of the girl but her profile. It's a jolly pretty profile, that I will say for her. Still, that's no reason why she should go about pretending to be a queen on a coin, always side-face on, eh?

Nothing I say or do makes any diff. She pretends she thinks I'm talking to Evelyn or Nancy, the sisters!

And the fact is—well, it doesn't sound very polite to two jolly nice girls, but neither of 'em is a patch upon her. Little demon! To-day she cut me in the village, walking down to the Hard. I swear she saw me coming. She turned her back and glared into a shop window until I'd gone by, walking with Curtis. He saw her. It was only a butcher's shop, too. Absolutely no excuse. Told her about it at lunch.

"You cut me dead," I said.

She just raised her eyebrows and said: "Oh? Was that you going by? So sorry. Hadn't you a different sort of coat on? I must have thought you were one of the sea scouts."

Now, considering the beastly little scouts run about twelve years old and four foot high, it was a little thick, wasn't it? However, "there are others." I'm not breaking my heart about the Peach! I'd just like to see how much ruder she could get; merely as a matter of curiosity!

(The youngest girl resumes.)

If it only weren't for this man, or, rather, Incubus, in the house here, I should think that Mud Flats was so changed for the better since the soldiers have come down.

Even the country doesn't look so dead.

The brown beach and the lead-grey sea and the dove-grey and primrose evening sky were desolate enough when they were only landscape. But they make a jolly background to the workings of the pontoon-class. The crowds of men, you know, dragging and hammering, and shoving away at things, make it look like pictures or groups of statues of ancient soldiery.

For the clothes they wear when they are toiling about in the mud here is not a bit the commonplace, usual, khaki uniforms in which they turned up from the station.

Because they now have always to be in and out of mud baths, they wear sort of white canvas overall sort of things that they have mudded and got rained on until they are just the colour of clay. In fact, the things do look like a coat of clay that has been plastered all over their bodies. Their trousers they tuck up about their knees. On their heads they wear Balaclava woollen caps that are just any old shape.

And what with the bare sunburnt limbs, and the reflections in the water, and the coming and going on shore, and the boats pushed off, and the singing and shouting and deep-voiced laughter heard through the lilac-tinted twilight, why! it seems to carry one right back into the days of the landing of the Romans! Before this country got so civilised and educated that girls could grow up on a sea-coast of it without ever catching a glimpse of real men doing a real strenuous man's work!

And then we hear there are going to be sports, and concerts, and dances for the Sappers, and Staff Officers coming down from London to inspect, and quite a lot of other excitements that Mud Flats never, never dreamt of before the war.

How I should have enjoyed the thought of them if only we'd got one of the other officers billeted here, instead of the Incubus!

The one he was walking with the other afternoon looked rather nice. Very tall and dark and rather shy-looking. Interesting, I thought: I wonder who he was....

But I can't ask. You see, having made up my mind to be icy cold and as prickly as a hedgehog to the Incubus, I can't allow myself to take any sort of interest in his friends, which makes me dislike the Incubus himself more than ever, of course.

For he is on my nerves. Meals are a perfect punishment to me, because he is always there. I spend no end of time and energy avoiding him, whether it is in this house in the evening or walking about our transmogrified village.

"Rattle, you are getting perfectly childish about Mr. Lascelles," Evelyn said to me one day quite crossly in the Lair. "If you don't like him, you needn't show it quite so patently."

"Why not?" I said, at my flippantest. "You and Nancy don't mind 'showing patently' that you do like him. His head is getting quite turned enough by the attention he's allowed to have from you two. I suppose you're going to toss up for him later on?"

"Don't be silly, Rattle," said Evelyn in her most grown-up voice. "You know you've been angry with Mr. Lascelles ever since that first afternoon he turned up, chiefly because you are angry with yourself!"

"Angry with myself?"

"Yes. Because you were caught out, talking nonsense as usual."

"Pooh! I never thought about that again," said I, hideously annoyed.

"I'm sure you have," contradicted Nancy. "And you're so afraid that Mr. Lascelles might think you'd been too interested about him that you can only fly to the opposite extreme, and bite his head off whenever he tries to make friends with you."

"Nothing of the kind," I said. "I don't like him because I don't like him."

"You allow him to notice it."

"Any reason why I shouldn't?" I said.

"Yes," said Evelyn. "For one thing he might, if he were a very conceited young man, imagine that you were really losing your heart to him."

"Oh, good gracious!" I said, impatiently. "Did anybody ever hear such poodle-doodle?"—this is our family word for absolute rot. Which it was.

I felt myself turning scarlet as the Turkey twill cushions of the Lair with pure annoyance. I said: "It's you two who he might quite well imagine were losing your hearts!"

Nancy laughed. Evelyn said: "Really, I'd rather he thought that of me than that he should see me behaving—well, not like a lady, Rattle!"

It was said in quite a different voice from the one in which she usually scolds me and Nancy when we have shocked her about anything. It was as if she really meant what she said, and the expression on Nancy's face was just as grave. They did really mean it, they did really think that I had behaved in a rotten way to the little blighter—(Yes, now be shocked at the word "blighter." He uses it as a slang word. I mean it literally. I mean he "blights" the whole of my enjoyment like a worm in the bud)—the horrid little blighter who has spoilt everything by coming here.

Yes, spoilt everything! That's exactly what he has done if he wants to know. I always used to think that nothing in the world could come between us three girls getting on together better than any sisters who have ever lived together in one house! And now here's this "incubus" come, and what's the result? What used to be a happy family is split up into factions! Two against one! Civil war, like the Wars of the Roses!

They say that's what happens as soon as one young man plumps himself into the middle of a group of girls, however attached the girls may have been to each other up to then. Only, I imagined it would have to be an attractive young man—not an eyesore.

Well, there was nothing more said on the subject of him. Presently Evelyn broke the silence in the Lair by asking Nancy what on earth she'd done with the bodkin. Just as if nothing had happened.

But it has.

There's a feeling in the air. I know what it means. Again, it's like something I've felt before at school.

It means that I, "Rattle," who used to be more or less the baby and the pet, have been sent to Coventry!

They're not going to invite me to any more hair-brushing family conclaves. They're going to be "polite." They're going to let me realise that they disapprove.

Here's a nice thing to happen after all those years and years and years of happy family life at the Grange!

Yes: I know I used to grumble at those years like anything when they were there: but how I wish, now, that they were back again! Oh, for the happy, happy days before any of those disgusting soldiers came to Mud Flats! Oh, for the top-hole time that we had, just by ourselves, without the Incubus in the house!

See if I don't get even with them all, somehow!

CHAPTER IV

THE STRANGE CASE OF MR. CURTIS

This evening Evelyn began asking the Incubus about the very tall, dark young man we had seen him walking with the time that I had failed to escape them both down by the Hard.

The Incubus said, "Oh, yes, that's Curtis. Awfully good chap, Curtis."

And then he began to laugh all over his silly baby face.

"What are you laughing at, Mr. Lascelles?" said Nancy at once. "Why should you laugh because Mr. Curtis is a good chap?"

"I am not laughing at that," said the Incubus. "In fact, I am laughing——" and then he laughed some more.

All this was in the drawing-room after supper. We were sitting by the big fire made of wreck wood.

You know, the salt water that the timber is soaked in makes the flames go emerald-green, and purple and scarlet, and all sorts of jolly colours.

The thick plum-coloured curtains were drawn across the bay windows, which were carefully shuttered as well, so that not the teeniest ray of light could find its way out into the black night of Mud Flats.

They are most fearfully particular about lights now in our part of the world. I wonder they haven't made Mr. Lascelles wear a cap in the house over his flaming red hair! Talk about "Keep the Home-fires Burning." Well! He does his best. One gleam of a candle through the keyhole, and some special constable or other is knocking at the door and calling out, "Put out that light."

But inside Aunt Victoria's drawing-room it was light and warm and cosy enough. Aunt Victoria herself was in the big armchair, drawn up beside the lamp with the rose-coloured shade. She had a book of "Reminiscences" of some Court or other in her hand, and she was pretending that she wasn't nodding her head and going to sleep over it.

I may as well say that this pretence was quite as transparent as the Incubus's attempt to persuade us that there was not some private joke to do with the tall, eye-glassed young officer he called Curtis. Making a mystery of it! Poodle-doodle!

Nancy said coaxingly: "You might tell us what it is."

She was sitting knitting a khaki sock on the big black bearskin rug in front of the fire, which made her hair (and all of our hairs, I suppose) look perfectly ripping.

The little Incubus was holding khaki wool for Evelyn to wind off his hands. I daresay a stranger would have said that "the three young people made a charming group."

I was right out of it, of course. I had drawn my chair right aside.

I just wanted to let the girls see that I didn't mind staying bang in "Coventry" as long as they liked. I went on embroidering a large "E" for Elizabeth on one of my own handkerchiefs. I wasn't going to knit khaki socks, thank you, or do anything that suggested the least interest in khaki while that young man was about.

However, I couldn't help hearing his conversation with the other two girls, even though I wasn't listening.

"At least you might tell us what sort of a chap this Mr. Curtis is."

"Oh, a thundering good chap," said the Incubus, and laughed again. "Capital fellow—really good sort."

"But that conveys nothing to us girls," said Nancy. "It's the sort of thing men do say about each other, and leaves you just as wise as you were before."

"Well, I don't know what else to say about the fellow," said the Incubus. "I have said all the nice things I can. You saw what he was like to look at; and then I tell you that he is a good chap. What more can I say? He's clever, too."

"What sort of clever?" persisted Evelyn, winding away at the wool.

"Oh, a regular bookworm cleverness," said the Incubus; "always reading. He has read no end of Johnnies that I have never heard of, and, by Jove! he writes himself, too! That's a thing I can't understand any one doing. I couldn't write a line to save my life, but this beggar actually keeps himself in 'baccy' by it. Sits down and writes an article every week, if you please; or did, before the War."

"An article?" Evelyn said, looking really interested. She's always thought it would be rather thrilling to meet a real person who wrote. "What's his article about, Mr. Lascelles?"

"Ah, that's the funny part of it," said the Incubus, laughing again so that he dropped the khaki wool and had to pick it up. "He writes for some ladies' paper. Diana's Weekly, or something. All about girls—what they ought to wear."

"What girls ought to wear?" echoed Nancy, staring with all her blue eyes. "How can he possibly know?"

"Oh, only what they're to wear when they are playing games," explained the Incubus. "You know, he's very hot stuff on the theory of games, old Curtis. That's what he writes about. 'Hockey for Girls,' and all about the right sort of blouse for it," he added vaguely (so like a man), "and how it ought to be all in one piece with the skirt, or something. Then he sits down and reels off yards about 'Swimming for Girls,' and 'Cross-Country Running for Girls,' and 'Motor-Cycling for Girls,' and all the lot. That's what Curtis does."

I felt that here was a chance for snubbing the Incubus in quite a dignified way. So I said, "Well, why shouldn't he?" in a haughty voice. "If Mr. Curtis knows such a lot about athletics, why should you gig—I mean laugh—about it? Where's the tremendous joke?"

"Oh! It's not tremendous. It's only this. He may know a lot about athletics," said the Incubus, turning to me, "but—it's the girls he knows so little about. I never met a fellow who was so absolutely blank on the subject. Why, if you'll believe me, he's twenty-three, and—no. Perhaps I'd better not say."

Here there was a loud chorus from the other two girls. "Oh, you must, now; you must, now. What is it? You must tell us! You must tell us what it is."

"Must I? Seems rather mean——"

"Not half as mean as letting us think there must be something perfectly unspeakable about your friend!" said Nancy.

So then the Incubus turned rather pink under his freckles and said: "Oh, well, it's nothing really. it's only this. Curtis reels off all that information for girls, about girls, and yet he—he—he's never kissed a girl in the whole course of his life!"

And he ended this absurd anecdote with his loudest "Ha, ha," Evelyn and Nancy joining in. Needless to say I didn't laugh. I bit my lips hard not to. But the others made such a noise that Aunt Victoria gave a jerk all over herself and nearly dropped her Reminiscence-book.

Nancy was just beginning: "Oh, I say, I would like to meet this Mr. Curt——"

When Aunt Victoria woke up in good earnest, and said quickly: "What was that? What was that, Mr. Lascelles? I didn't quite catch that last remark. What are you all laughing at?"

Whereupon we had another example of the utter cheek of the popular (except with me) Mr. Lascelles.

He looked up at her, smiling, and said: "I think your nieces are laughing, Mrs. Verdeley, at the idea of my having the nerve to ask you. They say you will never allow it."

"Oh?" purred Aunt Victoria, beaming at him over the top of her spectacles. "Allow what?"

Mr. Lascelles smiled back at Aunt Victoria as if she were his most favourite godmother.

And he said: "Allow me to suggest that two of our fellows should come round here to see you one evening. Two awfully nice quiet chaps—at least, one of them's quiet. But no, no. It's too much to ask. I won't."

So he knows the way to get round the contrariness of Aunt Victoria.

She beamed at him again, and said in her most amiable tone: "Oh? Why not? We don't pretend to entertain, you know, Mr. Lascelles. But supposing your young friends came in here to supper on Saturday; I'm sure I should be very glad to see them, if they don't mind our simple fare——"

"Simple fare" was good, considering how Auntie allows Cook to simply spread herself on butter and things since the Incubus has been here.

"And if your friends like music," Aunt Victoria purred on, "the little girls might play to them."

"The little girls," if you please, mean Nancy and me. Life is full of quiet humour, isn't it? Especially in the way of names. Auntie often calls us this, never remembering that any years have gone by since we were twelve and thirteen. It's a mercy in one way, because it means she never thinks of any flirting or love-making possibilities in any of us. She never remembers the silly old will of father's, in which he's so dead against any of his children rushing into an early marriage. She thinks that needn't be considered for about fifteen years, of course. Such a blessing. Otherwise she might add to the nuisance of having Mr. Lascelles here by trying to bring in a "chaperoney" atmosphere! That would be the last straw!

As it was, I felt myself turning pillar-box red with pure indignation at her bringing out the absurd expression "the little girls" just now, before the young man who is this little girl's pet abomination.

However, the young man didn't seem to have heard it. He was letting loose a shower of "thanks awfullys" and "so awfully good of yous" to Aunt Victoria. He ended up by saying, "One of these chaps is Masters, Captain Masters. He was in my Bank in the old days, but he was always champing his bit to be a soldier. Awful good sort; some lad! The other was a schoolmaster: I shared digs with him in town once, ages ago, and I'm sure you'd like him, Mrs. Verdeley. All his people were in the Church. Curtis is his name."

And, turning to my sisters, he added in a rapid aside, "Now, you will see the great Scribe for yourselves!"

If I weren't in Coventry I should be quite looking forward to this.

Everybody else is.

THE great excitement in this house is the supper-party next Saturday, and what this weird young man Curtis will be like, and what we're going to give them all to eat.

Nancy is going to make her special trifle. Evelyn looks after "the drinks": the drinks, of course, being barley-water and lemonade. You couldn't imagine any other in this house. Then both the girls surprised me, rather, by coming round to ask me quite nicely if I'd make the lemon-cheese cakes that I'm always such a success with.

"I don't think I will," said I, remembering how the Incubus said he loved lemon-cheese, and so afraid he might think I'd done it to please him.

"Rattle, don't be absurd. Of course, you must make it," said Evelyn. She took me by the shoulder, shook me, looked into my face and said, in her old, affectionate voice, "Don't sulk, old girl."

I said, "I'm not sulking," but I heard my own voice melt. "I thought I was in Coventry for being rude to the Favourite."

And then I hugged her and Nancy.... The squabble was over, and I'm going to make the blessed lemon-cheese for the party after all.

But I'm not going to leave off disliking the Incubus for all that!

I'm not going to allow that one little red-haired Temporary Lieutenant to become the chief interest in the lives of all the three girls at his billet. I'm thinking——

This is a sudden, lovely idea! I'm thinking of setting up quite a new interest, on my own!

CHAPTER V

THE NEW INTEREST

Aren't you dying to know what the new interest is going to be?

Perhaps you think it's for me to make special friends with one of the other young officers, one of those who are coming here on Saturday night? Oh, no. Something much more subtle than that. (I always was rather an unusual sort of person, I think, even as a quite young girl of about thirteen.)

But about the new interest. This is it.

The idea came to me this morning at breakfast. There was a general buzz of conversation going on among my sisters and Mr. Lascelles over the front page of the paper. You know, there are always quite a number of advertisements there from "Lonely Subalterns" asking if "some cheery individual" could be induced to correspond with them.

Evelyn was saying she thought nowadays there could not possibly be such a thing as a subaltern who had not got crowds of people only too anxious to write any quantity of long letters to him.

"Yet here's one who expressly states, 'Mother only correspondent,'" said Evelyn, picking up the paper again.

"Something seriously wrong with that chap, I should think," said our odious visitor, helping himself to an enormous spoonful of marmalade that was nearly as bright a colour as his hateful hair. "I must say I distrust the idea of a fellow who isn't able to get girls to write to him without rushing into the agony column. Shows he must be poisonously unpopular for some reason."

"I don't see that it follows that he need be unpopular at all," I said as snubbingly as I could from the other side of the breakfast-table. Generally I don't say anything at all when Mr. Lascelles speaks. There are times when I feel a mad wish to contradict him, and this was one of those times.

So I added: "It may mean that he is simply reserved. Some young men are, I suppose, even nowadays? And girls very foolishly pass them over for the men who try to make themselves popular by always jabbering a lot of compliments and nonsense to them."

"That's a nasty one, Miss Rattle—I mean, Miss Elizabeth, that really is a very nasty one," said that horrid little Mr. Lascelles, laughing boisterously with that great schoolboyish "Ha-ha!" that gets on my nerves so very badly.

But at the same time I saw that he realised I did mean to be severe with him.

He flushed up to the roots of his horrid hair again. And both Evelyn and Nancy looked at me reproachfully. They said, "Oh, Rattle," in a tone that quite stopped me caring whether I had hurt the young man's silly feelings or not.

So I went on calmly: "I don't see why these advertisements shouldn't be perfectly genuine. I shouldn't wonder if some quite nice people put them in. And I don't see why quite nice girls shouldn't answer them. I shouldn't mind writing 'cheery' letters to a poor dear subaltern who was——"

Here Aunt Victoria, who, as usual, hadn't heard what was going on, burst into conversation with something about her Belgian refugees.

For, to add to the general transformation of Mud Flats, we have got two whole families of Belgian refugees down there now. And it's full of difficulties. Not because the Mud Flats people aren't kind to them. Why, Mrs. Miles, the Post-Office, says she's given them her last stitch of baby-clothes! It's the Belgians. The poor darlings do quarrel so dreadfully among themselves! I daresay we should, too, if we were like them—turned out of house and home and dumped into quite a strange country where we simply despised the cooking and where we were always expected to wash more than we considered natural! However, it does make it very hard for the committee, all the same.

Anyhow, that introduction of the Belgians ended the conversation about correspondence with lonely subalterns.

But it didn't end my thinking about it. I did go on thinking about it—hard. And it was then that I thought, why shouldn't I write to one of these poor lambs who were reduced to advertise for letters? Evelyn and Nancy were taking to having friends that I wasn't friends with! Why shouldn't I have somebody that they didn't even know? It didn't matter a bit even if it were somebody whom I had never seen in my life! It made it all the more exciting! Now, which of these shall I answer?

Of course, they have taken the paper away. Newspapers do disappear if one happens to want them. If one does not happen to want them, there they lie in sheaves and stacks for the next fortnight. But to-day the paper has disappeared.

So I shall have to wait until another Times comes in. Then I shall look and see whether there is any specially lonely soul who would be glad to have some one to exchange a few thoughts with him.

(Later.)

Hurray! I have found it! I have found the very advertisement that I want. It is at the top of the agony column in this morning's paper. Neither Nancy nor Evelyn noticed it. As for the other horrid little creature who was discussing the question yesterday, he was off early to the Ford, where his men are supposed to be building a trestle-bridge. We were spared, at least I was spared, the sight of him at table for once in a way!

This is the advertisement:

"Would any one Young and Cheery take pity to the extent of writing an occasional letter to Lonely and Unpopular Subaltern who is unable to make himself liked?—Address Box X.Y.Z."

This went straight to my heart!

Imagine anybody putting himself down in black and white as being unpopular and unable to make himself liked!

Doesn't it show an awfully nice nature? So pathetic and diffident and appealing! So different in every way from that odious Mr. Lascelles, who seems to be popular with everybody in the place (except me—much he cares about my feelings towards him!), and who is perfectly able to make himself most undeservedly "liked" by all, from the colonel down to the latest-joined recruit.

"Unpopular!" That won't appeal to many people, I am afraid. I expect most girls when they read that would be as unsympathetic as our Incubus, and would say, "Oh, well, serve him right. If a man's unpopular it's his own fault."

But I know that this is not true.

I am in a very popular stage of my career at the moment myself. Yes, in spite of Nancy and Evelyn having "made up" our squabble, they do still disapprove of my attitude towards Mr. Lascelles.

And I know that that is not my fault. It is only just force of circumstances, and of having the wrong people about me. I daresay it is something of the same kind with this poor dear young man of the advertisement. Perhaps his is the only sensible one in a whole mess full of young officers like our beauty here! How awful for him! I really do sympathise. Perhaps he himself is like that Mr. Curtis, who's so clever at writing, but who doesn't know anything about girls? But no. I don't imagine him (the Lonely Subaltern) at all like that. Somehow or other I don't feel Mr. Curtis is going to be very amusing. I don't know what gives me this feeling, but something or other has "put me off" Mr. Curtis. But about this other——

D'you know, I've the most curious feeling, as if I were really meant to answer this particular advertisement. As if it were a kind of Fate that I should.

I believe in Fate.

Nancy and Evelyn are out this afternoon. They've gone for a tramp up to a place called the Ford, where they are making a trestle-bridge.

"They" are Mr. Lascelles's London, Chatham and Dovers. Judging from the amount of laughter and comic songs and awful parodies of hymns that you hear from them on their way home every night, the men are about as serious-minded as their officer. Nancy said something about all that joking and larking being the things that help our Tommies to be so plucky and to "carry on" at the Front. But of course one mustn't say a word against Temporary Second Lieutenant Frank Lascelles, not even against the taste in music of his Field Company!

However, I shall have the Lair all to myself this afternoon. Here's my chance for sending an answer to the Lonely Subaltern who is not able to make himself liked, poor dear.

I must write him a nice letter.

(Later.)

Here's the letter I have written.

It's taken me simply hours, and three sheets of the white paper I use for covering the marmalade. It's flushed my cheeks pæony-colour with the concentration I've put into it, and my fingers are a mass of ink, for goodness knows what's happened to our fountain-pen (the Incubus has been borrowing it, I daresay). Still, here it is, written at last in my clearest handwriting:

"DEAR LONELY SUBALTERN,

"I saw your advertisement in the Times, and I felt there was a special reason that I should answer it. The special reason is that you call yourself 'unpopular.'

"So we are companions in misfortune, because I am very unpopular, too. I am one of a family of three girls, and the other two, who used to be such jolly chums of mine, have sort of drifted apart from me. Perhaps some day, if you care to know, I will tell you what that was about. But in the meantime please let me ask you questions about yourself. For that is really what interests me. You know, I truly was interested in your advertisement. To begin with, why do you say that you 'can't make yourself liked'? Perhaps this isn't true? Perhaps it is all your modesty? Perhaps people do really like you very much, only you don't give them a chance to show what they feel? There are people like that: I have read about them in books.

"However, perhaps you will tell me that you have very good reason to know that people don't like you? Perhaps you have overheard them saying so? Well, if that is so, you must try to get at the bottom of it. You must try and find out the reasons why people take a dislike to you, and then you must try and alter them.

"To begin with, who are the people that you can't make yourself liked by?

"You don't mind my asking you these direct questions, do you? It isn't as if I know you. I have never seen you, and I never shall. That will make it ever so much easier. But to go on——"

Here I had to take a fresh sheet of the jam-covering paper. Really, it was the longest letter I had ever written in my whole life. I put:

"If it is men who dislike you—your C.O., the other people in your mess—well, then, I am afraid that I, being a girl, can't help very much.

"It seems to me almost impossible to guess what men will like and dislike, and why they admire lots of people that I should not be able to stand. For instance, I am now thinking of the little officer who is billeted in our house. I simply loathe the man, and he hates me. I look upon him as an absolute worm. But I hear from people in our village that his men adore him, and that his brother officers say he is 'the best little chap in the world.' Perhaps they look upon him as a mascot for their section? (I am sure he is small enough!)

"So you see there is no accounting for men's tastes! Men are so inconsistent, and so illogical. They act without reasons.

"With girls it is different. They always have some splendid reason. Anyhow, you can always account for girls' feelings so much better. So is it girls who don't like you? Please answer this question quite sincerely. It doesn't matter bothering to pretend to me. I'm simply what you might call a Voice out of the Unknown.

"And it's no disgrace not to be liked by girls. We have a man coming here to supper on Saturday who has never kissed a girl in his life. His best friend told us this. Yet he—the first man—is twenty-three, and very clever.

"Do you mind telling me if you think you are too ugly for girls to like? It must be rather terrible to the plain. Thank goodness, all my family have always been reasonably good-looking."

I wasn't quite certain whether I should put that in. It sounded so fearfully vain! Then I thought:

"Oh, well: why shouldn't I?—it isn't as if I was drawing attention to my good looks to any one who should ever see them. Or even preparing him for them as if I was going to meet him ever." Of course, I didn't mean to give him my address—just the number that he could write back to at the newspaper office.

At the same time, getting a letter from a girl who admitted that she wasn't quite a fright would make it so much more interesting for this poor, dear, lonely, unpopular one:

I went on:

"Ugliness or beauty doesn't matter in a man. What does matter are his looks.

"Perhaps you will say that this is the same thing? But if you do it shows that you can't have associated much with girls, or you would understand better their ways of looking at things. I think a man's looks means whether he is well and fit or whether he allows himself to have spots on his face. (This is unforgivable!!)"

I underlined the last sentence heavily, three times.

"Also how he does his hair. This is very important. For instance, part of the reason why I detest our little red-haired 'incubus' here is because he does his hair like Gilbert the Filbert instead of parting it at the side like a man. (Either from right to left, like most people, or from left to right, like some quite fascinating people I've seen portraits of. But, anyhow, it must be parted.)

"Then, of course, there is the way he holds himself. Men who have straight backs and their heads up are the ones that walk away with the admiration. Of course, there are more of them about, now that everything you could call a man is serving and has been trained 'how to walk and where to put his feet,' than there used to be in peace-time.

"Then, of course, there is whether a man looks as if he wanted to please us, meaning the women. If he doesn't, it is his finish. You know the Scotch proverb about what it is that gets a lassie married. 'It's not the beauty: it's not the dowry: it's the come-hither in the eye.' I think that holds good of men even more than it does of us. Anyhow, I am making you a present of a Woman's Point of View."

Here I drew myself up over the ink spotted table of our Lair and chuckled to myself.

"A woman!" If the lonely subaltern knew that I was only just eighteen, and that six months ago I had my hair dangling in a long, golden bell-rope below my waist-belt, he probably wouldn't call me a woman at all. He'd put me down as quite a young girl. A flapper, even."

Little realising how much more mature my mind is than that of a woman like—say Aunt Victoria. I've read far more love-stories than she has: I've studied the whole subject much more deeply. And I'm sure no one would guess from this letter that I am anything but a sophisticated woman of the world!

How could they?

I went on:

"Perhaps you think that the ideas of a woman are scarcely worth considering. Well! That won't hurt my feelings, you know, as if you were somebody who had ever met you. And, at any rate, it will be one more envelope for you to open at your lonely breakfast-table, or in your rat-infested 'dug-out' or wherever you do happen to be. Isn't it too funny to think that I don't know whether the man to whom I am writing is in England, or somewhere in France, or where?

"But it makes no difference at all.

"With much sympathy,
"Believe me, dear Lonely Subaltern,
"Your unknown friend,
"ELIZABETH."

That's all the signature that I shall put. And now to post this to Box X.Y.Z.

How I do hope that the Lonely Subaltern will answer this long epistle.

How disappointing if it really was a "fake," and a bet between two larky young men to see which of them snaffled the biggest mail!

Or, even if it's real—suppose "Lonely Subaltern" has so many sympathetic letters showered upon him that he will merely put a formal note of thanks in the paper "to all his unknown friends," explaining that it is absolutely impossible for him to answer them all individually? Or supposing he only answers some of the letters, and mine is one of those that he doesn't care for?

Well! I can't help that. Anyhow, I shall have done my best to bring a little brightness into the poor young man's sad life. And, incidentally, into my own! For I shan't so much mind being "Odd Girl Out" in our party at the Moated Grange if I have some little private interest all to myself. Yes, even if it is only a pen-and-ink one.

And somehow I have a presentiment that I shall have it.

He will answer, I think! Wouldn't any rather nice young man answer a letter like that?

* * * * * * * *

Well! "To-night's the night," as that idiotic little Mr. Lascelles will keep on saying.

Meaning the night of the supper-party at our house. "Only to think of it, only to dream of it!" as it says in one of the antediluvian song-books which we have in the Lair. Three men to supper: I'll just ask you to dwell on it for a few seconds. In our house! At the Moated Grange, Mud Flats! With the full sanction of Aunt Victoria.... Well, as I say, if you'd told us six months ago that this was going to happen we three girls would all have greeted the news in exactly the same spirit. We should have all, "with one sweet voice," exclaimed:

"TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE!"

And now?

Well, now ... it's perfectly extraordinary how soon one gets accustomed even to the most weird and cataclysmic happenings and changes in one's daily life. Look at the way Mud Flats has grown accustomed to being a Camp of Instruction and a background of Bridge-Builders and a Nest of Billets, instead of being "Scene—a Blasted Heath," like in Shakespeare.

We three girls are positively blasé about "Young Men and How to Feed Them."

Nancy and Evelyn have, of course, taken a good deal of trouble with the supper for them. Everything as stodgy and English as possible. What they'll call "filling" after the long cold afternoon spent trampling about the icy mud at the Ford.

So there is going to be a goose, roast goose with lagoons of hot, rich, brown gravy, and with sage-and-onion stuffing that they'll be able to notice from the Junction, pretty well! and apple sauce with cloves in it, and other savoury sorts of things that make men seem to lose all their self-control as they sniff them up and murmur, "By Jove! there's a top-hole smell of——" whatever it is. Things we should never dream of cooking for ourselves. I'm sure if any young men read this story they'll wish to goodness they'd ever struck a billet like this fellow Lascelles.

Then for pudding there's the last Christmas one left over from last year. It'll be well seasoned. Not to mention Nancy's trifle, and Elizabeth's cheesecakes. Hah! also there'll be a quince-pie with custard: Aunt Victoria's great-grandmother's recipe. Really, people used to guzzle in the Eighteenth Century: worse even than Mr. Frank Lascelles does now. Then there's to be celery, and toast, and biscuits and butter, and cheese, of course. The sort that I suppose people will never give up making childish jokes about, and calling Christian names, and all that sort of thing. As for drinks, as I broke it to you before, there will be home-made lemonade and barley water. The only beverages that have ever been known in this maiden-lady-like establishment.

"I do hope to goodness the visitors won't mind that very much," said Nancy, rather doubtfully. "One always imagines young men washing everything down with rivers of strong drink and quaffing torrents of whisky and soda——"

"Not in war-time, surely?" said Evelyn in her shocked little voice. "I always understood this campaign was being fought entirely on tea. Anyhow, if there isn't any 'strong drink' there, they can't quaff it. They are much better without it." So like Evelyn! Being "better without" is one of her little pet phrases. She's one of those people who are born thinking that to like a thing very much is a sure sign that the thing is a sin and the liker a sinner.

I laughed and said: "I suppose you'd say just the same thing about Mr. Whatsitsname who's coming, this friend of the Incubus's? (Yes: I shall call Mr. Lascelles the Incubus if I want to.) This Mr. Curtis, who has never kissed a girl in his life. I suppose he's much better without it, Evelyn?"

Evelyn looked very coldly at me over the big soup-ladle that she was covering with pink polishing paste. We were all in the pantry at the moment cleaning the silver for this evening.

She said: "Well, at any rate, it shows that he is probably a much nicer sort of young man than most."

"Does it?" I said. "It might show that he was a much nastier one, because nobody would ever let him come near them. Or what I think is that the Incubus may have made up the whole story about Mr. Curtis."

"One would soon know," murmured Nancy over the salt-cellars.

Evelyn said, "What do you mean?"

"Oh, nothing," said Nancy. "Run, Rattle: there's the postman's knock."

I ran, and took in the letters from the three o'clock post. A seedsman's catalogue and a Church Family Newspaper for Aunt Victoria: a glove company sale announcement for Evelyn: and a letter for Miss Elizabeth Verdeley....

Yes! A letter for me.

"A letter in an unknown hand," as it says in books, forwarded on from the box at the newspaper office. It was—it was a letter from the Lonely Subaltern in answer to my own!

He had answered. And as I realised this I realised how fearfully disappointed I should have been if he hadn't.

Yes: supposing he'd had too many letters to reply to each—or supposing that mine hadn't been one that he cared for the sound of.

Never mind. Those were things that might have happened. They hadn't.

He'd answered. Now I'd got to see what he'd said. Dropping the unimportant other letters on the hall table, I clutched my own and tore up to my bedroom. It was piercingly cold there, but never mind. It was solitary. I plumped down on the bed and cuddled the eiderdown all round me (thank goodness I hadn't been the ass that Nancy was, giving away her cosiest quilt to the Billet Incubus!) and I tore open the envelope.

The letter was written in a rather large, round hand. It reminded me of my own handwriting one time when I was at school and when I stuck a steel nib by accident into my thumb. I had to learn to write with my left hand for some weeks after that. This writing, as I say, was a little like it. Awkward and clumsy, and boyish. Rather touching, I thought.

The letter said:

"My dear 'Sympathiser,'

"Thank you most awfully for your letter, which I was no end bucked to get.

"It's most awfully good of you to take the trouble to write me such a jolly long letter, and to worry about 'why I am unpopular,' and all that.

"You ask me whether it is men or women that I 'can't get myself liked by.'

"Well, the answer to that is 'Women.' Or, rather, some women. I seem to have put her back up—"

Here the "her" is scratched out, and "their" is put instead. Of course he means "her": he means some particular girl. What a little cat she must be! Because I am sure he is frightfully nice. You can see it by his handwriting, and by his simple boyish way of putting things.

Well, he goes on:

"I seem to have put their back up in some way, and what I have done goodness only knows. Other people seem to get on with me all right, but I simply can't break any ice in this quarter. I'll take your kind advice about parting my hair. You never do seem to know what's going to make a difference—with women!

"I wonder why you, for example, are so down on the unlucky fellow who is billeted in your house—though I don't suppose I ought to call him unlucky really.

"You say something about my being perhaps 'above' taking an interest in 'a woman's point of view.' Believe me, this isn't at all true. Far from being 'above' it, I humbly admit that I am fearfully thrilled by any views that you may have. You wrote me about the most interesting letter that I've ever got in my life. Like Oliver, I am asking for more. Tell me more about what I am to do to make myself a little less repulsive to your sex. Will you? I'd be awfully grateful if you would.

"And another thing. Couldn't I have a photograph of yourself? I should like to see what she was like to look at, the woman who'd been so kind as to answer my foolish advertisement. I imagine you with a serious, serene sort of face, rather like Miss Florence Nightingale. Do you perhaps wear glasses? You say something about being thankful that all your family Have been reasonably good-looking. Is it the regular-featured, classical, rather passive style of good looks? Or is this a boss shot?"

Here I couldn't help leaving off to simply screech with laughter. Like Miss Florence Nightingale? Me? And with glasses? And "serene"? I peeped into the looking-glass on the dressing-table beyond the bed, and shrieked again at the sight of my own baby face, pink and dimpled under the cloud of unruly golden hair. "Regular-featured"? "Classical"? "Passive"? Oh, no: I couldn't allow Lonely Subaltern to think that that was the sort of person who was writing to him. I should simply have to explain to him!

"You see, I have nothing to go by," the letter says quite pathetically. "So do please let me have a photograph of some sort. A snapshot would do. Won't you send one?"

What shall I do about this? To send or not to send? What would other girls do, I wonder? I rather feel I'd like to send. There is, as it happens, quite a good post-card photograph of me that was taken by the little man at Nowhere Junction. Shall I let Lonely Subaltern have a copy? It might amuse him, poor lad, in his solitary, damp dug-out—if he is in a dug-out. He doesn't say. No: he can't be in a dug-out, because he talks of this girl whose back he's managed to get up. That shows he must be serving somewhere at home still. Unless this girl is a French lady. Perhaps the dark-eyed daughter of the landlady at his billet in some once-enchanting and peaceful French village? You see, he doesn't tell me anything at all about where he is or what he's doing. He just ends up:

"With many thanks for your kindness,
"Believe me yours most gratefully,
"THE LONELY SUBALTERN."

Perhaps he thinks I'm too old and "serious" for him to write to me in detail? That may be it. Perhaps he'd be encouraged to go on and write yards to me if he realised that I was just a fair-haired girl with big eyes and dimples?

That settles it.

Evelyn would perhaps say that I should be "better without" details of what Lonely Subalterns are doing. And that they would be better without photographs of their sympathetic girl correspondents; Never mind. Let Evelyn go on cleaning the silver for to-night's supper-party. This has nothing to do with her, or with Nancy. This is my own private little show! And, besides, I do feel that I'm some good in the world when a lonely and unappreciated young man writes to me in such a really grateful and appreciative way. He shall have a photograph.

I'll get one now....

H'm.... It certainly does look rather a flapper! There is a certain effect of "How-do-I-look-with-my-hair-up?" about it. I mustn't let him imagine that it's a mere schoolgirl who is offering him all this sage advice about life, and love, and popularity, and all that sort of thing. I know what I'll do. I'll write him just a little note to send with the photograph. I'll put:

"DEAR LONELY SUBALTERN,

"Thank you for your touching letter, which I will answer at greater length presently."

(For I shall have to get dressed directly.)

"I am so sorry that I have not got an up-to-date photograph of myself to send you, but I enclose one that was taken some time ago"

(It was—it was taken in May, and it's now December.)

"when I was a mere girl."

(That gets over the difficulty.)

"The photograph is still considered to have quite a look of me. So I am sending it to give you some 'idea.' Please do not thank me for any of the advice which I may be able to give you. If my experience and my point of view prove to be of any use to one of our gallant defenders,"

(There! That sounds woman-of-the-worldly enough.)

"I shall be only too pleased.

"Believe me, dear Lonely Subaltern,
Your sympathetic friend,
"ELIZABETH."

There! I shall just catch the post out from Mud Flats.

(Later.) As I tore down the road towards the pillar-box-in my blanket-coat, and without a hat, I almost ran into our Incubus, Mr. Frank Lascelles.

He was stampeding up to the house, swinging along with that would-be military swagger that I suppose is put on to conceal the fact that he's almost too small to see. Up to the eyes he was clay mud. Down to the eyes he was floppy khaki cap. (I suppose that's supposed to look active service-y?) He saluted, and said: "Hullo, Miss Elizabeth, are you taking a letter to the post?" Such an absolutely futile question, don't you know, seeing that I was flying along towards the pillar-box, and had a large white envelope in my hand. So I simply couldn't help snapping at him, "Oh, no. I'm sitting by the fire and reading a book!" Then I was sorry because it sounded so absolutely idiotic and fifth-form-at-schoolish. And he made it worse by holding out his hand towards the envelope and saying: "Anyhow, mayn't I take that thing down the road for you?"

Well, I couldn't let him, could I?

Supposing he'd caught sight of the address? My handwriting's quite big enough. Suppose he'd tumbled to it that I was "one of these girls" who write to Lonely Subalterns? ...

Oh, no. He's the sort of little beast who would laugh and tease me about it for evermore.

So I said, "Please don't trouble," and simply legged it past him without drawing breath until I dropped the big envelope with the photograph of little Me and the note to Lonely Subaltern into the pillar-post.

And when I ran back again to the house the Incubus had disappeared, as usual, into the bathroom, where I was just going to get some hot water.

And, as usual, the little toad bagged every drop: singing away as he splashed in his tub his exasperating song about

"Oh, please don't flirt with me:
Don't try to flirt with me.
For it might be horribly awkward
If some one were to see."

So Evelyn, Nancy and I had to wash in cold.

CHAPTER VI

THE DISGRACEFUL PARTY

I suppose everybody—I mean every girl body—will want to know what we three had to wear for this party? Nothing wildly exciting, I can tell you: the fact is we haven't got any really compelling clothes. How can you, when you have to shop out of catalogues, and when you're miles bigger than stock size? Still, we'd three quite fairly pretty frocks left over from last summer; Evelyn's is pale, pale pink voile, with little rosy dabs scattered all over it, and with a fichu that makes her look like a Puritan maid. Particularly as she never likes "extremes" of fashion, and simply wouldn't have her skirt cut as it was in the Lady's Pic., though Nancy and I told her that skirts were going to be imitations of the London Skittish, only more so!

I wore white: my last Prize-Day frock made a little shorter and fuller, and frillier, and Nancy had a very sweet mauve, like a fondant.

All our hairs looked simply lovely: and I'm sure our complexions must have been a treat to three young men who had been surrounded all day by masculine tan and freckles and mud-ground-in-ness!

Now, I'd better get on to those young men, and to about what happened at the party....

Aunt Victoria—she really is a weird old thing! Always taking you by surprise when you're least expecting it. What do you think she'd done? She had actually rolled down to the supper-table after we had finished arranging it: and she'd placed by the side of the glasses of each of our visitors a large dark bottle with a gold paper "top" to it.

"Bubbly, by Gad!" were what burst from Mr. Frank Lascelles' lips at the sight of them.

And Aunt Victoria beamed at him, and said: "Just the three bottles of champagne that were left over from little Elizabeth's christening dinner-party" (I being called "little Elizabeth," you understand!) "and they've been waiting in the cellar here ever since."

The first any of us had ever heard of there having ever been a christening dinner-party in this house: not to mention champagne. Life is full of sudden shocks, these days. Well, to get on with this other party. Dinner lasted for hours, with everybody having second helps of everything, and a great deal of what you could only call "horse-play" from Mr. Lascelles, though I can't imagine any horses being as silly as he was over going round the table with a table-napkin thrown over his arm and pouring out champagne and pretending to be a waiter; and then pretending to "straf" Captain Masters for letting some of his fizz over on to the table-cloth. Telling him to "parade in chains at ten o'clock to-morrow," and that sort of rot.

The really interesting part of it all to us (not to the men, of course) began after the eating was finished, and after we had left those three young men alone to smoke, and after they had rejoined us in the drawing-room afterwards. Aunt Victoria was playing patience, and Evelyn was busy as usual over her embroidery-frame, and Nancy and I were comparing notes, just as girls always do, about what we thought of the two new young men.

I haven't said anything about them yet, so I'll just tell you quickly that Captain Masters, the elder one, was a perfect dream of good looks, just like an illustration to a story in Forget-me-not, only better. He'd black, black hair, like pitch with a crinkle in it, and black lashes framing his dark-grey "round-the-corner" sort of eyes, and a cleft chin that's supposed to be the mark of a flirt. And so tall, and such a nice shape all over! I thought he was rather too much of a vision. Any girl that he went about with would have to be most frantically pretty to keep pace with him! I expect that's what most girls feel when they say they like a man to have a nice ugly face: and probably that's why these Greek-goddy sort of men are always picking out quite ordinary girls in the Society Wedding photographs of them. They don't feel they can stand up against competition. It's all vanity really, as Solomon said. Well, but about these two. The other one, Mr. Curtis, was a complete contrast. I don't know why I thought he was "interesting-looking" the first time. He's fearfully tall and thin, with those glasses, and very bulgy knuckles and khaki-coloured hair. He looked as if Nature never, never meant him to wear khaki in any other way, but never mind, I daresay it's all the more credit to him that he joined as soon as war broke out. He had a look about him, too, that immediately convinced Nancy and me that the story which the Incubus had told us about him was literally true. I could just imagine him sitting down and reeling off articles about "Weight-lifting for Girls" and "Steeplechasing for Girls," and all the other things that seemed to make out that he was a regular expert about girls, whereas— Well, I don't suppose he was on Christian-name terms with any girl except his sister. He gave you that feeling about himself.

I was just saying so to Nancy, when in he came with the others.

Captain Masters, coming over to Nancy, immediately began about "having a little music," as he'd heard we all played. Wanted to "turn over" for her, I guessed.

You know, there's no piano in the drawing-room at the Moated Grange, only antimacassars and vases and what-nots. The only piano is in the Lair.

I scarcely expected that Aunt Victoria would be the one to suggest that "the young people" should adjourn to that room for their little concert. It was quite as unexpected as the bubbly for dinner when she did so. Not only that, but she thought nothing of going on playing her own solitary game of patience in her accustomed corner of the drawing-room while we all trooped off to the back of the house.

This is where the evening really began, so listen.

After putting chairs for us nearly inside the grate, the three young men plumped down on the hearthrug, which is a nice thick, furry one. Captain Masters flung his glossy black head back against the Incubus's knee, and sent a sleepy, round-the-corner glance at Nancy which was evidently meant to convey the message, "It's really you that I should like to be leaning up against at this minute." However, of course, Nancy never noticed it. She says so. And all he (Captain Masters) said was: "Now, do let us have these songs, shall we? Who's going to open the Concert? And what are we going to have? Have you got any of the music of Shell Out, Miss Verdeley? There's an awfully pretty thing in it called

"'Sprinkle me with kisses if you want my
Love to Grow——'"

"Oh, yes: let's have that: I think I can manage to vamp it," volunteered the Incubus, springing up from the rug and bustling across to the piano. In a stage aside I heard him say to Nancy, "So awfully appropriate for old Curtis, what?"

I saw Nancy, who was looking prettier than ever in her life before, dimple back at him. Then she gave a glance at "Old Curtis." He still looked painfully shy, but as if he were thoroughly enjoying himself, in an embarrassed sort of way. Yes, he was exactly the sort of person who would be too bashful to ask any girl to write to him. He would be a regular "Lonely Subaltern" himself. But I did hope that my own special Lonely One, to whom I'd sent a letter and a photograph that very afternoon, was not like Mr. Curtis to look at.

Perhaps he'll send me a photograph in return. Then I shall know.

Well, but to get on with this celebrated party of ours. (Evelyn has taken to calling it "that disgraceful" party, by the way.) There was a lot of laughing and "ragging" each other by the young men, in fact, the Lair echoed more than even when the three of us have been there in our giggliest mood. Captain Masters said something about palmistry, and the Incubus said: "Yes, old Thing, you can tell mine; anything else would take too much time..." and so on.

The next thing that happened was the Incubus giving an imitation of Miss Vesta Tilley singing

"I joined the Army yesterday,
So the Army of To-day's all right!

and the staircase window which is outside the Lair began to rattle so violently that we heard it right through the music. Nancy, skipping up in the middle of all her mauve flounces from the hearthrug, said she must go and put a wedge in it.

Of course, directly she hopped up, up jumped Captain Masters, who had been lolling with his head against Mr. Curtis's knee, this time. "Let me help you," he said; "I'd love to."

And then Mr. Curtis jumped up and actually plucked up courage to say that he was very good at putting in wedges. At the same moment the Incubus—Mr. Lascelles—also skipped to his feet and said, "Bravo, Curtis! This will provide you with copy for another newspaper article: 'Window-Fastening for Girls'—what? I'm going to come and look on at this."

"Surely it won't take four of us," protested Nancy, in her most mischievous voice. "I can do it all by myself, thank you; unless—unless Mr. Curtis really wants to help me?"

And with that, of course, the other two young men flopped down again on the hearthrug like two terriers when one tells them that they are not going to be taken for a walk after all.

And Mr. Curtis was at Nancy's heels like another dog to whom she had whistled.

Evelyn was at the piano trying over the music of "Neville Is a Devil with the Girls," which Mr. Lascelles had just sent for down from London.

I must say that he is very good about sending for those things for us—I mean, for Evelyn and Nancy.

For he knows perfectly well that I don't want any dance music, or chocolates, or fashion magazines, from him. He scarcely spoke to me, either, the whole of the evening.

Well, Evelyn had played all through "Neville" and gone on to the one about "In my heart there's always room for One Girl More," and still Nancy, in spite of what she'd said about being able to do it all by herself, hadn't got that window wedged.

Minutes passed, my dears. And she was still out there in the passage, with the young man who wrote those articles on "Exercise for Girls"—and who had never kissed a girl in his life—until then.

You notice that I said "until then." That's the point.

For when he came in again to the Lair I looked at that minx Nancy, and I saw that he had! Don't ask me how I knew. If you're a girl, you won't have to. (Girls have intuitions, thank goodness, even if they haven't any sense of humour, as people always say.) And if you're a man, you won't get answered. So that's that.

(Later.)

All to-day, which is the day after this scandeelious orgy, poor Nancy has been having nothing but talking to upon the subject. You see, it was no earthly good pretending that she hadn't been kissed—we just knew. And to do her justice, Nancy didn't try to pretend that she hadn't been. She stood her ground quite pluckily, and said: "Yes! That was why we were such ages over the rattling staircase window. Yes, I did let Mr. Curtis kiss me. Why not?"

This was where our eldest sister, Evelyn the Ever-proper, came down on Nancy like a ton of bricks. She was really fluent. I needn't go into all that fluency. I expect every girl who reads this has heard bits of it at one time or another: "He comes too near who comes to be denied." Also: "A young girl who has been kissed is like a peach with the bloom off it." (I've never seen any kisses that come off like that.) Also: "Men think very lightly of any girl who gives her favours to a man before she is even engaged to him."

"Engaged to him!" said Nancy, turning upon the lecturer at this. "But how do you want me to be engaged to the man when I had only seen him for the first time that evening? Don't be so ridiculous—and besides," here she began to laugh a little, "Mr. Curtis is scarcely the kind of young man that I should want to be engaged to. Not my type. Much too—— Well! Too everything that I could never like in that way."

"Why not, I should like to know? He's a good deal cleverer than his friends—— I mean, if you wouldn't want to be engaged to him," said Evelyn, in a voice that was even more shocked than before, "how was it, Nancy, that you allowed him to kiss you? That makes it so far, far worse."

"No, it doesn't. It makes it so much, much better," protested Nancy defiantly, but still going on with her work, which was, as usual, the darning of our Incubus's khaki socks. "Poor Mr. Curtis, he really never had before! It seemed to mean such a treat to him! And it didn't mean anything particular to me!"

"Only like letting a rather rough retriever lick your hand," I suggested.

"Rattle, there's only one word for you," said Evelyn. "Vulgar!"

"Yes: people always call people that as soon as they're natural," I said. "The fact is, we live in an artificial age. I've read that, heaps of times, and I see it's true. Why, the girls in Shakespeare say much worse things than I do—much! and the other people in the plays never seem to turn a hair at them. Even the ones that are supposed to be quite ladies. Like Juliet. Or Beatrice when she says——"

The other two weren't taking the least notice of me and my Shakespeare. Nancy was going on explaining to our eldest sister that what she had done in letting Mr. Curtis kiss her was "only patriotic."

She said, "Think what a man like that is doing for us. Leaving his good job as a schoolmaster. Leaving his home. Leaving his friends——"

"Can't have many friends," I put in, "if this was the first time he'd ever been allowed to——"

"All his friends," pursued Nancy, waving aside my objection with the khaki sock, "and everything he's got! Presently, in three weeks' time, he'll be off to the trenches in that awful country where it seems to be even muddier than it is here at its worst. He's going to have an awful time there this winter. He may," said Nancy, with a graver look on her pretty face, "he may be giving his life for England and Englishwomen. Yet here you are, ready to grudge him a little thing like a kiss."

Evelyn began to look cross as well as shocked. She protested that a kiss was not "a little thing." It was all part and parcel of the biggest thing that a girl had to give—her love and herself.

"You mean you would refuse that poor young man?"

Evelyn, drawing herself up to her full height, which as you know is a good long way with all of us three girls—Evelyn said, whatever happened, rather than not refuse, she would remain an old maid with nobody wanting to kiss her for the rest of her life.

"And how would you have felt a month after," asked Nancy, "if we have to read Mr. Curtis's name in the casualty lists: 'Wounded and missing—believed killed'? How would you have felt then?"

Evelyn gave a little shiver.

"Don't—don't talk about that——"

"Yes, but I want to ask you. Wouldn't you have felt sorry?"

"Of course I should have felt sorry if anything had happened to—him," Evelyn quite snapped, "but I shouldn't be sorry about what I'd done. I should always be glad to think I had behaved in the right way about that."

And as she marched out of the room I couldn't help laughing. Because, for the only time it has happened in her life, I saw my pretty sister looking like Aunt Victoria.

Yes, she had just the sort of face on that Aunt Victoria has sometimes when we have a very special kind of cake for tea. She looks down her nose at it, and raises her eyebrows as she passes it to us as much as to say, "How can any one possibly eat it?" You see, poor auntie is what they call "a martyr to indigestion," and she isn't allowed to have any sort of cake. At the same time, we always think that she is really, in her secret heart of hearts, rather greedy about cake, and would give anything to take some.

But about the party: it may have been a "disgraceful" one, but you can't say it was an unsuccess!

All the young men were absolutely enthusiastic about the way they'd enjoyed themselves—even Mr. Curtis!

CHAPTER VII

THE LONELY SUBALTERN AGAIN

This morning I got another letter from the Lonely Subaltern, to acknowledge the photograph I sent.

He really does seem to have been pleased with it.

His letter begins, without any "Dear Sympathiser" at the top, straight away:

"I think that if you know how pleased I was to have the charming picture, which is looking at me as I now write, even your kindness in having sent it would feel rewarded! It is certainly very unlike the fancy portrait that I made up of you in the letter which I had the absolute cheek to ask you for this. But now, shall I confess something to you? I only made up that description as a kind of draw! I knew perfectly well that you were gay as well as pretty, and that there could be no spectacles or seriousness about you!

"And even if this laughing blonde face shows you as you were 'some time ago,' I can't help feeling that it is very like what you are now. If I said all this to your face I suppose it might be looked upon as rather cheek, mightn't it?"

(Yes, it certainly might.)

"Still, as you are not here, I think I might be allowed to say what I mean, which is I think that you are a perfect peach. If you will only go on writing letters to me I shall look forward to them more than to anything else I have ever looked forward to in my life."

Poor boy! He must have had a horribly dull sort of time. He says:

"I shall read them over and over to see whether I can't find between the lines something that gives me more of you, that tells me more about the 'true inwardness,' as they call it, of the girl who has been so awfully sweet to me. I shall keep all your letters (if I have the luck to get some more) in my pocketbook, close to me wherever I go, with your photograph letters from Betty.

"By the way, I forgot to tell you that that is my new name for you—Betty.

"Elizabeth is too long and too pompous. It reminds me too much of the 'Maiden Queen' in one of her tantrums. But Betty is just you—a rose-faced, shapely, blue-eyed and golden-haired English girl."

My dears! Fancy having things like that about you written down in pen-and-ink! Don't I wish I could show them to my sisters! I can't, of course, ever. But never mind. Whenever I feel down in the mouth or neglected, or bad-tempered with the Incubus, or bored with Mud Flats, I shall always be able to take the Lonely Subaltern's letters up to my own room, and have a little private preen over them, all to myself. How glad I am that I answered his touching advertisement! Didn't I tell you that I believed in Fate? Well, there you are. Isn't it funny?

The letter ends up:

"Good-bye, my Betty. Think kindly of me sometimes, will you? and believe me

"Ever
"YOUR LONELY SUBALTERN."

This I call perfectly sweet.

Fancy his saying "my Betty." It gives one quite a little warm glowy sort of feeling at one's heart. Fancy his thinking the photograph so nice! I wish I'd had a coloured one to send him, but he seems to have guessed the colours rather well.

I wonder what he's like? How I do wish I could see him! (Anybody would, I think.)

Well, I must write to him again. Aunt Victoria always taught me that a letter deserved an answer. I must write to him at once. If I don't he might think I was offended at the new name he's given me, and then his poor dear feelings would be hurt, and I should so hate to do that. I must tell him that of course I don't mind his calling me "Betty": that as a matter of fact, I rather like it. I'll go to the Lair and write now.

* * * * * * * *

Now comes the most awful thing that's ever happened in my life.

To begin at the beginning of it, there was no ink in the Lair.

I really believe Nancy has taken to drinking ink—at least, I know she was writing in there for hours yesterday, and I can't imagine what about, though she said it was accounts. As I say, this place is full of mystery and surprises, both inside and out—in fact, I don't seem to know even my own sisters, Nancy and Evelyn, as well as I did before the arrival of the troops in our hamlet. Well, to go back to this ink—I knew there was a good large bottle of it in the dining-room. So, carrying the Lair inkpot in my hand, I betook myself off to the dining-room, thinking to find it—what most people's dining-rooms are at a quarter to four in the afternoon, namely, a deserted wilderness faintly smelling of lunch. However, when I got in who should I run into but the eternal "Incubus," who, I thought, would be busy making saps or something in a field out by the Ford. He was sitting there writing. Up he jumped, of course, and said he was afraid he was in my way. (Of course he always is, really.) Then he said: "Do let me fill that for you," and I said, "Oh, no, thank you! I can do it perfectly well myself: I am myself doing it."

Well, of course I should have done it perfectly well if I hadn't been flurried and annoyed at finding him there—horrid little creature!

As it was, what you would imagine to happen did happen. My hand shook, and I upset three large tears of blue-black ink on to the red leather cover of the dining-room writing-table.

"Oh, I say!" exclaimed the Incubus. And I said, of course, the usual thing, "Oh, it doesn't matter in the very least. I will get a cloth and wipe it up."

"No, wait. I have got a handkerchief here—quite an old handkerchief, which doesn't matter in the least, I assure you," he went on: "it will be good for it."

Before I could say another word he thrust his hand into the pocket of his coat, and had brought it out.

This was where, I expect, he wished he had never been born.

Why on earth don't they have classes for those men which, instead of only being about demolishing houses and blowing up bridges, would teach them to pull a handkerchief out of a pocket without pulling out everything else that the pocket contains?

For as the Incubus took out his quite nice khaki silk handkerchief there fell on the floor——

You will never guess!

Yes, perhaps you will guess. Perhaps it is only I who has been such a fool and lunatic as not to guess all about it from the very beginning!

Anyhow, there it was, staring me in the face, now! What they call in books "the confirmation of my own folly."

What had fallen out of the young man's pocket was my own photograph!

There was no mistaking it. You know that old proverb about bread and butter falling always on the buttery side? Well, photographs (especially when you don't want them to) always fall picture-side uppermost. There it lay—my latest photograph that was taken just after I had my hair up—the last one I had in the house—the one, I knew it was the one, that I had sent to the "Lonely Subaltern."

And in one second the appalling truth flashed upon me.

It was him!

He was it!

At one and the same moment That Deceiver and I made a dash for the thing as it lay on the carpet. If I had got it first I think I should have torn out of the room with it, and, still holding it in my hand, have rushed to the station and taken the next train to London, and gone into a tea-shop or something—as a waitress, I mean—and never have seen him or anybody else who knew me again as long as I lived!

If he had got the photograph first, well—I don't quite know what he would have done—perhaps pretended that it came out of a packet of cigarettes, or something like that!

But as it was, what do you suppose happened? Of course, the last thing one would wish.

We both get it at once! Our fingers were all entangled in the sickening thing.

Firmly grasping my edge of the thing, I dragged my hand back.

But that ... that young Pretender (who I hope will never feel comfortable as long as he lives) had hung on to his edge of the photograph as well.

Naturally, it came in two! There we stood, for one brief second, glaring at each other over the two halves, exactly like the judgment of Solomon!

CHAPTER VIII

THE FRIGHTFUL ROW

My mind was in such a whirl of feelings that I really don't know whether I was most petrified with amazement or dumb with anger. I, that had been known from childhood's hours as "Rattle," was too flabbergasted to have a single syllable to say for myself.

He spoke first. As usual, he said something that nobody else in the world would have the absolute cheek to: for he said, quite angrily, and as if he were talking to some naughty little girl: "There, now! See what you have done! You have torn my photograph!"

"Your photograph!"

I simply gasped as I said it. Then, collecting my breath and my scattered wits, I went on again: "It's my photograph, a photograph of me—you know it is. How dare you have it!"

"You—I mean—it was sent to me," said Mr. Frank Lascelles.

I felt that I had turned as red as his own horrid hair. But I stood my ground, and spoke as dignifiedly as I possibly could.

"Oh, then you admit it. You—you are the man who has been writing letters to me——"

"Yes, I am."

"Pretending," I said witheringly, "to be a lonely subaltern! Pretending that you couldn't make yourself liked!"

"Pretending?" The Incubus brazened it out. "Not much pretence about that."

"Oh! What an awful story!" I said downrightedly. "Apart from everything else, what a—what an untruther you are! You said you weren't popular."

"Well? I'm not."

"You are. All your idiots of men seem to adore you. How they can I don't know."

"Thank you," he said. "That's what I meant. It's you I'm unpopular with. You know you've had a 'down' on me——"

"Well, d'you wonder?" I snapped, glaring at him with whole Hymns of Hate in my eyes. "Haven't I an excuse?"—waving the torn photograph.

"Yes, you may have now. But that's only since this minute. You hadn't before," he went on. "And you began to have that 'down' the moment I arrived here. Why? Will you explain?"

Well, I couldn't. I couldn't say that it started the first minute that he came upon me in the kitchen, talking loudly about HIM. I couldn't explain that it was all part and parcel of my being ashamed of having played cards for him, and made plans about him, even if it was in fun, before he came! I said: "Anyhow, I shall have a much worse 'down' after this! I don't know what you have to say for yourself, Mr. Lascelles."

"A great deal," he said. Then he put on a more ingratiating sort of tone. He said: "Look here, I may be a rotter in many ways, but I'm dashed if I see how I've deserved your considering me such a—such an impossible sort of person. I'd give anything to have you like me, even a tiny bit, Miss—Elizabeth!"

He was trying to get round me. But I'm not soft-hearted like Nancy. I wasn't going to allow him to.

"I wish——" he began again.

"It's a wish you never will get, if it is that we should be friends," said I. "I—I dislike you instinctively."

"So it seems. I saw that."

"And you tried to pay me out by playing tricks on me," I said, beginning to realise more clearly what had happened, and getting angrier than ever. "You thought that if you could get me to write letters to you and send you my photograph, you'd turn round some day and show them to me, and that would be your revenge!"

"I never thought anything of the kind!" he declared, fearfully angry himself. "I only wanted to get to know you! And you've been turning me down with a loud bang every time I've spoken to you. I didn't know how to get hold of the crab. This seemed the only way."

"It is a most dishonourable and sneaky way," I said hotly. "It was not fair."

Mr. Lascelles, standing there with his torn half of the photograph still between his finger and thumb, and with the ink still trickling down over the edge of the writing-table—Mr. Lascelles said: "You know, they say all is fair in—in war! And, after all, this is war-time, you know!"

"Some people seem to think that's an excuse for absolutely everything nowadays," I told him. "But there are some things at which one has got to draw the line! I can't tell you," I said, suddenly boiling over again with rage, "what I think of you!"

Then the Pretender said another unforgivable thing. He said, "In your letters you didn't seem to mind me."

"Because I didn't know it was you. I thought it was somebody——" Well, I couldn't say "nice." So I said rather lamely, "somebody lonely, who really needed my—my——"

"I did need your letters," the Incubus put in. "I knew that you'd never write if you'd known it was me, that you'd got your knife into!"

"Known? If I had known, I——" Here I sort of clutched about for words and couldn't find any. I simply had to repeat myself and say, "I can't—I can't tell you what I think."

"Could you write it?" suggested Mr. Lascelles quite meekly.

But there was a laugh in his voice. I heard it. There was a twinkle in his eye. I saw it!

Well, at that I was so angry that I know now exactly what people mean when they say "that they see red." A mist seemed to come before my eyes, a red mist of the same colour as Mr. Lascelles's locks, and then——

Well—I am almost too ashamed to write it! To use one of Aunt Victoria's old-fashioned words, it certainly was an unladylike thing to do—I had done it before I had thought—or something did it for me! Something lifted my arm and took direct aim. A sound rang out that I should think they could have heard from the Ford, clearer than the sound of rifles practising at the range.

For I slapped his face as hard as I possibly could with my open hand!

The second afterwards I was so ashamed of myself that I wished I'd never been born. I wished the dining-room floor would open and swallow me up: it often creaks as if it were going to!

But not it.

There I stood, still panting with temper, and gazing at the red mark of my own hand (not by any means a microscopic one) on the Incubus's smooth and freckled cheek.

He glared back up at me with eyes like grey-blue icicles, if you can imagine them. Then with a movement, as quick as a cat putting out a claw to scratch, he seized my hand—the one that slapped him.

I was terrified for a minute. I was so certain what would happen next. I knew that he was going to kiss me by force, as a punishment.

I had read in a book that a man who has had his face slapped by a girl has the right to kiss her in anger, and that she deserves it. (It's just "reprisals," like we ought to take on the Germans for murdering babies.)

And you know men always seem to be much stronger than we are, even if we are six foot, and they (the reprisaling men) are tiny!

I flung my head back and screwed my face as far to one side as I could. If he had kissed it, I'm sure it would have come out all over Spotted Plague, from sheer temper, and given him blood-poisoning!

However, thank goodness, the little horror didn't even try to touch my face.

Instead of that he took my hand, the one that had slapped him. He crushed it in his and then put it to his mouth, and kissed it. First the fingers and then the palm, as if he'd never had anything to kiss in his whole life before.

"There!" he said, rather breathlessly. "You needn't think——"

But what he meant that I "needn't think" I shall never know, for at that moment I heard the footsteps of Mary, our housemaid, coming along the passage to what she calls "see about the dining-room fire."

I wasn't going to let her come in and find me there. No: not with the whole atmosphere quivering with slaps and kisses, thank you: not with me and the Incubus standing facing each other like a Christmas number supplement called "The Lovers' Quarrel," by Marcus Stone, or something like that.

Not much!

So up I flung the dining-room window, and out I tore through the laurustinus bushes, with no hat, and just my blue sports coat on, and with my half of the torn photograph grasped firmly in my hand.

He shall never have that again, anyhow!

And I hope that I jolly well hurt him, even if I am ashamed that I did!

For oh, what a beastly thing he's done to me! Not so much by pretending to be the Lonely Subaltern, but by not being it.... That sounds muddled, but if you're a girl you'll understand what I mean, and if you're a man you'll never understand anything. At least, not if you're a man like that loathsome little bank-clerk of a temporary second lieutenant.

I feel he's robbed me of a friend, for the Lonely Subaltern would have been a friend, if his letters had been real letters—I mean, if it hadn't been the Incubus who'd written them. And now all that promising new interest has gone out of my life with a loud bang. I shall have nothing to console myself with now when I feel bored with life and nobody loves me. I shan't be able to take the Lonely Subaltern's letters out now and purr over them to myself. Good gracious, no! I shall feel ill at the very sight of a letter addressed to me for the next fortnight. And, of course, I shall take the Incubus's detestable letters and do them up in a big envelope with lumps of sealing-wax over it and register it back to Frank Lascelles, Esquire, at the Moated Grange....

No: I can't do that. Mrs. Miles at the post-office would wonder what on earth was in the packet and why I was sending things through the post to the young orficer gentleman that lives in our very house, and she'd ask Mary, our housemaid, and——

Oh, anybody who's ever lived in a village will know the yards and yards that get added in this way to the "Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood."

That wouldn't do.

Besides, I can't have the little brute writing back to acknowledge the receipt.

And I'm not going to give them into his own hands, either.

I shall tear them all up into the teeniest scraps, and burn them in my bedroom grate.

No, I won't, either. I'll keep them as they are: it'll serve him right!

CHAPTER IX

ANOTHER SHOCK!

You know how fast you can walk when you're angry and don't see where you are going?

Well, that was me as I tore out of our garden (still hatless and in my Saxe blue woolly coat) down the road towards Nowhere Junction and then came to the field that leads in the direction of the Ford. It might have been Hyde Park for all I saw of it, but close to the stile I was reminded of where I was by the tramp of feet on the frosty road (thanks be it's dry frost at last for a change) and the sound of men's voices singing in parts a hymn tune with these words:

"When we get our civvy clothes on,
O 'ow 'appy we shall be!
When this blooming war is o—ver,
No more soldiering for me!"

It was a squad of that regiment called "The Super-Filberts," marching at ease after a class.

Behind them came their officer, the sort of young man who is awfully nice, but whom you feel you must have met before somewhere because he is so like thousands of pictures of our gallant defenders in the Sunday Herald.

With him came another tall, rather disconsolate figure in khaki, wearing eyeglasses—Nancy's friend, Mr. Curtis!

At that moment I was so infuriated against Mr. Lascelles that I felt just as angry with anything calling itself his friend. So I only gave the very curtest nod when he and the other officer saluted me. Salutes are "no treat to me" now—as the bus driver said about the ladies' ankles.

I presently came to a field where I had to pass a guard of soldiers, who challenged me, and then, smiling, let me go on. I had to pick my way pretty carefully. It was a perfect honeycomb of wet and muddy ditches—trenches that the "Super-Filberts" had been digging under the instruction of Mr. Curtis, who is an instructor, I may mention. I looked into them, and simply couldn't help heaving a tiny sigh of pity for the poor darlings out there "somewhere in France." They have to live in those trenches for weeks on end. How on earth do they ever keep their poor feet dry? Or do they give up all hope of trying to?

Some way away from the trenches, there was a deeper hole covered over. I had heard the Incubus explaining to Evelyn that this was the entrance to a "sap"—one of the long tunnels which the men go down to lay a charge of gunpowder.

I put aside the wooden cover, which was like the door of the open mouth of a well, looking right down into the beginning of the sap. It looked so narrow that I couldn't possibly imagine anybody working there except a mole or something about the size of that scrubby little Mr. Lascelles. Never mind him, though. I had come out here to try to forget him. So, beginning to feel angry again, on I pranced, towards what they call "the fortified house" at the other end of the field.

Now, the fortified house is a square, stone-built farm affair, which has been bought by the military authorities for instruction purposes. The inside roofs and some of the inner walls have been knocked down.

And the windows have all been boarded up, and instead of them there are wicked little square holes everywhere just big enough to put the muzzle of a machine-gun through. A lot of the classes for defence and that sort of thing take place up at this house. But, of course, there wouldn't be a soul about there now, as it was four o'clock.

The sun was beginning to set behind the trees just like an old-fashioned Christmas card, and I had met the class, of course, marching away.

I peeped in through the open, doorless entrance of the house and tried to imagine what it must be like to find yourself one of a lot of soldiers working those machine-guns, with perhaps half of your comrades fallen around you and scarcely enough ammunition to hold out until the relief comes up, and a strong surrounding force of horrible grey-coated Boches creeping nearer and nearer!

I was just thinking this when I jumped back with a little scream.

"Hullo! What is it? Oh!——"

For a moment I felt as if my imaginings had come true. I thought that there before me, out of the fortified house, was slinking and stealing the stealthy grey-clad form of one of those Germans.

Then I saw what it was. And I burst out laughing, in relief, at the cause of my absurd fright. For the man who had slipped quietly out of the house, touching his old felt hat to me, was nothing more alarming than an English labourer.

Besides this, it was a labourer whom I knew! It was no one more or less than our nice old Penny, the gardener, with that pathetic old black wig of his, who has been working for Aunt Victoria since before we girls came to live with her at Mud Flats.

"Good evening, missie. What a fright you gave me!" he said in his nice, kind, affectionate voice. He is very fond of all of us—a real old-fashioned English servant, who is more of a friend than anything else, as Aunt Victoria says. "What are you doing out here at this time—come to watch the soldiers?" I asked him.

"Oh, no, miss. I was just about seeing whether there mightn't be one or two cart-loads of gravel by the hedge there where they have been digging. I thought I might be able to get them to let me have it cheap, and it would do nicely to mend those holes in your auntie's garden path where the drippings have come from the rain off the porch roof; and then I went into the house here, so as to get a bit of shelter for lighting a pipe—too much breeze outside."

Somehow I couldn't help feeling at the time that there was something very queer about Penny that afternoon. To begin with, talking about "a breeze" when it was so still and frosty that one could hear the chinking of the R.E.'s forge and the sawing of some planks in their workshops simply miles away!

And, for the second thing, old Penny never has smoked for as long as I can remember. Mr. Lascelles's cigarettes were the first whiff of tobacco smoke that have profaned Aunt Victoria's curtains since the year Eighteen Hundred and Goodness Knows.

So how could our old Penny have imagined that he was going to light a pipe?

And I said to him: "You had better not let the 'Super-Filberts' catch you poking round their fortified house, Penny! They might arrest you on suspicion of being a German spy!" I was just joking, of course, to keep his spirits up. And, anyhow, the poor dear old fellow did smile at last. He said to me: "Bless your heart, my dear Miss Elizabeth! There ain't no soldiers going to think anything of that sort about an honest old man like me! They all know where I work, and all about me. They are civil to me, and no mistake."

And he went hobbling off, rheumatism and all.

I didn't want to go back home again so soon, as you can imagine. What I wanted was to put off as long as possible seeing again that Lonely-Subaltern-impersonating disgrace to the New Army, Mr. Lascelles.

So, instead of going straight down the road again, I turned down a lane that is rather a long way round, by the oyster beds.

It is a narrow lane, always muddy unless we have frost, when the ruts are as hard as very deep corrugated iron. There is a wood on each side.

I say, you must really excuse some more landscape just here, will you? because it really is part of the story. I have just got to put in those woods, because it was they that made the lane so very dark. The tall hollies on either side of it branch out overhead and turn it into a regular tunnel.

So that was how it happened that two figures ahead of me, strolling along, I hardly saw until I was right up to them.

And they didn't see me at all, being too fearfully absorbed in what they were saying to each other.

They were a tall girl and a young man in uniform—an officer.

Oh, of course, we have plenty of officers down here. Some of them have their wives and things down for the week-end, too.

So, though the man had got a massive-looking khaki arm about the girl's waist, and though she was leaning her head in that "loppy," helpless sort of way against his shoulder that I suppose must mean she's fearfully in love, I shouldn't have taken any notice of this pair if I hadn't heard the man's voice.

It was a voice I knew. It was the voice of that big, good-looking Captain Masters: you know, the forget-me-notty one who came to our party, with the black hair like pitch, with a crinkle in it.

And it—the voice, of course—was saying, just as I passed, these startling words:

"But look here, darling: look here, Nancy——"

I gave one startled glance, through the dusk, at the figure of the girl.

Yes, it was. There are only three girls, only three of us in this village who would look as tall as that standing by the side of a six-foot-fourer like Captain Masters.

It was my own sister Nancy! With the young man that I thought she hadn't even seen since the party, since she was out when he came to pay his duty-call! How—what——

Well, of course, there was only one thing to be done, and that was to pass on as quickly as I could, pretending that I hadn't seen them. (They really hadn't seen me.)

I have my faults, goodness knows! Hot-tempered I may be. Vulgar and outspoken, Evelyn says I am, very often. And it is not for nothing that I have been nicknamed "Rattle." I suppose I do really talk rather a lot?

But no one shall ever say that I am not a sports-woman!

So I didn't breathe a word to Evelyn, when I got home this evening, of the terrific surprise I had been just given by our fair young sister! However, I didn't see why I shouldn't tax Nancy with it later on. So, after tea (where Mr. Lascelles never turned up) I took her aside, and said I had simply got to speak to her. I dragged her into the linen-room, which is a funny little warm, lavender-scented cubbyhole two steps down from the garret, where our poor old Penny, the gardener, has been put for the benefit of his rheumatism.

"I say, you are greedy," I said to her as a start off.

"Greedy?" said Nancy, opening her enormous innocent-looking blue eyes at me. "Do you mean because I have finished all those chocolates of Mr. Lascelles's? You know Evelyn had a box of her own, and you never will touch any sweets that unfortunate young man brings into the house, so——"

"Nothing about chocolates," I said, cutting it short. "But what about a girl who in the same week allows one young man to kiss her, and another to get on 'darling' terms with her?"

For a moment Nancy didn't say a single word. By the light of the tiny blue fairy light in the linen-room I saw that she had got the family blush well on!

There really are drawbacks to being the possessors of these dazzling fair skins like all of the Verdeleys have got.

Then she drew a long breath and said in a resigned little voice: "I suppose you mean ... just before tea?"

I nodded. "The—er—the second Prince Charming is a good deal better-looking than the first one," I told her. "That I will say for you."

"But—but, Rattle," began Nancy, in a half-horror-struck, half-puzzled tone, "how could you—how did you know?"

"Passed you just now in the lane when you were too wrapped up in your flirtation to see who was walking up behind you."

"Flirtation?" cried Nancy, quite sharply. "It isn't any flirtation!"

"What? What?" I put in, thrilled. "D'you mean it's what they call in books The Real Thing?"

"Rather," said Nancy, as if she meant it from the bottom of her heart, and then she pulled up as if she'd said what she wasn't going to.

I clutched her nice plump arm, "Nancy! Are you really very in love with him, and him with you?"

"Don't! Please don't ask me any questions!"

"You're engaged to him, then?"

"No!" said Nancy, in an uncertain sort of voice.

"What? Not engaged to him," I said, angrily. "Oh! If he's just a philanderer, like they have on the stage——"

"He—he's nothing of the kind——"

"If he is, and he's just passing the time away by making love to the prettiest girl here, and then going to ride away leaving her to break her heart——"

"But he isn't: he isn't. Rather not! Oh, my dear child, I can't explain," Nancy said, half laughing, half crying. "I assure you it's all right!"

"That means that you are engaged."

"I never said so," murmured Nancy, dimpling.

"I don't care what you 'say.' I suppose you call it 'an understanding.' A girl at school's sister had one of those for six months once, and it meant that nobody could go into the drawing-room when she was there with the young man and that she never looked at anybody else and that they got married in the usual way: so what the difference is," I said, "I can't see!"

"Perhaps not. Only, Rattle, you will be a brick, won't you?" she said very coaxingly. "You will prrrromise you won't breathe a word of——"

"You needn't have asked me that," I said, hurt. "Awful I may be. But at least I'm not a sneak."

"Oh, I know, I know! Only you might forget, and rag me before Evelyn, and Evelyn would be—— You know what Evelyn would be like!"

I nodded. "A conscientious objector."

Then I thought of something. Just as Nancy was going to slip away, I caught her arm again.

"You might tell me just one thing."

"No, Rattle, no. I'm not going to answer any questions. I can't now. 'Tisn't fair."

"It is! It's nothing to do with your—with him. It can't make any difference if you tell me just this.

"What, then?"

"This. I may be the youngest of the family, and too young and ignorant to know anything at all," I began (meaning it sarcastically, of course), "but I can guess some things. I can see from your face——"

Here Nancy turned her pretty face away.

"I could see from your face," I persisted, "that what's happened means something absolutely wonderful to you."

She gave my hand a little squeeze, "You darling Baby! You'll know yourself, some day——"

"Yes, but what I want to know now is, doesn't it make you sorry that you let Mr. Curtis kiss you at the party?"

She stared at me. "Sorry? What's it got to do with it? Why should I be sorry?"

"You don't feel," I asked, "that you've wasted something that ought to have been saved up for—for the real love affair?"

Nancy laughed like anything. "My dear Rattle! My dear Kid!"

"Thanks: a year younger than you, aren't I?"

"Yes, but—oh, as if that had anything whatsoever to do with this!" cried Nancy, still laughing. "Oh, what a lot of mistakes there must be made in this world by people making up their minds to believe there's only one kind of kiss!"

And then she ran downstairs, leaving me to ponder over the doings of a very crowded day.

CHAPTER X

THE ZEPPELIN NIGHT

When I said it had been "a crowded day" I only meant at the time crowded with the little affairs of the Verdeley family. My finding out first of all about that unforgivable Incubus and his "Lonely Subaltern" trick and our quarrel for one thing! And, for the other thing, my coming unexpectedly upon Nancy's romance. For it is a romance. How they have managed it in such a short time I don't know. But here she is actually engaged. Ahem! I mean, of course, having an understanding with this Captain Masters, whose name we hadn't heard a fortnight ago.

Really it reminds me of that old poem:

"A roving eye, a soldier's mien,
A doublet of the blue,
No more of me you knew, my love—
No more of me you knew."

In this case, of course, the doublet is made of what the London Mail tells you is the only key to a woman's heart—khaki!

How I should like to know every detail about just how it all happened! I must get Nancy to tell me every atom of that as soon as the "understanding" has blossomed out into a proper engagement.

Yes, here's Nancy, if you please, only just twenty and flying straight in the face of our parents' will that sent us down to this God-forsaken place on purpose so that we mightn't rush into the madness of an early love affair before the age of twenty-five!

What would our parents have said to this?

However, those two bombshells are not the only ones that have fallen on this place to-night. Between eleven o'clock and half-past we had, by way of a little change, some real ones!

An air raid over Mud Flats! That is the latest!

I heard the sound of "bang, bang, bang!" outside when I was in bed. Immediately I popped up and slipped on my dressing-gown and nipped across the passage to Evelyn's room, which looks out on to the front. Nancy was there already. Then out bounced Aunt Victoria in a million shawls and an eider-down and a most worried look, and her grey hair like a bird's nest with hoar frost on it. All this time "bang, bang, bang," was still going on outside, with a deep "Brrr—Rroum! Brrr—Roum!" that we seemed to hear in our bones, first of all. We were told afterwards that these were the guns from the cruiser in the Bay outside Mud Flats.

And then we heard a tap at Evelyn's door, which we'd left open.

And then, looking up, we beheld the weirdest little figure in bright-blue-and-cream-striped pyjamas, with red hair standing bolt upright on end, like a baby's just rumpled from its cot.

"Don't be frightened! I say, it's quite all right," said a voice that I suppose was intended to be awfully encouraging and dauntless, though, as a matter of fact, all of us girls were far more excited than frightened.

"The thing's gone over now! And, anyhow, you have got a man in the house." This was, if you please, our awful Incubus—the Lascelles boy!

I suppose he was the only object in pyjamas that Aunt Victoria had ever seen in her life (since I know she said that our uncle Edward always used to wear a good old-fashioned nightshirt). So possibly she thought that Mr. Lascelles had gone into mufti and was wearing the very latest and "nuttiest" thing in lounge suits. (She really is as ignorant as that about men!) What I mean to say is that she didn't look in the least shocked: she who always used to consider it a sign of being extra nice to be shocked at everything but an overcoat! Isn't it funny? And it was actually she, if you please, who suggested that we should all have cups of cocoa and pieces of cake to help us to "compose ourselves" before we went off to sleep again: not only that, but that she meant Mr. Lascelles as well, of course! So there he stayed, looking something like an illustration of "Toy-Town" in The Sketch, and bustling about in that zebra pyjama-suit, and that hair, handing cups and gobbling cake, and jabbering away to all of us—I mean, of course, to all of them.

Neither of us has spoken a word to the other since that echoing moment when I slapped his face for him in the dining-room, and I don't see any particular reason why we ever should speak again.

I am not going to apologise for having lost my temper with him: he deserved everything he got—and I don't suppose he is going to apologise for his "Lonely Subaltern" trick—so there we shall remain.

I forgot to say that, of course, both the servants were crowded in as well to that Zeppelin cocoa party in Evelyn's room. Mary, the housemaid, was the only one of our party who seemed at all hysterical. She came in Hinde's curlers and pink flannelette. She began to whimper about this being the end of everything, and how we had all come to the last hour of our lives.

This was when cook, in a grey golf-cape and carpet slippers, rounded on her, and said: "Well, if it is the last hour, it has come at a very good time for you, and don't forget it! Wasn't it your evening out? Didn't I see you, with my own eyes, trapesing down the market place with Lance-Corporal Gateshead going to the pictures?"

(I forgot to explain that, among other changes, there actually is a Picture Palace at Mud Flats now, for the benefit of the soldiers.)

"And even if you do get killed by them Germans to-night, at least you saw the new film of Charlie Chaplin the last thing before leaving! So I don't see what you have got to complain of, you ungrateful thing!" said cook. "If you was like poor old Mr. Penny, now, who had that bad attack of screwmatics for his last evening——"

That suddenly reminded us of poor old Penny—the only member of the entire household who wasn't gathered there in Evelyn's little room.

"I wonder if he has slept through all this racket?" said Aunt Victoria, rather anxiously. "If not, I am afraid he must have been rather terrified, poor old man."

"Penny? Is that your old gardener chap with the wig—the one who is always nosing round the camps for leaf-mould and groundsel for your canary, and that sort of thing?" said the Incubus quickly. "Sleeps in the attic, does he? Well, I will just pop up to him."

And off he popped in his red Turkish slippers.

We heard voices from Penny's room, Penny's sounding rather angry.

Presently the Sight in pyjamas came down, and said: "He's all right. He wasn't frightened a bit, unless he is scared by my language!"

"Language!"—just fancy, to dear old Penny, our faithful old servant! In the middle of a Zeppelin Night! Did you ever hear anything so disgraceful?

I think even the Incubus noticed my look of stony disapproval, for he went on rather hastily to explain: "I told the old Johnnie he'd simply got to keep his skylight covered. He'd lighted his lamp, just to hearten himself up, he said——"

Poor old fellow! As if he knew what he was doing in his nervousness and flurry!

—"But there was light enough to see beyond the Martello Tower. I don't think it will happen again," wound up that interfering parrot of an Incubus. "Good-night, everybody!"

Everybody said "Good-night," except me. I hope he noticed that I didn't even look at him. When I got back to my own room and went straight to the glass to see whether I had been looking as dignified and mature as I'd been feeling, I was annoyed when I saw myself. What with my two fat golden plaits hanging down on each side of my face and the soft muslin collar on my sky-blue dressing-gown and the pale pink ribbon showing from my nightie, I looked years and years less than my real age. I might have been fifteen-and-a-half!

Girls? Can you imagine anything more maddening?

CHAPTER XI

THE MAKING OF A MAN-HATER

Great excitement this morning in Mud Flats: assessing the damage that has been done by the Raid! And, after all, that's not much.

Most of the bombs had fallen into a soft mud bank off the Hard. One had been dropped near the doctor's back-door and had killed a fowl. Two—I mean two bombs, not fowls—had just missed the Martello Tower and the magazine that holds explosives for the Instruction Class.

"Bit of a bust-up if they'd got that!" I heard the Incubus saying to Evelyn at breakfast. "Might have consoled them for not having killed a single kiddy this time. But perhaps they know the youngest inhabitant in Mud Flats is nearly seventeen——"

Did he mean me? DID he? He was quite horrid enough to.

"Dear me, Mr. Lascelles, how could the Germans know that?" put in the drowsy voice of our Aunt Victoria from behind the new coffee-machine. "They can't have any spies here. Not here in the village."

He laughed and said: "Oh, no spies in Mud Flats. Oh, decidedly not—what?"

And then laughed again—silly idiot! It's just one of his thoughtless habits, since, of course, there was absolutely nothing to laugh at. However, never mind about the Lascelles boy. I've got something much more interesting to think about now.

You see, I can't help feeling frightfully excited and inquisitive about Nancy's affair with Captain Masters. She has not said a word about it to me ever since the Zeppelin night, and I haven't asked, only I can't help knowing that she is absolutely at the high tide of a happy engagement. It seems to me to shine all out of her: out of her blue eyes, out of every single crinkly curl of her golden hair: she seems to bring a wave of it with her into the house when she comes in from those errands to the village which always take her such an unconscionable time. I suppose because she always comes back by the shady lane? The whole atmosphere of the Grange is seething with it. Perhaps it is only because I have the key to this affair that I feel it is too strange that nobody else should guess anything about it. Yet nobody does suspect. Aunt Victoria goes on knitting as usual. Evelyn goes on doing the usual things, bandaging-class, sewing, and practising. The Incubus comes and goes in his awful boots. Mr. Curtis has been to call several times. Nobody seems to think of there being any understanding between our Nancy and the best-looking officer in Mud Flats!

But I do so wish that, instead of just bubbling over with silent happiness and smiles, Nancy would tell me something. If she would only enter into one single detail about it! Really it would be an act of charity to her youngest sister. For, beyond that, I don't seem to have anything in the wide world to interest me now.

Both my sisters are so altered: lost to me. Evelyn because, ever since the night of the party, she has taken such a fit of virtuousness and conscientiousness that we can hardly talk about anything without her being shocked. And Nancy because she is in the middle of the throes of first love and a secret engagement! As for me, among all the coming and going of soldiers and sailors in this place, I don't seem to have a single "special" that I want to be interested in me, or that I can possibly be interested in. I tell you what I think is the matter with me. I think I am utterly disillusioned—disillusioned at eighteen! I am absolutely "off" men. I don't think that I shall ever, as long as I live, be able to like one. Seriously, I mean it. Of course, you can guess whose fault that is: this horrible little Mr. Lascelles! The fact is, living in the house with some one whom one so thoroughly dislikes is enough to sour one's temper and warp one's whole nature for ever! The last straw to it, of course, was when he robbed me of the new interest that I was beginning to feel in my life, my "Lonely Subaltern." Yes, indeed! when my pet aversion turned out to be the same person as my unknown friend, that really did send all the "fair dreams crashing down to ruin," as it says in books.

I don't think any one can blame me for being a bit of a man-hater, after all?

* * * * * * * *

(Later.)

Nancy actually has vouchsafed a word to me at last! Not that it is much. She came into the drawing-room just now with a very woebegone face and asked everybody in general whether they had any toothache cure in the house. This was a bit of a surprise. You see, the one advantage of belonging to the Verdeley family is that the curse of toothache never has been known to them, from the cradle to the grave!

Our teeth all "come easily" when we are babies and teething. And when we get the second set they jolly well stay with us until the end of our lives. Even Aunt Victoria, who is twice a Verdeley, having married her cousin, even Aunt Victoria hasn't got a single gold crown or stopped tooth or atrocity of that kind in her head!

And father was the same. And we have all inherited it from him, thank goodness! So that I don't wish to boast, but we can't help realising that the combined teeth of the Verdeley girls are like nothing in the world but a long, completely-perfect string of white pearls. Hence the surprise when Nancy, with the corners of her mouth drawn well down, and her hand over one very pink cheek, murmured disconsolately that "she had such a racking toothache, and she wondered if anybody in the house had got any Nerve-Soother?"

Nobody had, of course.

Then Mr. Lascelles said he would nip off to the chemist's for a bottle.

As usual, on these occasions when you want to buy something in a hurry, it was Early Closing Day. The only chemist had gone off to Nowhere Junction. So then he (the Inc.) had to clatter away on his motor-cycle to Mr. Curtis's billet, at the other end of the town. Finally, he raised a small bottle of chlorodyne. This I took up to Nancy's bedroom, where she was lying stretched on a couch of pain with her thick emerald-green blanket-coat spread over her—(I told you she had given her pink eiderdown to the Incubus)—and Evelyn, hovering over her, was saying, "I'm afraid you'll have to make up your mind to go to the dentist's," and offering Nancy a bottle of "Eau de Cologne" and some cotton-wool, which she was faintly refusing.

"This will be better," I said, producing the chlorodyne. "It comes 'with Mr. Curtis's profoundest sympathy.'"

The mere mention of Mr. Curtis sent Evelyn out of the room. You know, she disapproves of him so awfully since the night of the party.

"Try and stick some of this into your tooth, old thing," I said consolingly. "Is it very bad? Open your mouth, and let me see which one it is."

"Oh, it's right at the back," moaned Nancy, touching her cheek.

"Why, that's the other side of your face from what it was this afternoon," I said.

"Yes, I think it must be a kind of neuralgia: it flies all over the place," said my sister, in a stifled voice. "Evelyn is quite right. She thinks the only thing to be done is for me to go to the dentist and see where the trouble really is."

"But if it's neuralgia," I said, "going to the dentist won't do it any good."

"Oh, yes, I am sure it will," said Nancy hastily. "I think going to the dentist will be absolutely the only thing to do. I expect there's a tooth at the bottom of it, really."

In fact, she seemed as anxious to go there as most people are to stop away. A thought came to me.

"Young Nancy," I said firmly, "open your mouth and let me have a look at those teeth of yours."

"No," objected Nancy. "You're not a dentist, Rattle. You wouldn't be able to do any good."

"All right, then I'll go away," I said, and moved to the door.

Nancy glanced at me. I think she saw it was no good pretending any longer.

"Open your mouth," I insisted.

Well, she opened her pink mouth, wide. I gave a peep in. And, of course, every one of her thirty-two teeth was as white and sound and efficient-looking as those of a young terrier!

"Oh, you fraud!" I said, looking her full in the face.

Nancy pursed up her mouth again, and a whole swarm of dimples immediately broke out over her face.

Then she said, meekly, "But, Rattle, dear, I have got to get to the dentist's somehow."

"You mean that somehow you have got to fib your way to Nowhere Junction," I said severely, "so that you have a chance of meeting Captain——"

"S-sh," said Nancy.

"I won't s-sh," I said. "You know you are only making an opportunity to meet your fiancé!"

"Oh, Rattle, darling, don't shout so loud," Nancy said softly, although as it happened I was only talking in a whisper. "If you ever were fond of me do stand by me now."

I leaned over her and hugged her through the blanket-coat.

"Of course, I am fond of you. You know you're my favourite person in the world. But I think you might let me know what I am standing by, and what I am supposed to do."

"Only see me through this! See that I manage to get up to Nowhere Junction to-morrow," said Nancy beseechingly. "You know that Aunt Victoria won't let one of us go there alone, and that Auntie won't go herself in this weather, because the frost is so bad for her bronchitis, so one of you will have to go with me, and I think it had better be you."

"Yes," I agreed. "I think it had better not be Evelyn. She wouldn't think it right. She would be shocked. We won't tell her."

You know it is curious, but as soon as people begin being "shocked" at things, like Evelyn, other people begin to leave off telling them anything. So, quite soon, they don't have much left to be shocked at. This is what's called the wind being tempered to the shorn lamb, I expect. But to go back to the plans of my other sister. Nancy said: "The trains to-morrow are very inconvenient for——"

She paused.

"For the dentist, I suppose."

"Yes, for the dentist," said Nancy, with more dimples. "So I shan't be able to go over by train."

"How then?" I asked, looking down at her.

"I shall go in the side-car of—of somebody's motor bicycle," planned that disgraceful Nancy, as demurely as you please. "He is going to offer (very kindly) to run me over to town."

"Well, then, he can't take me," I objected. "There is only room for one in that side-car of his."

"You will have to go in another side-car of another bicycle," decreed Nancy. "That has been arranged, too."

"Who's going to take me, then?" I asked (with what you might call a not unnatural curiosity), "Mr. Curtis?"

"No," said Nancy. Then she added, rather hurriedly, "Mr. Lascelles says he will take you."

Immediately I stiffened all over myself, as if I had swallowed six pokers.

"Oh, does he?" I said indignantly. "Mr. Lascelles says he will take me? Does he? That's kind of him! Well, as a matter of fact, Mr. Lascelles will not take me. There are a few things which I draw the line at. This is one. I am not going with Mr. Lascelles."

"Rattle! Be an angel!"

"I will be anything you like," I said, "but not with Mr. Lascelles. I will do anything for you, but I won't have anything to do with him! I am fright' fully sorry to disappoint you, Nancy, old girl, but don't ask me any more, because if it is a case of Mr. Lascelles I will not!"

And I meant what I said: every syllable of it. I meant to stick to it. But!——

Well, you know the kind of argument that begins by one's being absolutely determined about something, and saying that whatever happens one will not, one will not give in. It generally ends in the same way. The most determined of the arguers gets the worst of it. The one who simply looked pathetic and allowed big tears to well up into her blue eyes comes off triumphant. This was what happened in the wrangle between Nancy and me.

"You couldn't be so absolutely horrid to your own sister," Nancy almost wept, "if you only knew how much it meant to me being able to get up to Nowhere Junction to-morrow without any bother and asking of questions! And you know that he—that people will probably be off to the Front in a fortnight!"

(By "people" of course she meant Captain Masters.) "And I may never be going to see him again," she mourned. "Oh! Rattle, think of that! ... If you were a little older you might understand how I feel about this. But really I think there is no one so callous and unfeeling about things as the very young," said Nancy, who is only just twenty herself, dash it all!

She said, "If I could only get you to go up with me to-morrow——"

I said, "I don't mind going. 'Tisn't that. It's only who I've got to go with! I don't mind coming with you, and disappearing into one tea-shop while you go into another, in the way that a really good chaperon ought to do, and then joining you about half a mile from home again when you come back! Only, my young friend, you will have to arrange so that I go in somebody else's side-car."

"My dear, there is nobody else with a side-car!"

"But half the officers here have got them," I protested.

"Yes, but there is not another of the officers here that I would like to know about Harry—I mean about—you know who—and myself," said Nancy, getting agitated about it again. "You know that Mr. Lascelles is a pal of his, a very old chum, and Captain Masters knows that he can trust him to the uttermost——"

"That shows that he doesn't really know the Incubus's true character," said I, bitterly thinking of my own disillusionment about the "Lonely Subaltern."

"I don't see how you can pretend to know poor Mr. Lascelles," said Nancy to me quite indignantly. "You hardly speak to him! You won't look at him! And it is such a pity, Rattle, you know, because——"

"Well, because what?"

"Because he likes you so awfully much," said Nancy.

I laughed cynically, as it says in books. "Thank you," I said, "but I happen to know what the Incubus thinks of me!"

I remembered the icicles in his eyes the other day, just after I had slapped his face. (However, Nancy could not be expected to know anything about that.) She went on, sitting up on the bed and clutching her blanket-coat round her, for you know how piercingly cold it gets up in a bedroom this weather? She said, "Rattle, you don't know what he thinks, and, as a matter of fact, I do, since—well, since I've known one of the soldier men here pretty well. Because I hear a good deal about what all the others say. And they all say the same thing, Rattle. They say that Frank Lascelles is most frightfully fond of you."

This absolute rot annoyed me so much that I skipped up off the bed where I was sitting at Nancy's feet and was just going to bolt out of the room and not take the slightest notice of anything further that she said. However, Nancy grasped me firmly by the arm.

"Stop! you must listen," she said. "It's too bad that you are being so horrid to him. All the boys, my Harry, and Mr. Curtis, and the adjutant, say exactly the same thing—poor old Frank has been absolutely 'pottie' about the youngest of the girls at his billet ever since he first came here, and—— No! stop, Rattle! You are to hear it! They say, some of them say, that you must like him quite a lot, for it's always a sign of a girl's taking a really violent interest in a young man when she won't have anything to say to him in that very marked manner!"

"Oh!" I said, bouncing up and down on the bed in my annoyance. "How dare they say anything so absolutely idiotic? If they only knew me at all they would realise that nothing could possibly be further from my—why!—— You know——"

"Yes, I know, Rattle," said Nancy. "But, you see, they don't. What they think is that you don't know whether Mr. Lascelles is merely a flirt or not!"

"As if I cared what he is!"

"They think," pursued Nancy, "that you are just keeping out of his way because you are afraid of getting too fond of him!"

"Me, afraid of that?" I said, rocking with indignant laughter. "Oh, is that what they think?"

"So I understand, my dear!"

"Very well, then, I will see that they do understand," I cried indignantly. "I shan't care tuppence how much I am with that horrid little blot on the landscape. I will go and positively live in his pocket for the next week! I shan't like it, nor will he. But never mind. Anything to put a stop to this maudlin, puerile gossip of those young men," I said as witheringly as I could.

"Never mind about his pocket, Rattle," Nancy took up in her most coaxing tone again, "but if you will only go in his side-car——"

"Very well—I just will," I said, with the calmness of desperation, "if you like!"

So that was how that was settled!

What a day it will be——

There's one thing that I can have a quiet mind about though, at all events.

Nobody can accuse me of "using a side-car for pleasure."

"Pleasure!"

Ha, ha!

CHAPTER XII

THE ANYTHING-BUT-JOY RIDE

To begin with, I thought that our chaperon, our respected guardian, who is supposed to be so frightfully particular about us, I thought she would be a difficulty.

But, do you know, a change has come over our Aunt Victoria? It is not the first time I have noticed it, either, since the troops have been here at Mud Flats. What with constantly entertaining masculine men in this house, and knitting khaki silk ties for the Incubus, and having coffee and bacon for breakfast, and getting champagne out of the cellar for that party—well, I don't recognise Auntie: I honour bright don't. It sometimes seems to me as if she were thoroughly disorganised. And it has been a great shock to me, I can tell you!

All this is to show you how paralysed with surprise I was to find that Aunt Victoria seemed to think absolutely nothing of Nancy's proposed expedition.

She said: "Yes, dear. Toothache must be a terrible thing. And it is far better to have the tooth out at once, and have done with it. And I am sure it is very kind of Captain Masters to run you up to the Junction——"

Imagine it! She went on:

"Yes, and you want Rattle to go with you, I expect, to hold your hand? Did you say that Mr. Lascelles said he would take her? That will be nice. What time are you going to start?"

So that was that.

As for the time when we did start, it was about eleven. Nancy, for reasons best known to herself, had decided upon eleven o'clock in the morning. Goodness knows how the two young officers managed to explain things to their C.O. or whoever it is: whether they fibbed, or told the truth, or got sick-leave, or a funeral, or an operation for appendicitis, I suppose I shall never hear. Anyhow, they'd what they called wrangled it.

So at ten minutes to eleven there we both were, waiting at the door of the Moated Grange. Both of us wore our little brown leather hats and our big emerald-green belted blanket-coats, which we had all three got alike. Of course, Nancy, the little scoundrel, had taken care to have her face well wrapped up in a big white woolly Shetland shawl to keep the draught from getting into that poor aching tooth of hers!

Mr. Lascelles had already wheeled up what he calls his "bus" and stood by it, waiting, all wrapped up and interned in that hideous belted waterproof garment, with a rug-strap about the waist of it, and the cap and the goggles, and that general get-up of a motor-cyclist that makes a man look a cross between a navvy and a diver.

When Nancy was being helped to her seat by Captain Masters, and was having about six extra rugs brought out for her by Evelyn (who really is the sweetest thing when anybody is in pain or trouble), and Aunt Victoria was impressing upon the poor sufferer to mind and not take cold in the empty place when the tooth came out, and while cook was also telling her that she would have some nice camomile tea warmed up for her when she got home—when all this quite unnecessary fuss was going on over "poor darling Nancy," the Incubus turned to me. He had brought a big scarlet rug lined with fur, and this he began, rather gingerly, to tuck about me.

I had to let him, of course. I was supposed to be in his charge, just as Nancy was in Captain Masters's. How perfectly awful! What a completely-against-the-grain sort of day it was going to be! Little Me making a sisterly sacrifice of herself for that naughty Nancy's sake—and thrown for hours, probably, into the hated society of the Incubus!

Oh, how I was going to enjoy myself! I saw it all coming.

(At least, I thought I did.

Little knowing how much more there was going to be than I had bargained for!)

Just before we started the Incubus actually did speak to me. It was the first time that he'd done this since that startling moment when I had slapped his face so hard in the dining-room.

"Quite sure you'll be warm enough, Miss Elizabeth?" he said.

And he spoke in a polite, not-quite-sure sort of voice, as if he thought probably when I spoke I should snap his head off.

I nearly did, too.

I felt fearfully inclined to speak very curtly to him.

Then I changed my mind again.

Captain Masters, looking a perfect dream in his coat and cap, but as if butter wouldn't melt in his handsome mouth, was standing close by. Quite suddenly I remembered what Nancy had told me about what Captain Masters had said the other men had thought about me and Mr. Frank Lascelles.

They actually thought that my being horrid to him meant that absurd thing, did they?—that it was all put on! Idiots! And possibly Captain Masters, the whited sepulchre, was waiting now to hear Mr. Lascelles get a snub from the youngest of the girls at his billet—a snub that he and all the rest of those idiotic young soldiers would go and interpret in exactly the opposite way!

Very well—all right, then he just shouldn't hear that.

So I turned round and said in the friendliest tone of voice that the Incubus had ever yet heard from me, "Oh, yes, thank you very much: I shall be beautifully warm under the nice red rug."

Well, anyhow, even if that tone of voice was no surprise to Captain Masters (who I don't believe heard it, he having his eyes simply glued to Nancy's every movement as if he were on a rifle-range and she were the target), it quite took aback the Incubus himself.

For he (the Incubus) opened his eyes and simply stared at me, and then, if you will believe it, he actually began to blush. What I could see of his face between the cap and collar had turned very nearly as red as that fur-lined rug that I nestled down into in the wicker carrier. Little dreaming, as I say, of the adventures I was destined to meet with before the day was over!

Well, in another minute we were off: Captain Masters and my sister clattering on ahead and the Incubus and I clattering a little way after them.

I found it awfully exhilarating. The fresh, frosty air shrieked in my ears and freshened my face and tried to find a loose lock of my hair to pull from under the little leather hat, but could not. I even enjoyed the rattle and the clatter and the speed. I quite forgot that my partner in this mad rush was not an amusing person, whom I would have liked, but my pet abomination himself! I forgot everything but the pleasure of the joy-ride itself—I couldn't help its turning out to be pleasure after all, could I?

I had heard them say that it was about three-quarters of an hour's run to the Junction, but I don't think we had been tearing along those roads between those long stretches of marshland for more than half an hour before the break-down occurred.

The rush got slower and slower, and finally petered out into dead standstill.

Don't ask me what had happened, because I really cannot tell you. It was more of that machinery, those things they have "gone wrong." There the machine stopped, and couldn't be got to go on again: although Mr. Lascelles nipped off and began fiddling with things and pulling at things and tugging at things, and saying, "What the—how the——" in a mutter to them. But "forrader" we did not get!

There we stayed, no more able to move on or back than the milestone near which the blessed motorcycle had taken it into its head to come to a standstill.

"I say, this is perfectly awful: what on earth is to be done?" muttered the Incubus at last, pushing his cap back from his fevered brow, and gazing at me with a very woebegone look. "We could leave the thing here and walk on to the Junction, and find some one there to come back and patch us up, but even if I did that there wouldn't be time——"

I didn't quite know what he meant by that. Time? Why, there would be heaps of time, since Aunt Victoria had agreed that she wouldn't expect to see us back until after tea-time. We were supposed to be going to have lunch at a confectioner's, and perhaps on to the picture palace, after Nancy had finished having her tooth out!

And here was the Incubus, standing by the petrified motor-cycle and looking as if the end of all things had come, just because he couldn't be at the Junction at the same time as his friend and my sister!

And he looked most fearfully distressed.

I must say that some men show to better advantage when they are upset and troubled than when they are larking about and perfectly cheery and uppish: it was so with the Incubus. Much as I always have hated that little object, and horrid as he has been to me about the "Lonely Subaltern," I must say this for him—that he seemed almost quite nice and boyish and simple as he stood there looking really desperately anxious. I actually found myself so far forgetting that we were at daggers drawn that I smiled quite encouragingly at him.

"Cheer up," I said, "it isn't your fault. Even if my sister does have to go to the dentist and have her tooth out without me being there to hold her hand it won't really matter so deadly much: she isn't going to have gas, but she won't feel it a bit," I said. "I believe they freeze the gum or something."

This I rattled out glibly in the way that we had all been talking about Nancy's toothache at home. You see, I didn't know how much the little Incubus knew about its all being what you could only describe as a "put-up job."

He looked at me very hard; then I began to wonder if he had suspicions about the "put-uppishness" of it. He said doubtfully, "I am afraid your sister will be most fearfully fed-up with me."

Then, I thought, he couldn't know?

If he had only known he would have realised that Nancy and Captain Masters would be only too delighted if they never caught sight of us again for the rest of the day.

So I said, still sitting in the car while he stood there, a perfectly abject little figure of despair in the roadway, "My sister won't mind! I think she had too bad toothache to care very much who is with her, and that she will be quite glad not to see us turning up until the tooth is out and it's all over. You know, we can walk on, or you can walk on to the nearest farm or inn, or something, and see if you could get some sort of trap."

"Yes, that's all right. I had thought of that," said little Mr. Lascelles, still in that absolutely disconsolate voice, as if the most dire catastrophe had happened. "The only thing is——"

Here he seemed to pull himself together and take a resolution. He looked straight at me and said: "I want to ask you something: you do know, don't you?—I mean—you do know about that toothache tale of your sister being all bunkum?"

"Oh, I know all about it," I said, seeing that it was the only thing to say, and realising that he must know everything now.

"You do know all about it?" he repeated. "You're sure you do?"

"Yes," I said.

Then he said: "Well, then, you must know, of course, why we shall all be so awfully sick if you and I can't turn up in time?"

This was very mysterious.

"What do you mean, exactly?" I said.

He stared at me.

"Why, Miss Elizabeth," he said, "you said you knew?"

"I do know," I said impatiently. "I know that my sister Nancy has no more had toothache in her life than she's had spotted plague: I know that that is simply a piece of new-six-shilling-fiction from beginning to end: I know that what she wants to get to the Junction for is simply so that she can have lunch in town and go to a matinee tea and that sort of thing with your friend, Captain Masters."

"Tea? And a matinee?" exclaimed the Incubus, suddenly, at the top of his voice. "Ha, ha!"

He let loose that extraordinary loud laugh of his for two seconds. Then he was serious again. He said: "But, Lord-love-a-duck! if you thought that, you can't know what we have all come up to town for?"

What on earth could he mean?

"Tell me what you mean," I said, gazing at the Incubus. "Tell me at once." But he didn't tell me. He stood there trying to gnaw his moustache, which was rather difficult, as he hasn't got nearly as much moustache as I have eye-lashes. He muttered: "Why on earth couldn't Harry Masters have told me how much everybody knew instead of leaving it all vague and indefinite like this?"

"It is you that is leaving everything vague and indefinite," I persisted from the side-car. "For goodness' sake tell me what it was that Captain Masters ought to have told you!"

The Incubus opened his mouth.

But at that moment a motor-car swept round the curve of the road, and immediately Mr. Lascelles started up and hailed it. It was coming from the Junction, and it was driven by a woman.

She wore a cloth hat nearly down to her mouth and a big cloth coat with a fur collar buttoned nearly up to her eyes, so you couldn't see what she was really like.

Little Mr. Lascelles went up to her and saluted as she slowed down, and began: "I say, I am most awfully sorry, but——"

Here the motoring woman interrupted him by calling out in a surprised and brisk and pleasant voice: "Frankie! why, Frankie!"

"Oh! by Jove! I say, if it isn't Sister!" exclaimed Mr. Lascelles.

Then he said: "It's luck meeting you again like this." Then he said to me: "I want to introduce you to a very old friend of mine. This is Miss Elizabeth Verdeley, from where I am staying at Mud Flats," he explained to the woman in the car. "And this is Miss Gates."

"Finish it up, Frankie, and say it is your nurse," said the woman in the car with her brisk laugh, and she added to me, "I steered him through appendicitis, you know."

"And I would have gone out, too, but for her," said the Incubus, with quite a serious look on his school-boyish face. "I gave her an awful lot of trouble, but she insisted on pulling me through."

"Well, what's the trouble now, Frankie? Never mind about digging up all these tender memories, but tell me what's the matter now," said the woman in the car. "Break-down, is it?"

"Yes, worse luck!" said Mr. Lascelles ruefully. "We were going into the Junction, Miss Verdeley and I—fact is we have a most important appointment, which we didn't want to miss for anything."

"Oh, really?" said the motoring woman, glancing at me rather inquisitively over her full collar.

I gazed straight up at her, with a look of perfect candour and resignation. Meaning to convey that I knew just as much about this important appointment as she did herself, seeing that she had come up in the middle of his going to tell me what all this dark mystery was about my sister Nancy and her fiancé!

"I wish I could tow you into the Junction," then said the lady motorist. "But I have one of these important appointments myself, Frankie. I have simply to go on and meet somebody on business at the village beyond Mud Flats. You know, I have a nursing home of my own now for wounded officers at the Junction?"

"Oh, have you? Good! you will see me turning up there one day and getting you to spoil me again after the Boches have had a good shot at me," said Mr. Lascelles, adding: "Well, if you must get on, we mustn't keep you. But look here, Sister, when you pass Mud Flats send somebody to the rescue, will you? Call at the blacksmith's and tell them to send somebody—anybody will do—to tinker up a motor-cycle."

"Right," said the motoring lady, gripping the wheel again. She gave a glance at me as she started the car. Her eyes were very bright and brown and shrewd-looking, I thought, and a little bit quizzical, too. She looked at me hard just before she waved her hand for good-bye. And then I began again: "You have got to tell me what all this fuss is about. You were just going to when your friend came up. Why should Nancy and Captain Masters want us to be there?"

Mr. Frank Lascelles made a funny little movement with the hands in his big brown woolly gloves: it was as if he was throwing everything to the winds. "All right, I'll tell you," he said. "They wanted us to be there because I promised to be the best man."

"What!" I exclaimed loudly. "But a best man is only a thing that they have at a wedding!"

"Yes, that's just it," said the Incubus, half laughing, half rueful. "However quiet a wedding is, people generally like to have somebody to see them off, somebody in the shape of a best man and a bridesmaid."

He added these surprising words:

"And you, Miss Rattle—Miss Elizabeth—I mean—were to have been the bridesmaid."

"But, good heavens! bridesmaid to whom?" I cried, feeling so bewildered that it would have been a relief to catch hold of the Incubus by his Burberried shoulders and shake him: he looked absurdly like a teddy bear.

"To whom do you suppose?" he said. "It has to come out sometime. To your sister and Harry Masters, of course."

"They are getting married?" I repeated in a sort of faint scream. "Married?"

"Yes, at twelve o'clock this morning," said the Incubus, shifting up his sleeve and looking at his wrist-watch. "It is twenty-five minutes to one now."

"Married!" I repeated in the faintest voice. "But they have hardly got engaged—if you can call it engaged! What did they want to get married for?"

"Oh! what does anybody want to get married for? I suppose because they are fond of each other. It seems the best kind of working reason, don't you think so?" said Mr. Frank Lascelles. "You must know that Harry was keen on your sister from the first minute, and that she liked him. He's a thundering good chap."

That seems to be about the utmost that one man can ever say of another whom he likes: "A thundering good chap"—which might mean anything or nothing. Ever since the troops came to Mud Flats I have heard one young man say that about some other young man every day. I suppose they think it's an expressive remark. To me it conveys nothing.

Besides, I didn't want to sit there in an icy sidecar talking about "thundering good chaps," when what I was pining to know was some explanation of this extraordinary thunderbolt that he had just hurled at my head.

I said, still gasping, "How long ago did they decide to get married?"

"Oh! about a fortnight, I suppose," said the Incubus. "Yes, about that."

"Why," I asked, "didn't they say anything about it?"

"Why? Because they didn't want a stopper put on it at once," explained the Incubus. "You see, Miss Elizabeth, we all know—I mean he knew about that arrangement of your relations saying that none of you girls were to think of rushing into early matrimony before you were twenty-five."

"Oh, you did know that?" I said indignantly. "You did discuss it? What a lot of gossips men are! Talk about a lot of old ladies! They are really nowhere in it with any collection of young men in a mess or a bar or a billiard-room!"

"Oh, come," said the Incubus. "We aren't as bad as that! You are severe, you know: the severest of you sisters, I think. But, anyhow, your sister Nancy and Harry Masters didn't see the point of waiting three mortal years before they settled things up, not to mention the fact that poor old Masters is due to get his orders in about a fortnight and may lose the chance of ever being able to marry her at all. Don't you see how rotten it would be for them?"

"Oh! yes, oh, yes: you needn't think I don't see their point of view," I said helplessly. "I think they are perfectly right, and it is just what I should like to do myself!"

"Would you?" said Frank Lascelles, in rather a surprised tone. I don't know whether he meant that he thought I had rather lost my own heart to that "thundering good chap" Captain Masters, but anyhow I went on hastily, "I mean if I were in Nancy's shoes. The only thing I can't understand is, why did she not tell me about it before?"

"Because she didn't want your auntie to reproach you with having known all about it and having kept it dark deceitfully," said Mr. Lascelles. "She meant to keep it from you till the last minute, she said." (And I thought it was the last minute.) "You see, we all three talked it over——"

"You talked it over with those two?" I said. "You have been deceitful all this time!"

"Oh, yes," he said, quite calmly. "I suppose I have. But this is war-time, after all. And 'all is fair in war.' What?"

A secret engagement: a runaway marriage! And here were the Incubus and I discussing the ins and outs of how it had happened in a sort of heart-to-heart way, as if we were the greatest chums, instead of at daggers drawn!

Who, I ask you, could ever have foreseen this weird situation?

With what they call in books the calm of despair, I asked the Incubus, "Do you know where these people intend to get married?"

"'Course I do. In church. St. Peter's it's called," said the Incubus, stamping his feet to try to get them warm on the iron-hard frosty road. "They've got the licence and all. That's been reposing in the pocket of Masters's woolly waistcoat for the last five days. With the wedding-ring. Thank goodness, he didn't give me that to hold, after all, as I told him he ought to," said the Incubus fervently. "They'd have been in a nice fix. Had to borrow the key of the church for a ring, or something of that sort. People did; once upon a time, didn't they?"

"Oh, never mind 'people,'" I said impatiently. "For goodness' sake tell me about Nancy and this—this eloper of hers. What were they going to do after the wedding—go off on a war-honeymoon to Brighton or something?"

"No: couldn't be done. Masters tried for leave, but couldn't get it," explained the Incubus. "Besides, I don't think the poor chap had a farthing to spare for Brighton and that sort of luxury. He's fearfully hard-up, you know. Got some millionaire relations who won't allow him a stiver. He and your sister were just going to get married, and then come back home, and say nothing whatsoever about it until just before he has to go off to France." Here he glanced again at his wrist-watch. "Quarter to one, by Jove!"

"Three-quarters of an hour late!" I chimed in. "Oh, do you think they will be waiting for us all this time?"

"Shouldn't think so," opined (good word, "opined": I've only just thought of it) the Incubus. "They'll have agreed to give the best man and bridesmaid part of it a miss by this time. Wait? Not if I know the bridegroom!"

"Oh, then, what are we to do?" I began again anxiously.

The Incubus said: "Masters said he was going to arrange for us all to have a spot of lunch together at the Royal Hotel after the ceremony. So we shall just have to go on and meet them there. That is, we shall go on if we can. I wonder if Sister will manage to get some help sent on from Mud Flats?"

I wondered too.

For what seemed like another two hours we fretted and fumed together on that icy, wind-swept bit of road, waiting, waiting, waiting....

And just as I was feeling so cold and numb that I'm sure it was as bad as being on any polar expedition, there was the welcome "pup-pup-pup" noise of another motor-cycle, and up came Greyson's man to put ours right.

He hopped off and brought out a whole heap of tools and instruments, and things that clattered and things that clinked. More "things they had," in fact, for setting right the other things that had gone wrong.

Well, he set to work, as I say, at the cycle, and presently it was all right again. Little Mr. Lascelles skipped into his seat again, and off we clattered towards the Junction.

"Better try the church first," said Mr. Lascelles. "We know they must have been there."

We tore through the town, which is a very old-fashioned one, with basement houses and bow windows and cobbled streets, and we drew up at last at the top of a hill at the entrance to a church.

Here Mr. Lascelles skipped off, and I put aside the red rug and got out of the side-car and followed him. We went up to the door. It was open. We peeped inside. I'd never been in it before: we don't go to the Junction much. It was a very dark church, with only the jewel-bright window glowing like a wonderful sunset at the east end above the altar.

A sort of awe crept over me as I looked round.

"There is nobody here," muttered Mr. Lascelles to me in a very low voice: but just as he was speaking there hobbled up a pew clerk or sexton or bell-ringer or something of that sort—a kind of shrivelled-looking man, with wispy white hair. He looked at us and whispered mysteriously: "Are you the party that the young officer and the lady was expecting here at twelve o'clock for that there wedding?"

"Yes, yes," I murmured, breathless with excitement. "What has happened? Hasn't there been any wedding yet?"

At the same time Mr. Lascelles was saying in a quick, low tone: "Yes, we're the party. Where are the others?"

CHAPTER XIII

THE SEARCH FOR THE BRIDE

"They left a message for you, sir," said the old man. "If another young orficer and a young lady was to turn up later I was to say that they had gone on to lunch at the hotel."

"Thought so: right you are, thank you very much," said Mr. Lascelles, slipping something into the old man's hand and turning out of the porch again towards the motor-cycle.

But I lingered for a moment in the porch all excitement. I said to the old clerk, or whatever he was, "Oh, but do tell me. Are they married? Were they married here? Has the wedding really happened, and is everything all over?"

The old man looked at me in distinct surprise at my excitement. Of course, he didn't know what a frightful surprise to me the whole wedding was, and that I had been dragged up to it to be a bridesmaid. Any one would think that a wedding was no more than a funeral to him! He blinked at me with his faded old eyes and said: "Oh, yes, Missy, the wedding has happened all right. The lady and gentleman were married at a quarter-past twelve. They said they couldn't wait more than a quarter of an hour before getting on with the wedding."

So the wedding had happened!

This was the thought that simply filled me as I took my seat again in the side-car that seemed to be becoming my permanent address. They were married—the first marriage happening in our family, and in such a different sort of way from anything that I had ever imagined.

A regular Gretna Green sort of romance!

Nancy married! No longer Nancy Verdeley, but "Mrs. Harry Masters." Mrs.!!

I wondered how long it would take me to get accustomed to the idea of that. Nancy, my favourite sister! Nancy, who went shares with me in everything! Why, you know, she and I (and Evelyn, too, for that matter) hadn't had a secret apart from each other all our lives until the time that the Camp of Instruction was formed at our back-of-beyond village!

That has made all the difference in the world: it has made each of us have our own private feuds and fears and prejudices and likings. I have had the affair of the "Lonely Subaltern" and my stand-up fight with the Incubus that I haven't told Nancy and Evelyn.

Evelyn has had—well, I don't know what, quite. I should say "nothing," but life is so full of surprises. I shall never think I know anything even about my sisters again. It is quite possible that even Evelyn has been through things that she hasn't told Nancy and me! And as for Nancy, she has capped the whole thing by launching out into a new life altogether.

She has taken the plunge: she is a married woman now. As for me, I suddenly felt quite shy at the idea of meeting her again for the first time after this extraordinary thing had happened. I should have to congratulate her, I suppose. And should I have to say "Harry" to Captain Masters, whom I scarcely know? How extraordinary to think that he is now quite a near relation—a brother-in-law!

We drew up at the white stucco entrance of the "Royal," a fearfully old-fashioned looking hostel with an enormous painting of King William IV. as a sign above the porch. We've passed it several times, but never been inside it, of course.

"We had better go in," said Mr. Lascelles, and in we went to a big, low, dark entrance place that seemed to be chiefly furnished by large glass cases containing stuffed white owls.

There were also a barometer, very dingy, and a lot of prints of gentlemen going fox-hunting by moonlight with nightshirts on, and in the middle of these early Victorian-looking things there was quite a modern landlady, with a very short skirt halfway up to her knees and her hair done in the very latest style.

Mr. Lascelles went up to her and asked if she could tell him whether Captain Masters was in the coffee-room, or if he had ordered lunch in a private room.

"Captain Masters, Captain Masters?" repeated the landlady; "I don't think he has been here at all this morning."

"Oh, he must be, Mrs. Ellis," said the Incubus. "He had arranged to come on here with—with a young lady, and the four of us were going to have luncheon together: they must have arrived before us."

"They are not here, I am nearly certain," said the landlady, looking most inquisitively at me.

I turned horrified eyes upon the Incubus. "What can have happened to them?" I said, but he only nodded encouragingly.

"Oh, they must be here," he insisted, then, turning to the landlady, he went on: "Are you sure you know who Captain Masters is?"

"Sure! me—why, I know him as well as I know you, Mr. Lascelles!" said the landlady, laughing in quite an amused way. Wasn't it funny that somebody miles away at the Junction should seem to know our officers from Mud Flats quite well? Any one would think they spent as much time here as there!

"Jim," called this Mrs. Ellis to a young man who was disappearing into the coffee-room, "is Captain Masters in the hotel?"

"No, ma'am," said Jim, whoever he might be. "There is only Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Brown and Captain Robinson having lunch. There is no Captain Masters at all."

"You would have been sure to see him if he had come in, Jim?" said the landlady.

"Oh, yes, ma'am. He couldn't have come in this morning without me knowing about it," said Jim.

"So, you see," said the landlady with a little nod to Mr. Lascelles.

"Oh, I do hope something awful hasn't happened," I murmured, gazing from him to the pert, powdered face of the landlady, and back again. "Oh, what do you think it can be?"

"Oh, some mistake, probably. He'll be shot at dawn about this, I expect," said Mr. Lascelles, still cheerily. "Either he or I have been idiotic, and got the name of the wrong hotel."

"Yes, he might have gone to the 'Queen's,'" suggested the landlady; "I know he often has been to the 'Queen's' has Captain Masters." Fancy his going to the "Queen's," a place I scarcely remember seeing, all the years we've lived at Mud Flats.

"Oh, thanks very much. Yes, I think we will try the 'Queen's,'" said Mr. Lascelles. "Come along, Miss Elizabeth, and, I say, don't be so upset: the 'Queen's' is only in the High Street, a few doors higher up. Good morning, Mrs. Ellis"—this was to the landlady. "We will try the 'Queen's' for our party."

So off we went and tried the "Queen's."

We drew a blank! Our party was not there. What next?

"Well, there are more than two hotels at the Junction," said Mr. Lascelles, surprising me again. He's only been three weeks in this neighbourhood, and yet he seems to know every single hotel here! The other thing that surprised me was that he really was most awfully kind in cheering one up. I think I shall have to begin to leave off calling him the Incubus—he didn't ask to be billeted at our house after all. He was almost brotherly as he said to me: "Don't you worry. We will try the 'Sportsman.' It is at the other end of the town."

So off to the other end of the town we rattled to try the "Sportsman."

And, if you will believe me, we met with the same disappointment there! Nothing had been seen or heard of our party. In the coffee-room, where we had been making inquiries, every waiter in the place said the same thing. I turned to the Incubus again with eyes of absolute despair and said: "They are not here: they are not anywhere. What—what in the world are we to do, Mr. Lascelles?"

"Oh, a very obvious thing, Miss Elizabeth," said the Incubus quite briskly. "Before we go another step or make another inquiry we are going to have some lunch ourselves here."

"Oh, no," I said drearily. "I don't want any lunch: I simply couldn't touch a crumb of anything."

"I could," said Mr. Lascelles, heartlessly. "After the whole morning hanging about in the bitter biting blast I am pretty sharp-set, I can tell you. I bet you anything you like that wherever Masters and his young Mrs. have got to they have had something to eat already. It is nearly two o'clock now.... Waiter!"

Well! before I could say any more I found myself sitting down at a round table in the bow window of the Sportsman Hotel, with before me a plate of very hot and savoury-smelling thick ox-tail soup.

Almost before I knew what I was doing I had begun to eat it.

My goodness! how delicious it was! I don't think I had ever tasted anything so lovely in my whole life. And before I had even begun to think how funny it was that I should be hungry, after all, I found that I had wolfed down the whole plateful.

I glanced apologetically across the table at Mr. Lascelles. I was afraid he must think: "Well, this young woman can't care very much what has happened to her sister, after all, by the way she is shifting the victuals." (You needn't be shocked at this horrible expression, because I have heard him use it himself, and it is just how he would put it.) However, as I say, Mr. Lascelles didn't seem to take the slightest notice of my disgraceful appetite. He merely went on ordering cold veal and ham pie, which came embedded in the most savoury jelly that I have ever tasted, and hot roly-poly made with lots of raspberry jam, and a great brown jug full of cream.

I know I made a perfect little beast of myself over both these two things. One thing kept me in countenance, and that was that Mr. Frank Lascelles's third helpings were quite as big as my second ones. Very little conversation took place over the meal.

But at the end of it, after we had both heaved deep sighs and turned to our cups of coffee, Mr. Lascelles smiled at me and said:

"There, that's better, isn't it? You poor little girlie! You know that you were beginning to look quite faint and ill from sheer starvation and anxiety."

Such a change seemed to have come over everything since this morning that if you will believe me I didn't even feel an impulse to slap the Incubus's face for having dared to call me "a poor little girlie."

"Little," you know! Me! Considering that I tower over him.

But, never mind, he had been so very kind all the morning, and so sympathetic and helpful, that I felt one ought to make allowances for his natural afflictions.

And, anyhow, at the moment he was my only friend, my only stand-by in the search for Nancy.

So I found myself looking at him in quite a friendly way as I asked him again, "What in the world are we to do next about finding our party?"

Only, this time I didn't hear my voice quite as agonised as it was before.

I didn't feel that things were quite so absolutely desperate, even if my sister and her brand-new husband had chosen to disappear, leaving no address!

It is wonderful what a difference to one's mental outlook is made by a little hot food when one is very hungry!

"Candidly," said Mr. Lascelles, "I don't see what more we can do about hunting those two to earth. I think, myself, that we shall have to give it up, Miss Elizabeth."

"To give it up?" I repeated, rather blankly.

"Yes," he said; "we have done everything we could: we have been everywhere—except to the dentist," he added, with a twinkle, "and now I think we had better do the Little Bo-Peep stunt."

"The which?" I asked, rather puzzled.

Mr. Lascelles explained, laughing, "Leave 'em alone, and they'll come home!

"They will come home after tea," he added, "so it seems to me quite the only scheme is for us to go home without them, and turn up at your aunt's with a hard-luck tale of the old motor-bike having crocked up. Which is quite true, too, for so she did," added Mr. Lascelles sedately.

"Very well," I said, feeling ever so much comforted as I put down my empty coffee-cup and rose to my feet, buttoning up the emerald-green blanket-coat again. "I suppose we had better go on now: I am quite ready."

"Oh, no, I don't think we are," Mr. Lascelles broke in. "You see, it wouldn't do for us to turn up home again at Mud Flats before the time settled on: that would look really very odd. We can't get back there until after tea-time; not for all the Eau in Cologne! If you don't mind, Miss Elizabeth (or, even if you do)," he added, "I am afraid you will have to resign yourself to an afternoon out with me."

I said: "Oh, I don't mind at all; why should I?" I said it in quite a pleasant tone of voice. And the funny part of it was that I really did mean what I said: I really was getting over some of my dislike of the little man. It was just like one of those old-fashioned songs that we had got in one of those antediluvian bound music-books in the Lair—a song that says:

"He's all right when you know him, but you've got to know him fust."

"Very well, then," said he. "We will have tea together at that quite jolly confectioner's in the High Street: but we won't start back until half-past five, as we had settled with your aunt that we should probably be out until then. So I think we had better put in the time at a matinee."

"Oh, a matinee!" I said, nearly skipping with joy.

If you will believe me, I hadn't been to a matinee since the dear dead days beyond recall, when I was at my last term at school, and we sixth-form girls were allowed as a great treat to be taken in a body one Saturday afternoon.

"There is quite a good touring company down here now doing a revival of Floradora," said Mr. Lascelles to me as we left the Sportsman Hotel. "Dear old Has-been—you have seen it, of course, Miss Rattle—I mean Miss Elizabeth?"

"No, I haven't," I told him, quite frankly. "As a matter of fact I haven't ever seen anything, except Coriolanus once."

"Oh, great Scott! Anything for a change," said Mr. Lascelles, but without laughing at me, as I was afraid he might. "I expect you will find this at least as amusing."

Well, I should just about think I did. Never in my whole life—no, never once—have I enjoyed myself as much as I enjoyed that. I really can't explain how absolutely top-hole it all was, or how different from the other affair that I went to at school: and, mind you, I don't exactly know why it should be so utterly different: perhaps it may be because at the Coriolanus show we were all packed into the second row of the pit, where we were decidedly squashed, as well as having to put up with a view of half the toques and bonnets in the place coming between us and the legs of the Romans on the stage.

Whereas now I was high above the heads of all the assembled multitudes, in a box! Yes, if you please, in a box! all to ourselves. I do think it was most frightfully extravagant of Mr. Lascelles, and I believe that Evelyn, for instance, would have been made quite uncomfortable by his spending golden sovereigns on her in this way. But what I say is, a young man's bound to waste money on something, so why shouldn't it be on a thoroughly deserving young woman? as a girl at school told me her cousin had said to her when he took her to Drury Lane in the holidays.

He, I mean Mr. Lascelles, also got me the most delicious box of chocolates, tied up with an enormous and lovely piece of pink satin ribbon, which will be the pride and glory of my best nightie for I don't know how long after this!

As for the play itself, well, of course, it seemed to me nothing in the world could ever be as beautiful!

The dresses! and the pretty girls! especially that simply lovely one who sang, "He insisted that she was his only love."

She was really so beautiful that she brought tears into my eyes!

Mr. Lascelles pretended to believe that she was forty if she was a day, but he needn't think that he took me in, because he didn't. A girl with hair and a complexion like that couldn't have been any older than Nancy!

By the way, all this time I was so thrilled by this unexpected orgy of theatrical delight that I am sorry to say I quite forgot about Nancy and her thrilling marriage and her disappearance, and what I was going to say to her when I met her again safe and sound under the aunt's roof, which she really honestly had no right to quit, and which she only bad quitted under false pretences, bless her!

I wish I could explain how glorious it was to hear the tunes we only knew from the Lair piano played absolutely splendidly by a real orchestra, with violins and things. At Coriolanus we had only had tiny little bits of music composed by somebody Elizabethan, played on the harpsichord or spinet or something between the acts.

What I say is, classical music is all right, but where is the tune?

And when I told him this, Mr. Lascelles quite agreed with me, too. The fact is, we have quite a number of tastes in common, really.

We were sitting in that confectioner's window in front of an enormous and lovely tea, which somehow I still managed to enjoy in spite of the more enormous lunch that I had had at two o'clock.

The most extraordinary part of the whole thing was that I should be enjoying myself so frantically in the society of some one I had hated so fervently for absolute weeks.

I was just thinking this, when I happened to catch his eye over the little round table with its pink table-cloth and pink chrysanthemums and pink and white china.

And, somehow, I don't know how, but somehow I realised just at that moment that Mr. Lascelles too was thinking of that furious quarrel we had had.

I felt the family blush coming on, so I buried my face in my teacup to hide as much of it as I could, and at that same moment Mr. Lascelles, leaning across the table, blushed too a little. I knew he wanted to say something about that ancient affair of the Lonely Subaltern. I guessed he would have liked to apologise. But he couldn't very well ask me to forgive him, could he? Not after he's just been giving me THE time of my life: it would look like bribery and corruption! It would look as if he thought I couldn't refuse, after all those chocolates with crystallised violets on the top, and all!

Those had nothing to do with it. Yesterday I should have thrown them at him!

But to-day, after the things we have been through together, after our being fellow-conspirators in a way over Nancy's khaki romance, and after that lovely matinee that he had taken me to, well, it is no use pretending that I shall ever feel so horrid about him again, because I shan't. I am really beginning to feel almost ashamed of myself!

So I thought there was only one thing to be done. I should have to apologise. In a funny little rush I said: "Mr. Lascelles, I—I—I am so sorry. Please will you forgive me?"

"Oh! Miss Elizabeth! No!"

"You mean you won't?" I said, quite chilled to the bone. "You can't forgive me for being so awful?"

"Oh you—I mean, there's nothing to forgive," blurted out Mr. Lascelles very quickly, "except what you have to forgive me!"

"Oh!" I said, awfully relieved. "Then there isn't that, because I've done it long ago, Mr. Lascelles!"

He looked at me hard over the dish of my favourite coffee cream éclairs, and said, "I think we are quits, and that it will be pax between us now, what?"

"Yes, please," I said.

And at that he put out his hand under the table-cloth and took hold of mine, squeezing it in a very warm and friendly way.

He said: "I wish you would do something for me, just to show that it really is pax."

"What?" I asked.

I wondered what on earth it was going to be.

And I should never have guessed, either. Then he said: "Will you allow me to call you by the name I was going to call you in those 'Lonely Subaltern' letters if they had ever come off? Do you remember it?"

Well, you know, I couldn't help remembering it, considering that it was a name which I had happened to rather like.

"Betty," I said.

He said again, "Let me call you 'Miss Betty,' then, will you?"

"Oh, I can't do that," I said, suddenly thinking of something. "The other girls know that I never could stand you. I mean, the other girls know that we haven't always got on together very well. And they have always been annoyed with me about it, and they would so tease me if they thought I had come round at last! You know how idiotic people are in that way? If they heard you suddenly call me by what is more or less a pet name they would laugh at me for ever," I explained.

He nodded, and smiled a little. "I see," he said. "Then it will have to be 'Miss Elizabeth' before them." He added, in a coaxing sort of tone that I had not heard from him before: "Can't it be 'Miss Betty' when we are just together out by ourselves like this?"

"We shall never be out by ourselves like this again," I said to him, and I couldn't help feeling just a trifle sad at the thought, for it had been a very jolly afternoon, in spite of my heartrending anxiety about my sister, and she was married, after all, and jour husband is supposed to look after her—you, I mean. "And really we must be getting home now," I said, picking up my gloves again.

There was no accident this time on the road, and we had a simply lovely spin home under the rising moon: with every yard I began to get more excited over the prospect of seeing Nancy again—Mrs. Harry Masters, my married sister!

For once in my life I should feel awfully grand. For, except Mr. Lascelles, I should be the only one in the house who knew anything at all about the great secret. Wouldn't I enjoy myself! But when we got back home to the Moated Grange—what do you think?

CHAPTER XIV

MOSTLY ABOUT RELATIONS

We got back to our house at about half-past six at night: the moon rising slowly but surely over the sea and silhouetting the figures of the soldiers working down by the jetty, also casting a subdued radiance on the gables of the Moated Grange, where the latticed and red-curtained windows gave the usual old-fashioned Christmas-card effect, which there is such a lot of down at Mud Flats.

I thought what a lovely picturesque sort of home it was after all for my young bride to come back to after her runaway marriage!

The clatter of Mr. Lascelles's motor-cycle is enough to warn anybody of his approach about half an hour beforehand.

So, as I anticipated, the porch door was flung open before we got to the gate: a tall, girlish figure in a blanket-coat like mine rushed towards us.

"Nancy!" I said gleefully.

But it wasn't Nancy; it was Evelyn.

In the moonlight I saw her face absolutely bewildered and distraught-looking. Any one would have thought that something perfectly terrible had happened! For a minute I did wonder whether perhaps there had been another Zeppelin raid while we were out, and whether it had hit Aunt Victoria. She's certainly the easiest target we've got.

But no—Aunt Victoria's plump, tea-cosy-like form appeared in the porch beyond, and beyond that were the figures of cook, Mary the housemaid, and the tall, rather leggy form of Mr. Curtis.

But where—where were the bride and bridegroom?

To my horror this was the very question with which we were met ourselves. There was a sort of chorus in the porch of "Nancy—where is Nancy? ... What has happened to those other two? ... Where is Masters—where did you leave Captain Masters and your sister?"

"Leave them? We haven't left them at all!" I retorted in a horrified voice. "Aren't they here?"

"Here?" said Aunt Victoria, very agitated. "No! They are not here."

This was pretty terrible. I looked at Mr. Lascelles, who took up: "The machine broke down, and we lost sight of them: we haven't really seen them since we left the place this morning."

"Then it is true, and not a joke!" exclaimed Evelyn in an awestruck accent.

I said, feeling more puzzled every minute, "What is not a joke?"

"Come into the drawing-room, and I will show you," said Aunt Victoria in a very shaky sort of voice.

Well, we all crowded into the drawing-room again, Mr. Curtis and Mr. Lascelles (still in his teddy-bear motor-cycling get-up) and me in my blanket-coat and little hat blinking my eyes, because it was too bright in the lamplight after the soft moon outside, and Evelyn looking absolutely distraught.

"Read this, Rattle," said Aunt Victoria. And she picked up a telegram which was lying with its envelope on the marble mantelpiece.

It had been handed in at the Junction at a quarter to two that afternoon, and it said:

"Very sorry. Married this morning. Writing later—Nancy Masters."

"I thought that it must be some silly practical joke of these children! The modern sense of humour is so extraordinarily broad," murmured Aunt Victoria in her agitated voice. "I made sure it was all a 'take-in.'"

"Oh! no: it isn't, it isn't!" I said, shaking my head violently. "It is all quite true and official! They are married!"

"And you knew about it, Rattle? You are an accomplice in this extraordinary affair?" My Aunt Victoria suddenly turned upon me. "You, the youngest of the girls: the baby! You have been deceiving me!"

"No, I haven't. Honour bright," I was beginning, but here Mr. Lascelles (very decently) came to the rescue.

He said, earnestly, "Upon my solemn word of honour, Mrs. Verdeley, Miss Elizabeth knew absolutely nothing about the affair. It was kept absolutely dark from her, I can assure you."

"But she went with them! She was going to start off on that wild-goose chase to the Junction, when that wicked little Nancy pretended that she had to go and see the dentist," took up Aunt Victoria.

Her enormous cameo brooch, that shows the three Graces doing a sort of one-step together on a terra-cotta background in a plaited gold frame, rose and fell on her chest with her agitation, like a boat at anchor on a very stormy sea. "It was Rattle who said that she would have to go with her and hold her hand during the operation."

"Yes, but upon my sacred sam, Mrs. Verdeley, Miss Rattle—I mean Miss Elizabeth—didn't know that the operation was only going to be a marriage!" Mr. Lascelles took up again quite gravely and seriously. "I only broke that to her when we were nearly at the town, and I assure you nobody on earth could have been more utterly flabbergasted than she was."

"Yes, they could—I was," put in Evelyn in a horrified voice.

"Never again shall I believe anything a girl says," said Aunt Victoria in heartfelt accents. "You did not even get to the church to see them married, Mr. Lascelles?"

"No. We just missed them," said Mr. Lascelles, ruefully. "Then we went all over the town hunting for them and drew a blank everywhere. Goodness knows where they got to: for I don't!"

"Well, that we shall be told, I suppose, when they condescend to write, as Nancy says they are going to do," said Aunt Victoria, taking up the wire again. "Now, Mr. Lascelles! since you appear to be the only person who knows anything at all about this wretched child's escapade, I shall have to ask you some questions about this. Dear me! This unscrupulous young adventurer who has lured her into marrying him!"

"Oh! I shouldn't call him that, Mrs. Verdeley: no, I really shouldn't call him that," protested Mr. Lascelles, sitting down on the sofa as soon as Aunt Victoria had settled in her easy chair. "After all, Masters is——"

Here I waited for the usual masculine expression.

Out it came.

"A thundering good chap! Isn't he, Curtis?"

"Awfully good chap," said Mr. Curtis, nodding his head so hard that the reflection of the lamplight danced in his eyeglasses. "One of the best: make an excellent husband. Any girl would be lucky to get him!"

This surprised me a little, because I thought Mr. Curtis, who had admired Nancy so awfully himself, would have been rather sick at anybody who presumed to walk off with her and marry her! Yet, there he was giving these unsolicited testimonials to his rival. Really, men are the most inexplicable beings in the world! One thing I have learnt about them since we have had so many of them billeted in this place, and that is, that you may as well save yourself the trouble of guessing what any of them are going to say or do next, because it is not the slightest good. You will never hit it.

Mr. Curtis went on: "Masters is—er—more of a man of the world than the rest of us, perhaps, but he is sincerely devoted to your niece, Mrs. Verdeley. All his friends knew that before he had been in the place a week."

Here's another little surprise. All his friends knowing something which had so surprised me when I found it out by accident!

"Never mind about his devotion: we will take that for granted," said Aunt Victoria, in a resigned sort of voice. "Let's hear what his people are, and his prospects, and a few things like that about him."

Here Mr. Lascelles, evidently trying to look extra grown-up and reliable, began to furnish her with some of these details.

"His people—that is, his father and mother are dead," he began, "but his father was in the Army, and his mother was the daughter of Sir William Magnate, the man they used to call 'The Steel King.'"

At this Aunt Victoria pricked up her ears.

"Why, then, there ought to be a good deal of money in the family," she began, looking rather more encouraged, but Mr. Lascelles put an extinguisher on this rosy gleam of hope by saying, "No, I am afraid not. You see, the old man quarrelled so fearfully with his daughter, practically turned her out of the house for daring to get engaged to 'a gentleman butcher.'"

"A gentleman butcher?" said my Aunt Victoria, looking rather bewildered again. "But you told me that Captain Masters' father was a soldier?"

"Yes—that is what he meant, that is what the old man used to call soldiers," said little Mr. Lascelles cheerfully. "That was just his sort of pet name for them—'Hired Assassin' was another, you know, Mrs. Verdeley. There are lots of people who used to talk before the war like that. 'Brainless Army Type' was another of their phrases. Old Sir William was very fond of that expression (you must know it? I always use it myself now, 'lest they forget'). Well, he used to hate soldiers, you see, and so he absolutely barred having anything to do with the Masters after they were married. They had a very tough fight to give Harry a decent education, and even then they were afraid they never could afford the Army, so they had to send him to the City, though he was absolutely cut out for the Service, and a very smart volunteer: that is how I met him, when we were both Territorials together. This war has given him his chance: he will go far, see if he doesn't," said little Mr. Lascelles earnestly, and I couldn't help liking the simple, earnest way he spoke of his chum. You saw at once that he meant every word he said, and that he simply couldn't bear Aunt Victoria to think that her niece had thrown herself away on somebody that wasn't worthy of her.

You could see he wouldn't be happy until Aunt Victoria had come round to Captain Masters.

There was silence for a while in the drawing-room. We were all sitting looking into the fire. Nobody knew what to say exactly: after all, what use is it saying anything, however one may disapprove, when somebody has absolutely been and gone and got married?

The milk is spilt by that time!

Why cry?

Evidently even Aunt Victoria saw it from that point of view.

She said slowly at last: "Well, there is nothing now to be done except wait for Nancy's letter. There is only one thing that distresses me very much still; and that is, why did the child deceive me like this? Why in the world couldn't she and Captain Masters have come to me and told me frankly how things were, and asked for my consent?"

"Because they didn't think they had an earthly chance of getting it, don't you see?" explained Mr. Frank Lascelles. "They didn't want to waste lots of time in family discussions before marriage, when it is always pretty certain that there will be plenty of them after marriage. After all, Mrs. Verdeley, think! It may be the last happiness that the poor fellow is able to snatch. For he'll be out there—out in France in a fortnight. He may not have the chance of seeing any more of her after this——"

"Don't talk to me like that. I forbid you to talk to me like that," said Aunt Victoria sharply. "Don't you know that it is very unlucky? For goodness' sake, touch wood," and here she actually took hold of the Incubus's—I mean Mr. Lascelles's—hand, and tapped hard with it on the wood of the mahogany cabinet that stands beside her chair. "Since they are married——"

Here she took out her lavender-watery handkerchief, and blew her aquiline, early Victorian nose with it as loudly as if she had a big trumpet.

"Since the dear children have got married," she went on, amazing us simply frightfully by the expression, "the least we can do is to hope that they have many, many years of happiness together when——"

Here she gave a funny little laugh, and quoted that song which we always hear from the "mud larks," and which you would really think was quite the last thing that you would ever expect from the mistress of this house.

—"When this blooming war is over!"

I don't quite know how to explain it to you, but as she said these last words her voice was quite different. It seemed just like the voice of one of us girls, for when I told Evelyn afterwards that it had reminded me of her voice, Evelyn said: "Why, Rattle, how awfully funny! Because, do you know, at the time I couldn't help noticing that Aunt Victoria when she said that sounded exactly like you speaking!"

And Aunt Victoria looked quite different too.

Perhaps it was the rosy glow of the firelight that suddenly made her cheeks so pink, and her eyes so bright and sapphire-like.

I know that the dancing flame struck lights out of the faded long-turned-to-grey hair below her old-fashioned nineteenth century lace cap with the black velvet bow.

Just for that moment it was golden hair, like Nancy's and Evelyn's and mine.

And just in that moment I saw her as she must have been years ago, before she became what we always thought her—a married old maid!

Yes, under all the old maidishness there must have been hidden away quite a lot of amusing things which we had never suspected. I suddenly felt that for years and years I had been misjudging Aunt Victoria, just as I had misjudged the Incubus for days and days. I wished there was some way of showing her that I realised this, and that I was sorry for being such a little beast to her so often, and that I saw how, long ago, she must have felt just as we felt, and that she must have been nice-looking, as nice-looking as any of us.

I don't know whether you have noticed it, but that sort of heart-to-heart remark is the kind of thing which you can say to comparative strangers, such as somebody in a railway carriage whom you had never seen before and will never see again!

But you simply can't say it to people of your own family that you have always been with.

It may sound nonsense, but there is such a thing as knowing people so well that you can't ever know them at all. Nothing can really break that barrier. Isn't it funny?

However, thank goodness! even if I couldn't manage to say something nice to Aunt Victoria at that moment, somebody else could.

Mr. Lascelles did. He gazed at our old aunt with a most touched expression in his grey-blue eyes for a second.

Then a scarlet blush (quite like our own family blush) spread itself all over his freckles and his school-boyish, tip-tilted features. And then he blurted out what you may think was absolute nonsense and blarney, but what I think must have been one of the most graceful compliments that the old lady had ever heard.

He said: "Mrs. Verdeley, I ought to have been a man when you were a young girl!"

What more graceful compliment could any woman of any age expect from any young officer? If any one said that to me when I was getting old, I should go on living to a hundred and eighty-three, out of pure bucked-upness!

He took her hand, which is stiff with wedding rings and engagement rings of bygone ancestors, and kissed it just as if she had been a girl.

Shortly after this we all went in to supper.

And I can tell you I felt I needed it after all this emotionality and excitement, even though I had had such an enormous lunch and such a splendid tea!

Nobody talked much, but I know that everybody was thinking of that great subject, "the young newly-married couple!"

And everybody was sort of quietly cheerful about it all, as if they realised that, money or no money, at last one quite promising love affair had come off now and couldn't be stopped.

Oh! but when I say everybody was cheerful, I forgot to mention that Evelyn certainly wasn't. She distinctly had the "blues," and she didn't eat anything except about a mouthful of celery soup and one crystallised fruit.

I thought perhaps she was rather offended at Nancy's having chosen me to go to the Junction instead of her? She is the eldest, after all.

But when we got upstairs, and I went into her room to talk, I found that Evelyn was not so much reproachful with Nancy for having shared the secret with me as she was disapproving of the whole affair.

She looked primmer than I have ever seen her, with her two great fair plaits hanging down on each side of her face over her long nightgown, that she doesn't put ribbons in: she thinks it's a waste in war-time.

And she said, "It's all very well, Rattle, and Aunt Victoria has taken it very well, and been much more forgiving than I ever thought she would, but right is right, and wrong is wrong! And it was wrong of Nancy to get secretly engaged, and then run away to be married. It was underhand!"

"Yes, but when she wasn't allowed to be overhand," I argued, sitting on the edge of Evelyn's white bed, and rubbing cold cream into my face, which was quite sore after the rushing through the frosty air, "what else was she to do?"

"She ought to have waited," said Evelyn, austerely. "It is our parents' wish that we should all wait until we are twenty-five."

"Wait!" I said rather scoffingly. "It isn't so jolly easy to settle down and wait for years and donkey's years when people happen to be much in love!"

"You don't know anything about being in love," said Evelyn, coldly.

"No, I may not know, but I can read, and I can imagine," I persisted. "Besides, you don't know anything about being in love yourself!"

"No, of course not," said Evelyn rather crossly. "Still, I do know that one ought not to steal one's happiness, which is what Nancy has done."

"Oh, Evelyn, what poodle-doodle!" I said. "It isn't as if Nancy were not grown up. She is twenty—she has a right to be married if she wants to be, and bother the silly old will!"

"I shouldn't be a bit surprised if no good comes of it," said Evelyn gloomily. "It looks very much as if Nancy herself realised that as soon as she had let herself in for it!"

"Nancy herself?" I said, staring at Evelyn, and not knowing what she meant.

"Yes—didn't she put it in her telegram?" said Evelyn. "Didn't she say, 'Very sorry married'?"

"Oh, you silly!" I said, laughing. "That was only a kind of apology to Aunt Victoria for having kept her in the dark up till now! That didn't mean she was very sorry she was married!"

"I am not at all so sure," said Evelyn darkly. "You know it always says, 'Marry in haste, repent at leisure.' This might be the beginning of the repentance."

"Not it!" I said firmly. "Marry in haste and go on feeling awfully bucked about it, is far more Nancy's style, I can assure you: but I am really much too sleepy to argue," I said, breaking off the argument at the best point (which is when one can't think of what to say next). "Good-night," I said, and I went to bed, and slept like the dead until Mary knocked for the fourth time at my bedroom door this morning.

I think we had all expected to find that Aunt Victoria had received the note from Nancy by the first post, but nothing of the kind. The entire mail consisted of a bootmaker's bill for Mr. Lascelles, a catalogue addressed to "Miss Nancy Verdeley," little dreaming that there was not such a person left any more on this earth, and a letter for me.

There was something rather queer about the envelope of this letter. The stamp seemed to have been cut off another letter, and then fixed to this with Stick-phast.

Also the postmark was awfully funny. It looked as if it had been done with a charcoal pencil.

As for the handwriting, I knew it. I had a presentiment what it was all about before I opened it.

I deciphered it in the Lair.

It was from my old enemy and new friend—the Incubus—Mr. Lascelles.

It was dated last night, about twelve o'clock, so I suppose he couldn't have posted it—he must have given it to the old postman to bring in with the others.

And it said:

"My dear Miss Betty,—You may think it awful cheek of me to write to you, and also frightful rot my writing when I have seen you all day to-day, but somehow I feel I must write and tell you how fearfully pleased I am with life now that you are going to be real friends. I think you are a little brick and lots more things that I suppose I had better not put. As Kipling says in one of his best poems:

"'Man's timid heart is bursting with the things he dare not say.'

"Perhaps some day I may be allowed to trot a few of them out. Till then,

"I remain, dear Miss Betty,
"Yours very gratefully,
"FRANK LASCELLES.

"P.S.—I nearly put 'Lonely Subaltern,' because, however many people I was friends with, I still should feel lonely if you wouldn't speak to me."

Second postscript:

"I was so frightfully pleased that you enjoyed yourself at that matinée. I am sure I did."

Third postscript:

"I do hope you won't be offended with me again for writing."

Of course, I am not offended: I think it was very nice of him to write.

Quite a pretty letter, too, but not really as good as the ones that he wrote to me before I knew who he was. I wonder why?

However, the great excitement to-day will be, when is that other letter coming—the letter from Nancy, and what is she going to say in it?

CHAPTER XV

THE BRIDE WRITES HOME

Well, at last, two whole days after she had been married, our sister Nancy (now Mrs. Harry Masters) has condescended to write and tell us all about it!

Two long letters she has written! One is to Aunt Victoria, rather stilted and full of the most lovely words and phrases, and with "My husband" coming in about every second line.

"Just as if nobody had ever had a husband before," said Evelyn.

I said, "Well, she hasn't, which is the same thing as far as she is concerned."

The second letter is addressed to "The Misses Evelyn and Elizabeth Verdeley."

And it begins, "My dear Kids."

Well, that rather put us off at first. Considering that I am only three years younger than she is, and that Evelyn is actually a whole year older!

"Kids!" When for about twenty years we have done absolutely everything together—never been separated! "Kids!" Just because she is a married woman of forty-eight hours' standing!

However, it was a long letter, and quite jolly when you got past the beginning.

She says:

"To begin with, I absolutely must apologise and grovel for what you must think my perfectly unspeakable behaviour in getting married and all that sort of thing without having let you into the secret. But, Evelyn and Rattle, it really was impossible to do it any other way.

"You see, Harry and I knew that we couldn't possibly tell Aunt Victoria, because we imagined that what she immediately would do would be to put her foot down firmly, instantly, and never let us see each other for centuries, not until I was twenty-five. We made quite sure that since she could not turn Harry out of the place until he has got to go to France, she would pack me off to be paying guest in some fearful spot as far removed from Mud Flats as you can get it on the map, such as the Orkney Islands.

"And, you know, Evelyn and Rattle, if she had done that we should simply have died!

"At least, Harry wouldn't have died, perhaps, because men are so much better able to bear things than we are, and, besides, he has got his King and country to go on serving: but I know I should have died: I simply couldn't have existed without him. I could not have been dragged away from him, just at the very moment when we found we were simply made for each other, which we are.

"And then, as I couldn't possibly tell Aunt Victoria, I couldn't tell you kids——"

"Kids" again!

"I couldn't tell you kids, because it would seem so awful afterwards, when Aunt Victoria found out that I had dragged you two into my fearful deceit and wickedness. It was quite bad enough having to involve Mr. Lascelles in that. I am afraid he will be in fearful disgrace with Aunt Victoria for ever and ever after this."

If Nancy only knew! Aunt Victoria seems to have taken a greater fancy to Mr. Lascelles than ever before! Really, he does seem to know how to make himself popular, for Nancy goes on now to sing his praises.

"He has been the most awful brick all through this affair. I always told you girls it was exactly like having a delightful grown-up brother ready made for us when he came to be billeted at the Moated Grange, and even I didn't realise what a little ripper he was until he began tacking on to the best man business for Harry.

"Evelyn, I believe, does know he is nice, but I suppose it is no use appealing to Rattle, since she always did hate him, and is much too obstinate to leave off hating him still, even though he has been so nice to her sister and her brother-in-law."

This is very awkward, you know, for I don't know how I am ever going to break it to the girls after this that the ex-Incubus and I shook hands and declared peace on Nancy's wedding-day!

But to go on with Nancy's letter. She says:

"As for you, Rattle darling, I feel more apologetic about you than about anything else, after having dragged you out under false pretences to be bridesmaid to your eloping sister, and then getting married without waiting for you, and then disappearing without even letting you see me to wish luck to the bride!

"I will explain why that was.

"I have already explained it so hard to Aunt Victoria that I should think I must have writer's cramp, but never mind, dear old thing, I will tell you how it was.

"When we got to the church and found the clergyman all ready, and had waited for a quarter of an hour and you didn't turn up, Harry said he was perfectly certain that something had happened to that old tinker's cart of a motor-cycle of Frank's, and that when that went wrong it was not a question of time: it was a question of eternity!

"And he thought we had better push on and get married, for supposing we had waited there until it was so late that the marriage wasn't legal, well, then we should be in a worse fix than ever, and didn't know what in the world we were going to do about it or how we should get married at all, so married we got then and there.

"And I do wish you had been there, Rattle and Evelyn, to hear how beautifully I said my responses and my 'I wills.' I wasn't one bit nervous or hoarse, like I have always imagined I should be when I was a bride and would have to promise all those things about 'love, honour and obey.'

"Harry said to me when we were first engaged that that always seemed an awfully tall order and rather cheek of any fellow to expect a girl to promise, but I don't think it is a bit tall.

"As for 'love,' it is a question of who could help it when once they meet Harry?"

"Oh, dear! this is very long," said Evelyn, impatiently. "Aren't we ever going to get on to where she says she is, and why you didn't find her?"

"I expect that is coming presently," I said. I was reading the letter aloud. "Don't you interrupt: I call all this about Harry very interesting."

For somehow it is beginning to get rather on my nerves the superior attitude Evelyn is taking up just now about people being in love, as if it was rather a disgraceful, childish thing!

I call it being rather dog-in-the-mangerish. Even if you are not in love, and never going to be (like me), you might at least take a friendly interest in your relations that are. So I went on reading Nancy's letter, putting as much expression into it as I could just to shock Evelyn!

"As for love, who can help it when they have got to know Harry, and seen how frightfully good-looking he was, and what fascinating little ways he has?"

"'Some Lad!'" I quoted Mr. Lascelles before I went on.

"As for honour, well, the same thing applies when you think of his character and how noble and splendid he is, and how hard he has worked, poor darling, all these years so as to be independent, and how he has always longed to be a soldier, and how well he has got on ever since he has joined the Army, and what a lot everybody thinks of him wherever he is.

"As to 'obey,' well, when those first two things are right the third is merely a matter of form! When you love and honour a person so much, you simply want them to give you orders or forbid you to do things, simply for the sheer pleasure of obeying them! At least, that is how I feel."

"If I felt like that," declared Evelyn, "I should know I was getting softening of the brain. Why, because a girl is newly married, must she proceed to lose her individuality, and become a sort of door-mat under some young man's muddy, pontooning boots?"

"What does it matter as long as she enjoys it? Some people are born boots and some mats," I said, "and it must be a great relief to find yourself in your proper element whichever it is," and I went on reading the letter.

"Then, when we had got married, we were going on, as Mr. Lascelles would know, to the Royal Hotel, and oh! Rattle! we should have had such a lovely lunch: we had settled about that long before the wedding day, and how we should have jam roll with cream, because you love it. I do feel such a cad when I think of how frantically hungry you must have been, you poor darling, and with none of it ordered for you."

If she only knew that I did have it, after all, the exact lunch that she had thought of ordering for me.

"What happened," Nancy's letter went on, "was that when we got outside the church we came, if you please, upon something that put all ideas of lunch and everything else out of our heads forever.

"We came upon a car full of people, who immediately stopped us and held out their hands and called 'Harry!' and, do you know, before I could say anything I found myself in the middle of a large group of Harry's relations.

"There was his sister Doris, who is just married to somebody in the Ordnance Department, there was her husband, there were some schoolboy brothers of his, one of whom had just got a commission too, and, the most important of all, there was an old gentleman with fluffy white hair and beard, looking something between Father Christmas and our old gardener Penny, and as if he ought to have on a red dressing-gown trimmed with white cotton wool.

"This, my dears, if you please, was no less a person than Harry's rolling-in-riches grandfather, the one who quarrelled with Harry's mother because she would marry a soldier. (I don't blame her for that, of course; in fact, I will give you two girls one word of advice, and that is, don't ever look at anything else yourselves, because it is absolutely the one profession, and the only one, to marry.)

"Of course, I heard all about Harry's wicked old grandfather, and how cruel he had been to Harry's parents, so you can imagine how startled I was when Harry's sister Doris, who is very good-looking, of course, very like Harry, introduced him, and the old gentleman nearly wept with joy over him, and said he was exactly like his dear mother. Then Harry introduced me as his wife, both of us feeling most important, of course, because we were married, and then there was a general chorus of surprise and congratulations and all that sort of thing, and I thought I was going to have my hand positively shaken off by the relations.

"And then Harry's grandfather absolutely insisted on taking us all into the big car, and whisking us off to lunch at Great Merton, which is about thirty miles from the Junction, where he has taken a big country house.

"And, my dear Kids! to cut a long story short, there we have been ever since, if you please, and there we are going to be for another three days.

"Doris, the married sister, is a perfect angel, and has given me a whole heap of trousseau things. Just you wait till you see them.

"As for the old grandfather, I can't tell you what an unmitigated pet he is. As Rattle would say: 'Isn't it funny?' It is quite extraordinary to think that he was ever against the soldiers, and considered them brainless and popinjays and blood-sucking parasites who used to drain the resources of the country to keep up their useless hordes! He is absolutely changed now about all that. He began to change it when he first heard of the atrocities in Belgium, and he has gone on ever since. When it came to the Lusitania he really got quite affectionate about our Army that was fighting to put down a nation of barbarians, and by the time we arrived at the Germans firing on the women and children who were being taken in boats from that other sinking ship, well, the effect it had on Harry's grandfather was simply extraordinary. He felt that all these years, when he had been running down the fighting forces of England, and grudging every penny that went to keep up the Services, what had he been doing? Helping the Germans. Yes, giving a helping hand to those brutes who want to come and take away our Empire. So, of course, he felt most terribly remorseful about it, and about the idea that he had actually turned his own daughter out of the house because she had had the sense to see what he hadn't, namely, that soldiers are the very splendidest people in the whole world!

"Of course, he didn't explain this at the time, not in the street at the Junction. This was later, when we were all tearing on to Great Merton.

"By the way, I quite forgot to explain that there was another soldier we found here when we arrived, a General Blankley. Who he is I don't quite know, but he was so covered with gold oak-leaves and scarlet tabs that you could scarcely see any khaki: so he must be somebody frightfully important, so important that he is actually able to engineer so that Harry got five whole lovely days' leave then and there.

"Of course, you will say but all this was no excuse for our not leaving a message at the 'Royal' for Rattle and Mr. Lascelles when they arrived there.

"Of course, it wasn't an excuse, but oh! my dears, if you only knew the state of excitement that we are all in, what with having successfully fibbed our way to the Junction, as Rattle calls it, and what with having really and truly got married, and what with meeting with long-lost relations.

"Well, some day perhaps you will know the rainbow-coloured whirl that one lives in.

"I hope you will, I am sure.

"Harry's grandfather has been a perfect brick about an allowance for Harry.

"Not that I should have cared tuppence about the money part of it, even suppose I had had to give up my share of the pennies we get from father because I married against the will: even if that had happened, I should have cheerfully existed on what Harry could spare me from his pay, even if I had not been able to afford any more clothes besides the green blanket-coat and the little leather hat that I was married in, as long as I lived.

"But as it is I don't think I could possibly be happier except for one thing, and that is, if I could hear that you two should be going to get married yourselves to somebody nearly as nice as my Harry. Of course, you mustn't expect anything quite as nice."

(I wish Nancy could have seen Evelyn's face at this last remark! It really was a study!)

The epistle ends up at last:

"With best love, and hoping to see you all on Thursday. From

"Your happy and affectionate sister,
"NANCY MASTERS."

"Of course she must needs go and put her surname, just because it happens to be a different one," commented Evelyn sourly. Really, I wish she wasn't so ratty these days, I think she must be sickening for something! She has never written to us before and signed herself 'Nancy Verdeley,' I notice."

"Oh, my dear! Have some tolerance for the vagaries of people who are very much in love! It is no use expecting them to behave as if they were normal. I have read that in heaps of books," I told her. "We ought to consider ourselves highly favoured that she condescends to write to us at all before she has come out of the really silly stage. Here's a postscript: 'Please give my love to Frank.'"

I suppose now that Nancy is a young married matron it is considered quite proper for her to call her husband's chums by their Christian names?

To-day, after tea, Evelyn, in her primmest voice, gave the message—or, rather, her version of the message—namely, "My sister wished to be very kindly remembered to you, Mr. Lascelles."

Mr. Lascelles said: "Oh! Awfully obliged, I'm sure," without a flicker. It was very decent of him not to give away the fact that I had met him before lunch going down to the beach in waders and waterproof coat, and that I had told him in the cheeriest way, "Nancy sends you her love."

It certainly is very much more comfortable now that I have made friends with the little creature, and now that I have discovered that he really isn't as bad as I thought he was at first.

More than that—he isn't nearly as plain as he used to be.

And there is a reason for that.

He broached the subject of it this morning when he had to have his breakfast half an hour earlier than usual, and I was the only one who happened to be down at it. I poured out his coffee for him, and I was just handing him his cup when he said:

"Miss Betty, I wish you would tell me if you think it is any improvement——"

"If what is an improvement?" I asked him behind the coffee-pot innocently, as if I didn't know what he meant.

But of course I knew. I had noticed it, of course, in one flash the first minute that he had appeared to say good morning.

For he had done the thing that makes more difference to a person's appearance than anything else, whether they are a man or a woman.

Namely, he had done his hair in another way.

He had left off smarming it back from his brow like Gilbert the Filbert. He had had it cut and shampooed, so that it went easily into the new way.

And he had parted it at the side—he had parted it from left to right, which is the most becoming way in the world.

Anyhow, it is becoming to him: it just allows a little wave.

The merest suspicion of a wave, not a deep crinkle like you see in the pitch-black hair of Nancy's husband, but the merest little turn that gives quite a pretty light in one place to his red hair. This is not really such a very hideous shade of red as I always made out, but when you dislike a person you really cannot allow yourself to be fair about their looks, can you?

However, now that I have stopped disliking him, I can see him with a more impartial eye! I glanced at him with it over the coffee-pot and said sedately:

"Yes, I think it is a very great improvement indeed. I think it is ever so much better, though it is a pity you didn't do it before."

"I should have done it before," said Mr. Lascelles, eagerly. "I should have done it the first instant that I read your letter—you know, the one to the 'Lonely Subaltern,' when you said you detested people with their hair brushed back? I should have started the new way then, only that was when I was writing incog. to you, and I was so afraid that that would be enough to make you spot something."

"I daresay I might have," I said, laughing quite cheerfully. "I suppose I am rather sharp at seeing everything that's going on!"

I find I can laugh over the "Lonely Subaltern" business now instead of having to blush all over myself, like the man who painted himself black to play Othello, every time the subject is mentioned.

"I say, I am most fearfully bucked that you do think it is a bit of an improvement," said Mr. Frank Lascelles, quite as shyly as a girl at school who has taken to wearing some new kind of blouse. "I'm glad it makes me stop being—er—quite such an eye-sore to you!"

Well, common politeness demanded that I should say, quite emphatically, "You never were an eye-sore!"

"Oh, come: I was," he said, quite as if he wanted to have been. "But, as long as I am not now—am I?"

He said it so pathetically that I had to smile at him, noticing again how very much better-looking he was for the change of hair.

"Am I?"

"No. Since you must fish for compliments, you're not an eyesore, now."

"Cheers!" he said, but still without beginning his bacon. "And that being so, do you think you could possibly feel philanthropic enough to do me a great favour, Miss Betty?"

"What might that be?" I asked, not being able to help feeling interested. "Do you want me to do my hair in another way?"

"Oh, no! Please don't touch your beautiful—I mean your hair. It looks absolutely top-hole as it is," said Mr. Lascelles, hurriedly. "What I was going to beg you was to tell me whether you'd mind——"

But I wasn't privileged to hear what it was he wanted to know that I should mind, for at this moment in came Aunt Victoria, rubbing her hands together and saying she thought it felt as if we must have had several degrees of frost.

And I jumped up to give her my place, and Mr. Lascelles jumped up to say good morning, and what between the talk of the weather and of what time the young Masters would arrive home on Thursday, Mr. Lascelles simply didn't have time to go on asking me whatever the favour was going to have been.

I wonder what on earth it could have been?

Perhaps he will think of it again after a day or so. I don't want to ask him: it would seem as if I took such an exaggerated interest in him, which I don't, of course, except that I do think he is rather a nice, funny little thing whom it is quite amusing to be friends with. The great excitement in my life at present is the thought of the young bride and bridegroom, Mr. and Mrs. Harry Masters, if you please, coming back to take up their abode at Mud Flats!

CHAPTER XVI

SOMETHING QUITE UNEXPECTED

Really, our family is the rummest ever! Always breaking out in some new place, it seems to me.

I should have thought that Nancy's runaway marriage with Captain Masters would have been quite enough excitement for, say, the next two years, and that we need not have expected anything further to flutter this dovecot of a Moated Grange. I should have thought that we could now settle down to the anticipation of at least a peaceful and uneventful winter, summer and spring.

But no.

It is too much to expect. Before Nancy is so much as come back from her five days' honeymoon, before I have left off feeling absolutely thrilled about it once every five minutes of the day, before I have left off talking about "Miss" Nancy to the servants, a fresh piece of unexpectedness is burst upon me.

And who do you think it is this time?

Evelyn, if you please! Evelyn, the eldest of the family, the best-behaved, the one who is, as Aunt Victoria says, the most balanced, and the one who has always talked the least nonsense of all three of us girls. Let it be a lesson to all girls who think they're "sensible." I know Evelyn always thought she was that. Now listen to what's happened to her.

It was two days after the long talk we had had over Nancy's newly-married letter.

I think I told you that Evelyn seemed to me to be rather snappy over that or at any rate unsympathetic, making remarks about how girls seem to have softening of the brain as soon as they were in love, and how idiotic it was that a girl should think that it was her duty to become a door-mat under the young man's pontooning boots!

All this, you know, was not quite like Evelyn, the Evelyn we had always known: but then, of course, as I think we said, we had noticed she had been getting very much more prim and easily shocked ever since that first quite giddy party at the Moated Grange here, when Aunt Victoria actually had out champagne for dinner and Mr. Curtis kissed Nancy afterwards by the staircase window. Yes, I think that was when we began to realise that Evelyn was what is considered a "much nicer" girl than Nancy and me.

However, to get on with it. Ever since then Evelyn has been getting more and more difficult; she has never been jolly or laughed with us in the way she used to do: she has given up playing the piano in the Lair—that is to say, she has given up trying over the saucy revue tunes that we are all so fond of.

She can't bear any of those nowadays except what I call a droopy waltz like "Destiny" or one of those clinging nocturnes that really get you into the mood of making you wish you had never been born!

Or else it's one of the songs from one of those antediluvian old song-books with the red leather covers that we have inherited from goodness knows who, called

"Love not, love not, ye Hapless Sons of Clay."

But most of the time now she is wrapped up in her bandaging class or the linen fund for soldiers' babies.

Really, she began to behave like the girl in those old-fashioned books who is sick of life and worldly frivolities and who is thinking of taking the veil. She was coming in from the bandaging class this afternoon, when I put my foot into it apparently by making the most harmless remark you can imagine: at least, I thought it was harmless. You see, she was very late, at least half an hour later than the bandaging class usually bursts—I mean breaks up—and I said, "Hurry up, Evelyn, you had better look in at the kitchen on the way up and ask them to make you the little brown tea-pot full of fresh tea: we have nearly finished in the dining-room."

(I forgot to mention that we always have tea in the dining-room now, instead of the drawing-room, all on account of Mr. Lascelles, who says that he likes to spread himself and not to sit down in fear and trembling lest he should be spoiling the carpet every time he drops a crumb, which is, after all, only natural; and why shouldn't he be allowed to feel at home after a bothering afternoon of messing about with "men's applications for leave," and sick reports, and evening passes, and half-fare railway vouchers, and all those things that I think it's very clever of him to know how to manage, so there! But to get on about Evelyn, when she was late for tea.)

I went on light-heartedly, "There is only what you might describe as 'husband's tea' left in the dining-room teapot, and I know that you disapprove just now of everything to do with husbands."

Of course, I only meant to tease her a little about the attitude she has taken up with regard to Nancy and her new husband. Nothing was further from my thoughts than to wish to upset Evelyn in any way.

Yet, to my horror, this is what I seemed to do.

For Evelyn, if you please, glared at me for a moment as if I were a hair in the butter, and then broke out, positively violently, "Oh! Rattle, you talk too much nonsense! You do, indeed, and you say horrid things, and it is very unkind of you, it's hateful!"

What in the world could be the meaning of that, I asked myself. Wasn't it funny?

I stood there in the hall under the hanging-lamp, being absolutely flummoxed and flabbergasted, and Evelyn went on, still violently: "You are always horrid to me now, both of you! Have been for the last I don't know how long! You don't think anything of what I say: you only make fun of me, and laugh at me. I know you do! You and Nancy! I don't seem to have even any sisters left——"

And then she turned and dashed up the stairs and I heard her own door banging behind her.

What, indeed, could be the matter?

I went back into the dining-room with the fourth plate of muffins for Mr. Lascelles, and the little brown teapot of nice, fresh, hot tea for that extraordinary Evelyn. Somehow I had a kind of idea that she didn't mean to come down and drink it.

So in a minute or two I got a little tray, and arranged a really tempting tea for one on it.

I told Aunt Victoria and Mr. Lascelles that I thought poor Evelyn had got rather a headache.

Always a nice, safe thing to say: it commits you to nothing.

Then I went up to Evelyn's room and tapped at the door.

As I expected, there was no answer, so I went calmly in.

Evelyn was lying on her bed with her face buried in the pillow, just as Nancy had been last week when she was pretending to have such violent toothache!

But Evelyn was not pretending.

When I came in she stopped all of a sudden, but I knew that she had been sobbing as if her heart would break.

"I have brought you some tea," I said.

"I don't want any tea, thank you, Rattle," said Evelyn, in a muffled voice with all the violence gone out of it.

"Oh, you do. Just a nice cup of tea! You needn't eat anything with it if you aren't feeling very hungry," I said.

And I sat down on the bed beside her and put my arm round her and persuaded her to drink some nice hot tea, which was very sugary and milky, with a long tea-leaf floating about on the top, which meant a stranger to see her very shortly.

And a very tall stranger.

However, I didn't say any more about that sort of thing, not wishing to annoy her any more than I could help.

I just whispered to her: "Awfully sorry, old girl, if I upset you."

Evelyn gulped, and said: "It's all right, Rattle, it wasn't a bit your fault. I was a cross pig: but——"

Here she began to gulp again, and then felt for her handkerchief, which was a little, grey, sopping ball of linen by this time.

I stuffed my own quite nice dry one into her hand.

(It wasn't my own, really, being a very large white silk one with "F.L." embroidered in the corner. You know how people's wash gets mixed up when there are a lot of you in the same house, and I knew Mr. Lascelles wouldn't mind my using his hankie for just one week.)

I went on to say earnestly to Evelyn: "You know you are quite, quite wrong in thinking that Nancy and I don't think enough of you. Why, we are frightfully fond of you, if you only knew. When we begin to laugh at you for being prim——"

"Oh, Rattle, don't! 'Prim!'" mourned Evelyn. "Anybody who knew what I felt like inside would know I couldn't be called prim!"

"Well, primmer than we are," I said. "But if we do laugh at it, it means that we are so fond of you, and so pleased that there is at least one of us who makes some attempt to behave like a lady!"

I made her drink a little more tea, then eat a piece of muffin, which seemed to make her feel better, and presently she seemed well enough to confide to me: "Oh, Rattle! I am so fearfully miserable! the most miserable girl in Mud Flats!" she said.

"My dear old thing, why?" I asked, taking the tray out of her way and sitting down beside her on the bed. "Can't you tell me?"

In a choked voice poor old Evelyn said something about having to tell somebody or burst.

"Tell me, then," I encouraged her. "Was it really because you thought Nancy and I weren't as fond of you as we used to be?"

Evelyn shook her head. "It's not that. It's nothing to do with that."

"Have you had a row," I asked, "with the Bandaging Class?" For I knew what a cat in mittens the doctor's sister is; she adores the curate, I think, and she was frightfully annoyed once when she heard the doctor say that the curate had said that the eldest Miss Verdeley was the sort of girl who would be a parish priest's right hand.

She's never been anything but hideously polite to Evelyn ever since, and as she is secretary to that Bandaging Class, I thought she had been getting even with the curate's idea of a right hand that way. But no. Evelyn said it was nothing to do with that either.

"Is it anything," I suggested, "that I could help you with?"

"Nobody can ever help me," mourned Evelyn. And she added in a sort of gulp something that surprised me so much that I bounced on the bed and nearly kicked over the tea-things on their tray at my feet.

"Somebody," Evelyn moaned, "somebody wants to marry me!"

"What!" I exclaimed so loudly that I wonder they didn't hear me downstairs in the dining-room. Really, with all these love affairs going on in the house, I shall have to learn to modulate my voice a little more. "To marry you?"

The fact is, I nearly said "Why?" For I've never thought Evelyn, though she's so nice-looking and such a dear in many ways, is a bit the kind of girl you'd fall in love with! Nancy, yes. But Evelyn, who's out of sympathy with men! I should have thought they tumbled to that and avoided that sort of girl, at least, as a wife!

Then I pulled myself together and uttered my second thoughts. "Well, I suppose I know who it is. I suppose it's the curate?"

"It's nothing of the kind," said Evelyn, quite indignantly. "It's a young man."

(You see, the curate is at least thirty-two to begin with.)

"Oh," I said, with a long breath, for that made it quite different. "Two wantings-to-marry in our family in one week! How frightfully thrilling! What'll be the next, I wonder? But, Evelyn! for goodness' sake tell me who the young man is? And why, why are you crying about him?"

Poor Evelyn began to sob again so bitterly that she couldn't speak.

"It's a funny way to take a proposal," I said. "Does it—I say, does it mean that you've refused him?"

"Hurp—yes!" wept Evelyn.

I felt even more thrilled. You see, it was a change from Nancy's affair. Now we'd had both kinds in the house, a Yes and a No! What a lot of experience I'm getting!

"It must be very painful to have to cause a lot of unhappiness to a man, even if you don't like him well enough to marry," I said, understandingly. "Still, Evelyn, you must look on the bright side of it, you know. You'll have to remember that though he may seem to be upset just for the moment, you haven't really broken his heart for ever. Of course, he says you have, I expect? But don't you believe him, my dear girl," said I, encouragingly patting her arm. "He will get over it. Look what hundreds of men do. Think of half the novels we've read about that very thing. Think of that Somersetshire folk-song:

"'The grass that once has been trampled underfoot,
Give it time, it will rise up again: give it time, it will
rise up again!'"

I couldn't help feeling rather pleased over this quotation: it was so apt. Then I went on comforting poor Evelyn, whose head was buried in the pillow, showing only one hot little pink ear. I whispered into it: "Do you know, I was reading a book only the other day which says that hardly any man gets just the girl he has asked: most of them have been turned down by one or two before they find the woman who is meant to be their affinity. This proposer of yours would probably be quite grateful to your refusing him," I said, "in a year or two's time." She didn't answer, but I know she heard.

"For, you see, there is no scarcity of girls," I said judiciously. "Plenty of those to pick and choose from for any young man, especially after this war, when young men are going to be more of a rarity than ever! So, cheer up, Evelyn. He is bound to forget quite soon."

At this Evelyn suddenly reared her golden head up from her pillows and turned her flushed and tear-stained face to me. Then she hurled another bomb of surprise at me.

"Oh, Rattle! don't, don't!" she besought me wildly. "My dear! you think you are consoling me, don't you? But if you only knew, every word of yours about those other girls hurts. Do you suppose I want him to marry anybody else at once? I, who like him so frightfully badly myself."

Here was a facer! I said, "You like him frightfully badly and yet you aren't going to marry him?"

"I can't," wailed Evelyn.

"Why?" I asked, absolutely thrilled. This was the most unusual bit of the whole affair. "Is he married already?"

This terrible thought did seem to startle Evelyn—the only one in this family with any sense of propriety—into some sort of calm. She sat up against her pillows and sobbed again with her pretty face struggling into its normal prim expression. "Married, Rattle! Of course not! As if I should ever have spoken on such a subject if he had been married! Oh! dear no! There is nothing of that sort in it at all!"

"Then what is there?" I asked eagerly. "And, to begin with, Evelyn—tell me, do tell me, I really think you might tell me, if I promise not to say a word—I do so awfully want to know who he is?"

Buried in the pillow again, Evelyn murmured something about, "I thought you might have guessed. Do you mean you really haven't any idea, Rattle?"

I really hadn't, not the slightest. Since it wasn't the curate. Was it one of the soldier-men? She gave a tiny nod.

I then began to repeat the names of some of the officers we have got to know since the troops have been at Mud Flats. I thought first, of course, of the one we have in the house here.

I said, "It isn't Mr. Lascelles, is it?"

"Oh, Rattle! don't be absurd," said Evelyn, with a trembly laugh. "Mr. Lascelles! Why! He is only a child!"

"He is twenty-four! Three whole years older than you are!" I retorted. I was going on to explain how unexpectedly reliable and grown-up Mr. Lascelles had seemed at that awful moment at the Junction when we couldn't find the bridal party, but Evelyn went on:

"Well, he doesn't look like twenty-four! He looks about fourteen!"

"Yet you all seem so awfully fond of him," I reminded her, "and you all scold me because I couldn't—I mean, I can't—stand him. He was always a favourite of yours."

"Yes, in a kind of way—the sort of nice friendly way you feel towards a younger brother or a nephew, even," said Evelyn. "In that way I quite love his dear little Schoolboy face and his hideous red hair."

"I didn't think his hair was at all so hideous," I said. "At all events, it doesn't look so bad now, since he has taken to parting it at the side."

"Oh! is that what he has done? I thought I noticed it looked rather worse-looking, but I didn't know exactly what he had been doing with it. But, nice as he is, if he was the only man I ever see I shouldn't want to fall in love with the Lascelles boy. Oh, no, Rattle. It is somebody really grown-up; really clever."

"And really good-looking?" I asked. For the quotation on the calendar in the Lair to-day had been:

"Now, though we always know that looks deceive
And always have done, somehow these good looks
Make more impression than the best of books."
(BYRON.)

Rather true, I thought it. And Evelyn was saying earnestly, "Oh! He's very good-looking. Handsome."

"The handsomest man who's ever been here is Captain Masters (that we must get into the way of calling Harry)," I said. "But, of course, Nancy got him."

"I should never have looked at Captain Masters. He's much too novelette-y. A barber's block, I should call him," declared Evelyn, quite excitedly. The last trace of sobs had gone from her voice as she spoke. "My—I mean the man I am speaking of, is worth ten of Nancy's husband for looks or anything else. Can't you guess who it is?"

Conscientiously I began to go over the names of all the good-looking men I've seen about this place.

The adjutant? No. That young officer of the Super-Filberts? No. One of the sailor-men off the cruiser in the Bay? (nearly all sailors are nice-looking. Going into the Navy seems to give them such nice blue eyes!) Commander Smith? Mr. Brown? Mr. Robinson? No; it was none of these. Much handsomer than any of them.

"Then I can't have seen him," said I.

"Oh, yes, you have, Rattle. Often."

"Can't have. Some one I've often seen about this place? Why, there is only old Penny the gardener that I haven't guessed. It isn't him, by any chance, is it, Evelyn?"

This, thank goodness, made Evelyn laugh. "Don't be so absolutely idiotic, Rattle! If you really are too stupid to guess I suppose I shall have to tell you myself."

And she told me.

She blurted it out in these three electrifying words:

"It's Mr. Curtis!"

Have you got that, dear readers? I didn't, for about three seconds after she'd said it. Then——

Well, thank goodness! I didn't lose my head and exclaim, "Mr. Curtis!" with a long-drawn shriek of idiot mirth! The shock was quite enough to make me. However, one seems to get very quickly acclimatised to shocks. After the first two or three. There are only three of us girls, but I should think in really large families, such as sevens and eights, you would have to make them think the end of the world had come before they turned a hair.

See how hardened I was getting! I didn't even begin to explain to Evelyn that I didn't think of guessing Mr. Curtis for the simple reason that that young schoolmaster who was now a soldier hadn't made the faintest impression on me. I looked upon him, when I did look upon him, as a sort of pale, washed-out, long-legged shadow, who just sat there blinking through his eyeglasses and taking up the highest chair, so that there would be room for his legs. Once or twice after that celebrated party I had wondered if he was still going on writing his articles about "Pontoon Bridging for Girls," or something of that sort, or whether he had ever soared to composing verses about "The First Kiss," or anything of that sort. Then when the Nancy-Masters romance came on I hadn't thought of anything else to do with Mr. Curtis. If I had thought I should never have dreamt of connecting him with anything like a love affair!

Yet here was Evelyn, if you please, the most particular as well as the most proper of us girls, fairly crying her eyes out because of some reason or other for wanting to marry him, and yet she wasn't going to!

I gazed upon her in astonishment. "Handsome," she'd said! Wasn't it funny? I realised that the Mr. Curtis she saw must be an entirely different person from the Mr. Curtis I saw.

Perhaps that is the same way with everybody's young man or girl as the case may be? Perhaps the greatest shock that anybody ever could get would be for half an hour to borrow somebody else's eyes, just like Mr. Lascelles borrowed Mr. Curtis's eyeglasses once to see how he looked in them? And to see those other people's impression of their best friends? My word! there would be some astonishment!

The poem about seeing yourself as others see you would not be in it with seeing the other ones!

Just think of girls, for instance, that one had always considered hopeless freaks and frumps. Fancy catching sight of them transformed into a cross between Lily Elsie and Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland!

And then just think of the young men that you have always considered "It," and imagine seeing them dwindle down to the miserable nonentities that some other girls might see them as!

(I do wish a machine had been made to enable us to do it. However, I suppose it is one of those inventions that don't seem ever to be going to come off in our time, like hairpins that will stick in and silk stockings that never go into ladders.)

However, to go on with this absolutely unaccountable love affair of Evelyn and Mr. Curtis.

"You—I know you won't tell anybody," she said. "Nobody knows."

"Does he know?" I asked. "That you care for him, I mean?"

"Oh, no! Oh, NO!" cried my sister. "Because of course I told him that I didn't."

Now, that struck me as a silly sort of thing to do. Such a waste! Except, of course, in those old-fashioned novels on the top shelf in the Lair when sometimes the girl looks down (why?) and trembles (what at?) and refuses the man just so that he will ask her again.

I wondered if it was this kind of thing. I asked Evelyn.

"Ask me again? Oh, no. I made it quite clear to him that it would be absolutely no good if he did," went on that mysterious Evelyn.

"Why on earth not?" I asked.

It was quite a time before I could get that absurd Sphinx of an Evelyn to condescend to tell me the reason that stood between her and the man of her (no-accounting-for-tastes ) choice.

At last it came out. An absolutely footling reason, of course. Simply this:

Because Evelyn felt that she couldn't possibly marry a man who had been attracted to her own sister before he had proposed to her!

"It's no use! I should be too jealous," she said, sitting up and staring away blankly above the framed photograph of us three as little girls with curls over our sailor-blouses. "You don't understand, Rattle, how I should feel. Every time he kissed me I should"—here she buried her face in the pillow—"I should be reminded of that time at the staircase window when he kissed Nancy."

"My dear, good child!" I said to her, feeling quite like a maiden aunt. "Don't you remember how Mr. Curtis was a st——" Here I nearly said "standing joke," but I stopped myself, because I thought that Evelyn wouldn't like it. I said instead, "Don't you remember how Mr. Curtis was such a surprise to all those other young men just because he hadn't kissed anybody at all before? They seemed to think he was a regular white elephant—I mean, very unusual.

"So I expect that more than half the men who get engaged must have kissed other people before: or at least one other person."

"Yes, but not the girl's own sister."

"I don't see what difference that makes," I said.

"All the difference in the world," said Evelyn, obstinately. "Rattle, you don't understand how I feel about a thing like that. How could you? You're too young."

"I call that the unfairest argument in the world to use to a sister who just happens to have been born four years later than you have," I told her, reproachfully. "I'm sure I'm older than you are, in my mind."

"I'm glad," said Evelyn, looking up gloomily at me, "that you're not so miserable."

"You needn't be miserable, if you had the sense to accept the man you care for, Evelyn!"

"Yes, I need," argued Evelyn, huskily. "I should be desperately unhappy if I were going to marry Mr. Curtis, knowing that he had—oh, dear!"—down went the head into the pillow again—"knowing that he had cared for my sister first."

"But you seem to be going to be pretty unhappy as it is," I pointed out, gazing sympathetically at the rumpled back of her hair. "So I should have thought it was better to be unhappy with the people you liked, than just marooned, all by yourself!"

She only repeated that I was too young to understand.

"Mr. Curtis is years older than either of us, and you won't let him understand either," said I. "He thinks you won't marry him just because you don't like him enough?"

"Yes, that's it," said Evelyn, hopelessly.

Being in love does take people different ways, they say. Hers is the most exasperating I've ever come across in the whole course of my experience!

We can't have it. It must come right. Somebody capable of thinking things out reasonably must do something.

I must do something.

In the meantime, wasn't I right when I told you that my sister Evelyn was an awful warning and object-lesson to all "Sensible" girls?

CHAPTER XVII

AN EVENING OF THRILLS

Things simply will not leave off happening in this house! I should think we had come to the climax of them to-night!

Still! touch wood, you never know! There may be something else waiting to happen just round the corner.

To begin at the beginning. It was the evening after Evelyn had confided to me her love affair.

What a contrast between the beginning of that evening—and the end of it!

To start with the beginning.

We had spent a very quiet time in the drawing-room, Aunt Victoria playing patience on her green-covered table by the fire, and I busily embroidering a chemise top which I had just made out of two very nice hankies, and which I meant to be a belated wedding present for my sister Nancy.

Because, even if she is able to afford to pay for the new trousseau pretties out of his grandfather's reconciled allowance, I should think she would still rather like to have a few little things made for her by her own flesh and blood. So I have been sewing "a kiss and a good wish" into every stitch of this chimmie top, as you always should into the presents that you give to somebody that you are very fond of.

Evelyn, looking more than washed-out, poor child! after her fit of crying and confidence this afternoon, was rather languidly knitting a pair of khaki mittens for one of the men in Mr. Lascelles's company.

Mr. Lascelles himself was stretched out in his own particular armchair, which is the comfiest one in the drawing-room.

And so it ought to be, considering how hard he has to work, poor boy! and how he simply tears about all day. It really is just like that thing he's always humming:

"'I do all the work,' says the Subaltern."

To-day it was trousers, if you'll believe it; hours of his time taken up over four pair of the most awful khaki bags that looked just as if they were made of the old felt that we've got underneath the stair-carpet. "Please, sir, do you think these are worth mending?" and all that. Combined with some complication with a person who is called the Officer-in-charge-of-stores, who is always complaining that the precious stores have been misused, and getting people strafed when they don't deserve it one bit. Mr. Lascelles said he was quite looking forward to settling down to a little peace and quiet in the trenches, after all this.

However, he was settled down in his chair for the present, smoking a cigarette—oh, yes! cigarettes in Aunt Victoria's drawing-room are nothing, nowadays. I fully expect to see her light up herself one of these evenings! Well! He was smoking a cigarette and chuckling over a copy of The Natal Newsletter, that ship's newspaper that was written and printed and everything on board ship. It had been lent to him by the Commander, who had pinched it off one of the men on a trawler.

"You might read aloud to us," I said, stitching away.

And he, Mr. Lascelles, said he'd read a poem that was supposed to be about H.M.S. Queen Elizabeth.

"It isn't unlike you, yourself," he said, rather mischievously. "It begins:

"'She's quite a modern-to-the-minute flapper——'"

"I do hate being called a flapper!" I put in, but he frowned me down. It wasn't a real frown, you know: we were quite friends, now.

"'And older folk have called her rather fast——'"

("H'm, that's not so appropriate") put in Mr. Lascelles, reading on:

"'She's a girl of very vigorous opinions.'"

("That's all in order, isn't it?")

"'Though young, already has a vivid Past.'"

("That's the joy-ride to the Junction, Miss Elizabeth, the day of your sister's wedding.")

"'When she goes a-walking out there's consternation
Among the baggy-trousered Eastern swells.
For she's slinging Cupid's arrows
In the region of their narrows
Is our bu-sy little Lizzie in the dizzy Dardanelles!'"

Here Aunt Victoria looked up from her patience and asked mildly: "What are you reading, Mr. Lascelles? Aren't you going on?"

I should have liked him to, but he didn't. He got up, looked at Aunt Victoria's patience for a minute, then said that as he had had a rather hefty day's work he thought he would turn in early.

"Good-night, Mrs. Verdeley," he said. "Good-night, Miss Evelyn."

Then he turned to me on his way to the door, and caught my eyes and said in a lower tone that I don't think the others could possibly have caught, "Good-night, Miss Betty."

To show there was no ill-will I smiled up at him from my seat on the pouffe and said, "Good-night, Lonely Subaltern!"

Then I went on embroidering that white silk true-lovers' knot on young Mrs. Masters' chemise-top, and thinking how funny it was that I'd ever really disliked him. Evelyn was knitting away, mooning away at the same time, I expect, over her extremely uninteresting (except to her) young lover. Aunt Victoria continued to murmur to her cards, "Ah! that, and that, and that. Is it going to come out now? I believe I shall get it to come out after all." And the fire-flames "talked" softly in the grate, and everything under the pink lamplight of the cosy, old-fashioned room was Peace, perfect Peace.

I suppose that peace must have lasted for about five or seven minutes after Mr. Lascelles had gone upstairs. Then, as suddenly as thunder in the dark, the peace was shattered by the sound of the quickest, sharpest "Crack—Crack!"

An explosion? Another raid?

"The Zeppelins! Oh, my goodness, those horrible Zeppelins again!" shrieked Aunt Victoria, starting up and scattering all her cards, while the sewing dropped from my hands and the knitting from Evelyn's.

Before we had got up to put out all the lights (as we have been warned to do by the posters) there followed, quick upon the sound of those two shots, loud screaming—a shout—(there seemed to come from the top of our house) and then a hammering and violent ringing at our front door! I rushed to it, and opened it. There were Mr. Curtis and four of the sappers from the nearest house to us, all very breathless and excited-looking, all chorusing, "What's up? what's up?" Mr. Curtis, rather white, added, "Where's Evelyn?" And then went on, "I heard shots fired: it is in your house! What has happened?"

"I don't know," I began, still bewildered. Then Aunt Victoria came out, still clutching the knave of spades in her hand, and Evelyn looking over her shoulder.

"Shots came from the garret—I'm sure—they did," declared Mr. Curtis quickly. (In fact, you must please remember that all these sayings and doings took place much more quickly than I can possibly write, or you read about them. It was one mad rush, I can tell you.) "Come along, you men," called Mr. Curtis; "we must run up and see."

He dashed up the stairs with the four sappers at his heels, me after them, and Evelyn after me.

Aunt Victoria panted two steps behind Evelyn.

On the first landing we ran into Mary, the housemaid, all ready for bed.

Her face was as white as her nightie and her eyes were nearly out of her head with terror. She seized Mr. Curtis by the arm and exclaimed: "Oh, Lor! I believe I am going to faint."

Here Mr. Curtis shook her—a thing I have often longed to do myself—and she left off flopping and looked indignantly at the sappers and said: "Any one would be ready to faint! Happened? Why, there's that little Mr. Lascelles and old Penny just been and gone and murdered each other in the attic."

"Murdered!" gasped Aunt Victoria from the rear.

And I knew what it meant when it says in books that people's hearts have stopped beating with horror. For a moment I really did feel as if my own heart had stopped.

Mr. Lascelles? Murdered?

Ah, no, no, no! This must be some sort of hideous nightmare! It could only be that. It was so like the sort of things that only happen in dreams.

I saw Mr. Curtis put Mary firmly but not too gently aside and then pelt up the next flight of stairs on to the second landing, then on to the attic, where old Penny sleeps next door to the maids.

And here I found that I had rushed in front of the sappers and the others, and was close beside Mr. Curtis as he flung open the door of old Penny's room. It was dark.

Mr. Curtis struck a match and quickly turned on the gas, of which there is a bracket close to the side of the door.

The flaring light fell on the most extraordinary picture I have ever seen, either on a cinema or anywhere else.

The bed, which had been in the farther corner of the room, had been dragged into the middle of it, close under the skylight. The skylight was uncovered and open. On the bed was the figure of Penny, our gardener, fully dressed in his brown corduroys and his gardening leggings. One hand, hanging over the edge of the bed, was fumbling frantically about for something that lay just out of his reach on the floor. At that awful moment I didn't even take in what it was that he was trying to get at. Mr. Curtis dashed forward and snatched it up. It was a revolver. ("A thing dear old Penny never had!" as Aunt Victoria kept on saying.) A revolver for which he was feeling blindly—yes, thank Heavens, he was blinded!

Covering and muffling his head, which we couldn't see, of course, was the thick curtain of dark green serge which Aunt Victoria had sent up to his room for him to tack over the skylight so that not a vestige of light should get through and get him into disgrace with the military authorities.

He was struggling violently, making what I suppose are the "superhuman" efforts they're always doing in Henry's books, to free himself. For he was pinned down as he kicked and writhed. Half sitting, half lying on his chest, was Mr. Lascelles. Mr. Lascelles had blood trickling from a wound in his head down his cheek and chin, and his right arm was hanging all limp and helpless and dreadful-looking at his side.

"Hullo!" he said, smiling in a crooked way as we came in and Mr. Curtis rushed on him. "I have just collared this beauty signalling through the skylight with his electric torch! How's that for a fair cop, Miss Betty?"

At the last word he just toppled over and fell face downwards on to the still struggling Penny.

He had fainted dead away.

* * * * * * * *

It's now a whole day after that scene in the attic, and I am only just getting clear in my mind about what has happened.

Mr. Lascelles, who had been pretty badly hurt (they find), is in his room with a hospital nurse from the Junction to look after him.

Just as if Aunt Victoria and Evelyn and I couldn't do everything the doctor wanted! It seems to me that all the nurse does is to give herself fearful airs, and to send us running about on various messages for herself all day. Every time I have been to the door to see if there wasn't something I could do myself for Mr. Lascelles I have been held up by a starched blue-and-white figure who hasn't so much as let me put my foot over the threshold. I have only twice been able to catch a glimpse of Mr. Lascelles's bandaged red head lying on the pillow; once he didn't even see me, but the other time he just did. I saw him twist his poor, feverishly flushed little face into the funniest grimace of dislike at the nurse's back, just before she shut the door upon me.

I went down to Mr. Curtis, who was in the drawing-room, having torn over to the Junction and back on his motor-cycle to bring some grapes and everything else that he could think of in the way of comforts for his wounded friend.

Isn't it extraordinary that we, in this peaceful camp-of-instruction place, should have in our house a real, live, wounded officer, wounded on the spot, too, by the enemy—by a German?

For, would you believe it! After all these years old Penny, our gardener—that faithful old man as we have thought him—has turned out to be nothing in the world but a German spy!

Think of that!

Faithful, indeed! Do you know that all these ten years that he has been here it has been with only one idea in his mind apparently, and that is to help with the landing party in this place as soon as the war broke out which the Germans have been planning for years and years. He got in bright and early, you see, so that he should be looked upon as the oldest inhabitant, so to speak, and quite one of the landmarks of the place. Nobody having the vaguest suspicion except that he was a dear old hard-working Englishman!

And "old," you know. Would you believe it, he isn't even old! That "pathetic" black wig that we all thought was because he didn't want to go about as bald as a pale pink Easter egg, was all part of the take-in. When I saw him being marched off by the military police who were fetched by the sappers that dreadful night, they tore off his wig, and there he was underneath, if you please, with a thick stubble of hair as fair as our own! As for his walking lame with rheumatism, that was an old sabre-cut on the leg—from one of his superior officers, I suppose.

(Later.)

Mr. Curtis has just told me the latest about our treasure of a gardener. They have found out who old Penny is. His name is Otto Pfennig, and there was enough information in the papers they found in his garret to have given away every fortified place along this bit of coast! That is what he has been up to. That was why I met him that afternoon in the field sniffing round the explosives and saps and things; that was why he had pretended to have "screwmatics" so badly that he should leave his cottage, and be able to come and live in our garret, where there was a nice skylight convenient for signalling from.

That was why Mr. Lascelles had that bust-up with him the night of the Zeppelin raid when he found Penny with the skylight uncovered.

But Mr. Lascelles has had his eye on Penny ever since, Mr. Curtis says. He was absolutely certain that there was something very fishy about him, and so he shadowed him, and watched him, and that night when he went to bed early it was really more to reconnoitre than anything else.

It seems he had got another key cut in the R.E. workshops to fit the door of Penny's attic, which Penny, if you please, always kept locked, pretending that he was frightened of burglars! So Mr. Lascelles was able to steal in softly behind him and to find him with that electric torch which helped the Zeppelin raid over London that same night!

Mr. Lascelles had his revolver, and was just going to cover Penny, but the German, who was a much bigger man, flung himself on to the top of Mr. Lascelles, and wrested it from him.

Then little Mr. Lascelles seized hold of the skylight curtain, which was lying on the bed, and managed just in the very nick of time to get it round Penny's head just as Penny fired.

Those two shots in the dark were what we heard. Of course, they would have killed poor little Mr. Lascelles if the German had been able to see what he was doing: as it was, they shattered his right upper arm and tore his—Mr. Lascelles's—scalp. Thank Heaven he had the pistol knocked out of his hand and couldn't get at it to fire off the other four chambers.

Then, while we all pelted upstairs, there must have been a desperate scuffle between the German gardener and Mr. Lascelles, who still managed to keep that thick serge curtain wound over his head and round his throat, and who sat on his chest, keeping him down, just as a small, very game terrier is sometimes able to hold his own with a much bigger and more powerful mongrel.

"As it was," said Mr. Curtis, "the rescue party only just got up there in the very nick of time. That fellow would have wrested himself free and downed Lascelles in another minute."

"Dear me, oh, dear me!" murmured Aunt Victoria, looking in an absolute daze of not realising anything yet. "I daresay he might have hurt him dreadfully!"

"I should have been sorry for him then. For the German gentleman, I mean, if Lascelles's men had got hold of him," said Mr. Curtis, grimly. I quite liked him at that moment, being so very angry made him look almost nice! Perhaps Evelyn always sees him like that? "They'd have picked that spy to pieces like an old woman feathering a goose."

"That would have been very wrong," said Aunt Victoria, who is one of those people who sometimes forget that we are fighting Germans, and not merely savage tribes and barbarians that you have to remember the rules of war with. I didn't see why Herr Otto Pfennig shouldn't have been given over to Mr. Lascelles's Field Company as it was, to do what they thought fit with. None of the officers in the place need have been passing at the time!

"He was a good gardener while he was a gardener," Aunt Victoria stood up for him. "And he thinks he's right in doing what he can for his country, just as you are, Mr. Curtis." (Poor Mr. Curtis looked as if he wondered why he had ever joined to defend his country, if his countrywomen thought of him in the same breath as a Boche!)

Aunt Victoria wound up by asking anxiously, "What do you think will be done with him?"

Mr. Curtis shrugged his rather bony shoulders and said he supposed Mr. Pfennig would be given the best quarters in the Junction Barracks, turning out several of our officers to make room for him; and that he would be allowed to go over to the nearest concentration-camp and pick out whichever of the German prisoners he fancied to be his batman and wait on him.

"At least, he's certain to be treated with the utmost consideration," he assured Aunt Victoria. "It's only British prisoners who cannot expect to have every comfort and luxury when they fall into alien hands. You needn't worry about him, Mrs. Verdeley. It's Lascelles I'm worrying about. That head-wound of his is jolly nasty. The nurse says his temperature is up again."

CHAPTER XVIII

A DAY OF DESPAIR

Mr. Lascelles is worse. This morning the nurse said, in quite an ordinary sort of voice, something about "If he pulls through——"

"If!——"

Meaning he may not.

If he doesn't, I shall want to murder that nurse. I am sure it is her fault.

No, it isn't; it's the fault of that Miss Gates, the woman we met that lovely time on the road when he took me on his motor-cycle to the Junction.

It was she who sent down this nurse from her (Miss Gates's) nursing-home that she has for wounded officers at the Junction. Why didn't she send somebody better? Somebody who knew what ought to be done? Somebody who'd let us in to attend to him? I know he'd rather see one of our familiar faces than that unpleasant-looking feline in the blue-and-white print who thinks she's Everybody! Already she's found fault with the bathroom, and with the soda-water. All she's fit for is to nurse wounded Germans; I can't think why they don't set her to it. That would certainly be her "bit." She's enough to make anybody have a relapse.

You know, he did make a face at her....

But he's too ill even to make faces, now. Isn't it awful? He doesn't know what he's saying. He mutters and mutters in a voice that isn't his a bit I could hear it right from the mat outside, where I was standing. Once he called out quite loudly, "Mother! I want you! Where are you, Mother? Mother!"

And I had to swallow down a lump in my throat as big as an ostrich egg as I stood there on the mat listening to him. For, you know, his mother died when he was eleven-and-a-half.

"Mother!" he called again, and I couldn't bear it.

I dashed downstairs as quietly as I could ... I don't know what to do with myself. I don't want to go out, I'm afraid of meeting people in the village who will ask me how he is, and I should so hate having to hear myself say that I thought he was still in danger.

I've been walking all over the house, from the Lair, where Evelyn sits silently knitting, to the drawing-room, where Aunt Victoria sits silently staring at her patience cards, but doesn't care any longer whether it "comes out" or whether it doesn't come out. All she cares is whether Mr. Lascelles is going to pull through.

I left her and wandered aimlessly out into the kitchen, where cook was baking bread. At least cook would talk, I thought.

Cook did talk. She let loose a flow of it before I could say a word.

"Have you noticed all the signs there's been about, Miss Rattle, that there's going to be a death in the house?" she began, while I stood there petrified. "Yesterday that blessed dog howling outside for no reason that you could see! To-day a single magpie flew over the field in front of the house just as I was hotting the breakfast-plates, and the first thing in the morning if I didn't see a hare run across the garden-path! Always means something, that does. Always!"

"Cook! You sound as if you were hoping it meant——"

Without listening to me, cook went on, shaking her head lugubriously over her kneading-crock, in which her plump, pinky arms were plunging up and down.

"Ah, poor dear young gentleman! I expect he's doomed! You mark my words, Miss Rattle," said cook. "A short life and a merry! After all, he died doing his duty, just the same as if he had gone out to the front and stopped a German bullet there, as he calls it. Well! I suppose they will have a reel military funeral for him, the first there has ever been here!"

And she shook her head again and sighed with a gloom that she seemed—yes! she seemed to enjoy it!

For if there is one thing that cook seems to love it is going to what she calls "a burying"; even his! I was speechless with horrifiedness at her.

"There is always a silver lining to every cloud," she went on with gusto. "There is that good black crêpe toque I had for when my pore sister-in-law was took; now that will come in lovely. Haven't had it on above four times, and I should like to wear it, to show kind of respect, as you might say, to poor dear Mr. Lascelles. For I am sure your auntie, Miss Rattle, would be quite agreeable to letting us have the afternoon off for the ceremony, don't you think so?"

Here I lost my speechlessncss. "You awful woman!" I cried. "You perfect ghoul!" For I also lost my temper. Worse than I had ever lost it before, except that one time before I got to know Mr. Lascelles when I slapped his face in the dining-room. (Oh, how could I!) If I'd had a grenade in my hand then, I should have flung it at cook's capped head.

Fortunately, all that I had in my hand was a bunch of rather passé yellow chrysanthemums and laurustinus branches, which I had taken out of the bowl on the hall table, meaning to burn them in the kitchen fire.

I flung them at cook instead, wet stalks and all! You know how horrid wet chrysanthemum stalks are when they have been in water for some time?

Cook was so taken aback that, for the first second, she didn't realise what had happened.

"Good heavens above!" I heard her gasp out of the middle of that handful of decaying foliage. "Whatever's this?"

"As you are so fond of funerals," I heard myself cry furiously, "there's some flowers to make a wreath!"

Then I tore out of the kitchen again and fled to the Lair.

Evelyn was still there, knitting. I flung myself on the ground at her knee, and buried my face in her lap.

Then I burst into tears. Loud, bitter tears, just like a child of three.

I cried as if my heart would break.

"Oh, Evelyn! Oh, Evelyn!"

I must say dear old Evelyn was perfectly beautiful to me at this juncture. She threw down her knitting and put her arms round me and petted and comforted me as if she understood everything that I was feeling. She didn't even once ask me what I was crying about: she didn't tell me not to cry. She fished my hankie out for me, she gave me the comfortablest part of her shoulder to rest my head on.

For I must say that when anybody's really in trouble my eldest sister is so nice that you wouldn't believe she was in the least good! You know what I mean!

"Oh, Evelyn, if he dies," I sobbed brokenly. "If he dies!—— Beast! Little beast!"

"Rattle, darling! Don't call him names, now——"

"Call him names? Him? I mean me," I almost bellowed. "Little beast that I've been to him ever since he came here, Evelyn! S-s-snubbing him at every tut—turn! And saying such cuck—cruel things about bank-clerks and red hair and how he ought to be in the Bub—Bantam's Battalion and have c-c-corn strewed for him in the trenches because he was so small! Oh, oh! How could I? And then that awful day when I qu—quarrelled with him in the dining-room and——"

"Slapped his face," I was just going to gulp out, but in the nick of time I remembered that the others knew nothing about all that.

Evelyn whispered soothingly: "But, Rattle, you've been so much nicer to him lately. I've noticed that. Ever since the day you went to the Junction in his side-car, you've been quite—quite friends, comparatively, with Mr. Lascelles. Haven't you, now?"

"Not enough! Not enough to make up for all the times before!" I wept. "And, oh, supposing he dies!"

"I don't believe he is going to," said Evelyn firmly. "He's got youth on his side, the doctor said! I've a feeling he's going to be all right!"

"Oh! If only I could have that feeling, too!"

"He'll recover," Evelyn persisted, rubbing her cheek against my hair. "He'll pull through."

"Oh, if he does, I—I—I shall be such a perfect angel to him that he won't know me!" I sobbed. "And if he doesn't get well ... Evelyn, Evelyn! I shall wish that I was dead, too!"

CHAPTER XIX

OUT OF DANGER

At last! At last! After what has seemed seventeen years of waiting, and after Evelyn and I both feel that our hairs must have turned at least as grey as Aunt Victoria's! At last we've got some good news. Mr. Lascelles is out of danger.

This morning the blue-and-white-print nurse condescended to tell us that the doctor says her patient—(hers, you know! Please don't all laugh too loud, or the echoes of your laughter may break the bubble of self-satisfaction in which that woman lives)—"her" patient has turned the corner, and is beginning to do remarkably well.

We were all so frightfully relieved that I could have fallen on nurse's neck and kissed even her.

"But he will be weak for some time still," she said, discouragingly, "and had better not see anybody."

"She might have waited until somebody had suggested rushing in to see him," as Nancy said.

Oh! I forgot to tell you that our married sister, Nancy—Mrs. Masters—has arrived home safely. Her home-coming, which was going to have been such a terrific bust-up, fell very flat, coming just after that thrilling evening of the capture of the German spy in our house and in the very middle of all our anxieties about poor Mr. Lascelles. Hardly any fuss was made.

We had to receive her, so to speak, in a whisper: because the house has to be kept so very quiet still.

It's quite a nuisance.

Now that we know he is going to get well quite soon, we don't mind grumbling at him. As for me, I can't think why I made such a donkey of myself and actually shed tears.... I suppose it was tiredness, really, after not being able to sleep for excitement. Thank goodness there was nobody but Evelyn to notice how silly and hysterical I got! She has plenty of other things to think about.

We'll now talk a little about the newly-marrieds!

You didn't suppose they were going to settle down at the Grange, did you? Oh, no. Captain Masters—that is Harry—whisked Nancy off to stay with him where he is billeted at some rooms right at the other end of the village.

Aunt Victoria says she thinks it is not at all a bad plan for a young couple to start married life in billets, because then they will not get any new-fangled, grand ideas about artistic furniture, and a great deal of space, and a servants' hall and a private sitting-room for every member of the family. She says they will start by getting quite accustomed to the hideous inconvenience of rooms, and that, in the first flush of being together, they won't notice where it is! Then, afterwards, whatever other place they go into of their own, they will look upon it as a kind of mixture of heaven and the "Ritz!"

(Later.)

Evelyn and I have just been to tea with Nancy in her newly-married billet and found her surrounded by stores of cardboard boxes and drifts of tissue paper—wedding present stuff. It has begun to roll in now from Harry's relations. Salt-cellars, mustard-pots, silver-framed calendars, silver photograph-frames, and all the usual sort of things. "His people have been very kind," she told us at tea, which we had out of the silver Queen Anne service on the oval tray, which is another wedding present. I thought the first day she arrived that being married had made no difference at all to Nancy. She looked as young and pink and bubbling over with jolliness as she had before, only if possible she was more jolly.

But to-day, at tea, I noticed that there was a change. She did talk a tiny bit as if there was a great gulf fixed, or at least a trench dug.

I could see Evelyn getting rather annoyed at this little "superior" way, these airs and graces; but I didn't mind them.

Everything wears off as long as the other people don't take any notice.

So I fully expect that Nancy's newly-married manner will wear off, too, including the little flourish with which she calls her husband's friends by their Christian names. "Edwin," if you please for Mr. Curtis (I consider Edwin the limit in names myself, but no doubt poor Evelyn would be only too thankful to have the chance to utter it!) and "Frank" for Mr. Lascelles!

"Have you seen Frank yet, Evelyn?" she asked, after we'd talked all about her new relations and the honeymoon, and how long it would be before Harry went out. Ages, he thought. If a man's told he may expect to go within the next fortnight, he's pretty safe in taking a house at home for eighteen months. All this we were told before Nancy went on to talk of Mr. Lascelles, as she blew out the fire of the silver spirit-kettle with the long, slender trumpet affair that made her look like a very pretty, golden-haired sort of archangel Gabriel. "Or does the dragon of a nurse still mount guard?"

"She still mounts guard," said Evelyn resignedly. "Never mind, as soon as he is convalescent she will go. We really have missed him, Nancy, almost as much as we miss you. He has been exactly like a brother."

"And a brother that one is so proud of, too," Nancy took up. "When I think of that minute mite hanging on to that German brute, who would have killed him, Edwin says, in another minute, I feel that the Victoria Cross wouldn't be too much for him, provided there were room for it to hang on his chest!"

"Oh, come! I say, he is not as small as that!" I couldn't help protesting, through a mouthful of Nancy's tea-cake. "You all talk as if, because a man isn't six foot three, you couldn't see him!"

"Why, Rattle! it was you that was always talking as if he were too small to be seen," said Nancy. "It was you who said that dancing with him would make you feel as if you had got hold of a flea!"

I felt the family blush creeping up from my collar to the roots of my hair as I said, "That was ages ago, that was before he was wounded, that was before he was so ill and nearly died."

"Oh; was that it?" said Nancy, smiling at Evelyn; I'm sure I don't know why. "Well, he is nearly convalescent now," she said consolingly. "I hear he is cross."

"Cross!" said Evelyn and I together. "Who has been bothering him?"

"Nobody," said Nancy. "The nurse said he was cross."

"I hate all nurses," I said fervently.

"Why, that is exactly what Mr. Lascelles said himself to the nurse," reported Nancy. "Simply because she wanted to wash his face, and then she told me it was an excellent sign, and that he would soon be well."

"I should be glad," said Evelyn, "to have a talk with the little creature once more!"

She doesn't know—nobody knows how much I, Rattle, want to have a talk with the little creature, as they call him. (Quite absurd of them, because he is inches higher than any of our shoulders.)

But what I was going to say was that I am going to have the first talk with him. For I've got a secret from them, now.

I've had a letter from Mr. Lascelles. There!

A letter written in his own hand!

It was brought to me by Lance-Corporal Gateshead, who somehow got round Mary the housemaid to smuggle him up into Mr. Lascelles's room while that nurse was having her dinner.

It's written, this note of mine, in rather wobbly pencil on a blank sheet torn from a note-book and folded into a funny little twist. It simply says:

"DEAR BETTY" (Not "Miss"),

"I must see you as soon as I can possibly work it. I have something to ask you. It's that favour which I was going to ask you the other morning, and I haven't had a chance since. I do so want it. Nurse says that I may see one of you for a minute, at six to-night. Please be the one. I do so want it.

"Yours,
"LONELY SUBALTERN."

"P.S.—I really am, you know."

Just fancy! I mean his putting "Lonely Subaltern" again, like in those first letters.

And the "favour"! What can it be? What can it be? Anybody would be bursting with curiosity if they had had a note like that brought to them from a young man; I mean from anybody— Curiosity is the oddest feeling; it makes you so excited that you simply can't enjoy your tea, really; and you feel kind of aloof, too, from the light-hearted talk of other people about other things. Isn't it funny? You don't want to stop and see anybody's husband. Besides, when Harry Masters came in, I got a kind of clairvoyant sense that he hoped we'd go soon and leave him to have a tête-à-tête tea with his blooming bride. I believe in clairvoyance. So I didn't care if I wasn't the eldest of the party. I just did get up first, and told Nancy we should have to be going!

It's ten minutes' walk from the newly-married billet to the other side of the village, and I simply had to be back by six o'clock and hear all about the mysterious "favour" I was to be asked.

Anybody would have been dying to!

(Later.)

I'm afraid I rushed Evelyn home, rather; tearing across the short way by the fields, with Mr. Lascelles's note crackling inside my blouse.

Yes, I daresay you are going to say idiotic things about wearing young men's letters next to one's heart, but it wasn't meant for that kind of thing at all. It was simply that I always lose everything that I put into my vanity-bag, and I didn't want to lose this letter, because—well, because it would look so silly of me.

"Any one would think we were running for a train," said Evelyn rather pettishly when we got back beyond the village post-office.

I said, "My feet are cold," and rushed on like a runaway horse.

Who could help it, in my shoes? And it seemed as if we must have been mistaken about the fields being shorter than the road to the Grange, because it really took a longer time than usual!

When we got to the Grange—well! We needn't have rushed! We might as well have stayed on at Nancy's for all the use our rushing had been! In fact, if we had stayed with Nancy and finished our tea, properly, it would at least have postponed the sickening disappointment that awaited us at home!

Aunt Victoria, looking a little flushed and flustered, met us in the hall.

"What's the matter, Auntie?" I asked at once. "Mr. Lascelles isn't worse, is he?"

Aunt Victoria pronounced these awful words, "He's gone!"

"Gone!" exclaimed Evelyn and I together, not able to believe our ears. Evelyn added in a horrified voice, "Do you mean he is dead, Auntie?"

"Dead! Good Heavens! no, my dear child," said Aunt Victoria in an equally horrified voice. "I only mean that he has gone away from here."

"Where on earth to?" we asked loudly.

"To the Junction," said Aunt Victoria. "To that nursing home for wounded officers that they have got, that one that nurse came from."

"Gone!" I said. "But how? How could he possibly go?"

She pointed to the marks of wheels on our gravel.

"A motor came over from the Junction and whisked him off at half-past five. He asked me to say good-bye very nicely to you girls for him."

Here I heard myself say in a very angry voice, "Who came in the motor?"

"The matron of the nursing home, Miss Gates," Aunt Victoria told us, fanning herself with her lavender-scented handkerchief as if she'd had a rather fatiguing time. "She's a——" here she sat down on the hall chair and breathed hard. "A very efficient woman, I should think, very determined and very capable. I don't think Mr. Lascelles wanted to go at first. He said he was quite comfortable with us if he was not too much trouble, and the lady said that he would convalesce so much better at her home, and she took him off."

"Kidnapped him!" said Evelyn. "When he wanted to stay here! How tiresome of her, wasn't it, Rattle?"

I didn't say anything. I was too cross. If there's one thing I loathe, it's bad manners. And wasn't it the worst manners in the world for that woman, that Miss Gates whom I'd seen once, to come swooping along in a motor to people's houses, carrying off people's reluctant guests—reluctant to go with her, I mean. Here she came, upsetting Aunt Victoria!

(You could see poor Auntie had had her "siesta" disturbed, and was feeling it.) Upsetting Mr. Lascelles! For he'd something to ask me! He wanted to see me! Had written to me—and she'd whisked him off before we could catch a glimpse of each other!

Now goodness only knows when I shall be able to find out what he wanted; a convalescent man, too, ought to have his wishes studied! Any one with any idea of nursing should have known that!

"Nurse packed up and went with them, at a minute's notice," said Aunt Victoria.

"She would!" said I. "She's just the sort of nurse who would belong to that matron!"

Aunt Victoria, still fanning herself, said, "Perhaps she was right; he will have every comfort and care there."

"And didn't he here?" I said indignantly.

Aunt Victoria murmured something about the matron not seeming to think Mr. Lascelles's billet was exactly adapted for hospital-nursing, not any of the modern ideas of——

"That's nurse!" said I.

"Well, the matron was an old friend of his," Aunt Victoria said mildly. She sticks up for everybody, first Baby-Killers, then Kidnappers!

"She has the prior claim. It seems she nursed him before once—saved his life——"

I remembered the appendicitis-story on the road that day, and how she'd stared at me from the motor, and how she'd called Mr. Lascelles "Frankie," and all about her.

I said, "He called her 'Sister,' I suppose?"

"Yes, my dear, I believe he did."

"I tell you what I call her," I said bitterly. "A managing old maid!"

I don't know when I've felt so angry.

CHAPTER XX

I PLAY PROVIDENCE

Well, I've always heard that when one is very upset oneself, the best cure is to force oneself to take an interest in somebody else's troubles.

Of course, I'm not exactly "upset" about Mr. Lascelles having been kidnapped out of this house before I could hear what he wanted. I'm sorry for him, that's all.

But I'm sorrier still for my poor crossed-in-love sister Evelyn.

I really must devote some attention to her and her rejected suitor.

It makes me perfectly miserable to see somebody I am fond of taking love as Evelyn takes it. Her smile is a most half-hearted affair, and she takes absolutely no interest in her food, though she eats pretty well. At dinner-time she tried to make a meal of vegetables and gravy and one grain of rice pudding; but immediately Aunt Victoria looked up and said: "Evelyn, my dear child, is that all you are going to have? Aren't you feeling well? What is the matter with you?"

Of course, it is the last thing that poor old Evelyn wants for anybody to think that there is anything the matter with her, so she had to pretend that she had got rather a headache again through the stuffiness of the room where they have their bandaging class, and that that was why she didn't feel like eating.

And then next day she took to roast mutton and two helpings again as if nothing had happened.

However, of course I knew that concealment was gnawing away like a worm in the bud, like that girl in Shakespeare, and that Evelyn was feeling as if all the champagne had gone out of her life, as I once heard Mr. Lascelles express it. We do so miss him and his expressions!

It is—really, it is too beastly to be in a house full of women once more.

It is nearly as bad as before the troops came to Mud Flats.

At least, now I suppose one can't very well say it is as bad as that, because, after all, we do have men coming and going. Our brother-in-law, Harry, is in and out quite a lot, and he brings various of the men with him to have tea and to play the piano in the Lair.

And then, of course, we have occasionally the evidently quite homeless Mr. Curtis. Evidently Evelyn cares as much for the creature as if he were every inch a soldier, and, goodness knows! there are plenty of inches of him to be!

So since that is her ideal I do think she ought to be allowed to have it instead of grizzling and moping about it all day and half the night, and to think that it's only her obstinate idealism or whatever she likes to call it that is standing in the way of her being perfectly happy with the creature forever! You see, he won't be having to go out to the front like Nancy's Harry, because he (Mr. Curtis) has got a permanent job as instructor here.

And I am sure Aunt Victoria could be got round, considering how surprisingly kind and sympathetic she was about Nancy's war marriage.

Evelyn really is like the old song, "If she dies an old maid she will have only herself to blame."

This afternoon I told her so in the Lair, where she was sitting looking like the absolute incarnation of The Pip. We had a long, fruitless, and exhausting argument about it, which I won't go into again, because it was just like the last one we had, which you read all about before the German spy night.

Arguments are like history, having a way of repeating themselves.

And this one had a sort of constant refrain from Evelyn of, "It is all very well, Rattle, but you don't understand. You might be able to go to Edwin—I mean Mr. Curtis—and say to him, 'Look here, I have thought better of it. I will marry you, I thought I minded too much about Nancy at the party, and all that sort of thing, but I don't. All that I mind would be not being able to be with you any more'—I couldn't do that, Rattle; you don't understand."

I got so very tired of what one can't help considering as a parrot cry!

It is no earthly use ever arguing, especially when you are the youngest.

And all you can say is, "Yes, I do understand," and then the other person says, "No, you don't, you can't," and there you are!

What can be done?

Nothing!

So I resigned myself, and merely said, "No, perhaps I don't understand. Of course, I am the youngest, and, of course, I haven't ever been in love, so, of course, I haven't any right to an opinion; but look here, Evelyn, can't you talk it over with somebody else, and see what they think about it?"

Evelyn, holding her face in both hands, said gloomily, "What sort of person is there that I could possibly talk it over with?"

"Well," I said, "somebody married, who knew all about love and that!"

"Aunt Victoria, I suppose you mean," said Evelyn, with bitter irony.

"No, of course, not Aunt Victoria," I said patiently. "But what about Nancy?"

Evelyn gave a little furious jump out of her chair.

"Nancy!" she exclaimed indignantly. "But Nancy is the one that all the trouble is about—Nancy is the very last person that I should ever breathe a word to!"

"Is she?" I said, staring at Evelyn across the good old ink-spattered tablecloth of the Lair. "Now, that's funny, because, if I had been you, Nancy would have been the very first person to whom I should have turned! Just because she was at the bottom of the trouble, as you call it. I call it a storm in a teacup and a mountain and a molehill," I said, getting mixed up rather in my metaphors because I was really serious.

I said: "If I were in your place, Evelyn, I should go straight away to Nancy and get her to tell me exactly what had happened that time on the staircase. I should say: 'Look here, I do so want to marry Edwin, but I don't feel I can unless I know exactly how much he liked you first. Do you think he would have asked you to marry him if you hadn't got engaged to Harry Masters? Do you think he is only making love to you because he is one of those young men who marry the family rather more than the girl? They get a type that they admire and they stick to it. If the Nancy of the family won't have them they take the Evelyn. That is what I am afraid of,' I should say to Nancy, in your place, 'and I really don't know how to stand it; please tell me exactly everything that happened by the staircase.' I should make her give me a full descrip——"

"Stop, Rattle, stop! You really do say such dreadful things," complained Evelyn, putting her hands over her ears to shut out anything else I might have been able to say. "You really are what Mr. Curtis once said you were——"

"Oh? What?" I asked. For one can't help always being interested in what people have said of one, even if the people don't exactly thrill one. "What did Mr. Curtis call me?"

"An artless and opinionated kid," said Evelyn, so listlessly that, disgusted as I was, I hadn't the heart to tell her what I thought of her precious Mr. Curtis; a pompous mile of measuring-tape! "You really can't enter into one's feelings yet. I'd much rather die or go into Miss Gates's Nursing Home for life than say a single word of all that to Nancy! And promise, Rattle!" she added, suddenly, "promise that you will never say a word of it either. Promise, Honour Bright, that you will never breathe a single syllable of it to her. Oh, if you did——"

"All right, old thing, I won't; don't get so fearfully excited. I've promised now. I always do what I say I will, don't I? I've never broken my word yet," I said, drawing myself up to my full height, which unfortunately made me bump the gas-bracket, hard. Rubbing my head, I said, "You're simply spoiling two lives, that's all."

"Oh, no; I expect he'll get over it, as you said yourself," was Evelyn's dreary answer, "and as for me, I shall go away and be a V.A.D. as soon as the time's up and I needn't be under Aunt Victoria's wing any more. I've got all my Red Cross certificates, and I ought to do some useful war-work."

"But, my goodness, d'you expect this war will still be going on, Evelyn, when you're twenty-five?"

"Captain Masters says it'll last till the youngest of our politicians die, so I expect it'll be going on when I'm seventy," said Evelyn.

You see the kind of mood she was in!

In fact, I was feeling rather pessimistic and ruffled myself as I strolled out of the Lair again.

For, you know, Evelyn dragging that promise out of me has just scotched a nice little plan that I had been making on my own.

I thought, "Well, if that silly Evelyn won't go and have it out with Nancy, I will go myself; I will tell her the whole complicated affair and hear what she has to say. Why not?"

However, that, you see, was nipped in the bud. I am a man of my word, or a woman, or a flapper, whichever you like to call it, and my lips are sealed by my own hand as far as Nancy is concerned.

But here a ray of hope dawns upon me. I haven't sealed them as far as anybody else is concerned. I haven't said that I wouldn't say anything to the other principal actor in this performance. So why shouldn't I speak to Mr. Curtis?

In fact, I shall. I have made up my mind to speak to him as soon as I get the opportunity!

The chance came sooner than I expected it would.

I went out for my usual afternoon walk, up near that field that is all riddled with trenches, where I had come upon Penny that afternoon when I little dreamt what it was he was up to.

And again I passed the Class, singing, "When the Boys come Home," with, trailing a long way after them on the road, the leggy, eyeglassed figure of Evelyn's adored one.

He looked at me as much as to say, "Why are you alone, not with HER?" but I wasn't damped.

"You are just the very person I want to see," I told him in a friendly way, stopping short as he saluted. "Will you see me home by the longest way round, please?"

"Wh—what? Oh! certainly! With pleasure, Miss Elizabeth," said Mr. Curtis; with a great deal of hesitation would have been truthfuller. Evidently he was alarmed beyond words at the idea of this tête-à-tête with the artless and opinionated one, and couldn't think what on earth it was going to be about.

It was on the tip of my tongue to say: "Do not agitate yourself, my good young man! this is out-of-doors, with no staircase window rattling, and at any moment there are motor-lorries and people passing, so you needn't think I shall expect you to behave to me as you did to Nancy."

However, I realised that this would be quite the wrong opening. So I said nothing for a moment, but merely trudged along by his side, in the gloaming, oh, my darling, when the lights were falling low.

To return to prose. We were going down the road to the Junction that Mr. Lascelles and I had whizzed down on our way to Nancy's wedding.

What ages ago that seemed now! It really does seem as if we had never had what I used to call the "Incubus" in the house with us at all....

However, here was this other creature wondering what in the world it was I had got to say to him.

It was a situation that called for the greatest delicacy and tact, as it says in the papers.

I thought I had better stop beating about the bush, take the bull by the horns and begin at once with the main issue.

I began: "Mr. Curtis! You know that my sister Evelyn is desperately in love with you?——"

At this he turned round on me like a jaguar at bay or something of that sort.

His voice was as sharp as any old pistol shot as he rapped out at me, "Miss Elizabeth! I don't know what your idea may be in making this kind of joke; but, if you don't mind my saying so, we will have no more of it. I consider it to be very poor taste."

You would have known he had been a schoolmaster, wouldn't you, by the way he said that? Schoolmasters always talk about "we" when they mean just themselves, just like the Kaiser.

And he—Mr. Curtis, I mean—started striding away so fast that, long as my own legs are, I had to put my best foot foremost to keep up with him.

"Mr. Curtis, Mr. Curtis," I exclaimed. "It isn't a joke——"

"It is not a joke to me," said Mr. Curtis grimly, through the gathering darkness.

"No, nor to me," I said, panting a little, for I was out of breath galloping after him like this, "nor to Evelyn."

"Please, I do not think we need bring your sister's name into it," said Mr. Curtis, as stiff as a dress-shirt that has just come home from the laundry.

He must be frantically in love, mustn't he, to think that Evelyn's mere name is too good to have her youngest sister mention it?

"But I must," I insisted. "I had to mention Evelyn's name, because it's about her that I want to speak to you."

"I should prefer it if you chose some other subject for conversation," said that awful Mr. Curtis that Evelyn was breaking her heart over at this moment. How true it is that Love is blind! I should think he must be deaf as well, besides not having any sense of humour!

However, faint heart never won fair gentleman! Not that Mr. Curtis is fair, being one of these men who is much of a muchness with their own khaki. I do like a man to be one thing or the other. Either definite black or quite fair or even red; but to get on with what I was saying to Mr. Curtis.

"I really mean it," I insisted, trying to keep in step with him. "My sister Evelyn is fearfully in love with you. I—I am very anxious about her because of it!"

"Miss Elizabeth, you must allow me to beg you not to say these things," barked Mr. Curtis, still doing the heavy schoolmaster. "Since it is not a very doubtful joke on your part, it is a very unfortunate and incomprehensible mistake."

"It isn't," I insisted, striding along by the side of the man who was going to be my brother-in-law, or I would know the reason why. "Strange as it may seem, it's the absolute truth."

"I am the best judge of that," said the stony voice of Mr. Curtis, just above me. "Since you have broached the subject, Miss Elizabeth, I may as well tell you that I have the best possible reason for knowing that Miss Evelyn does not and could not ever care for me in the least."

"She told you so, I suppose?"

This satire was quite lost on him.

If you notice, satire nearly always is, on everybody. You have only got to say a thing without smiling and everybody takes it literally and sees nothing further in it.

"She did tell me, since you must know," said Mr. Curtis, shortly.

But at the back of his words there was such a sort of quiver of sorrow and yearning and hopeless loneliness that I overlooked the rude things he'd said about me. I could not help feeling sorry for him.

"Because a woman says a thing it isn't always a sign that it is perfectly true," I informed him. "It is not true that Evelyn does not care for you. Even if she says so one-hundred-and-sixty-five times a day, it isn't true, Mr. Curtis. You aren't the only person with 'reasons' for what you say, either."

He turned towards me very quickly.

It's a shame that all these goings-on and excitement didn't happen in the summer last year, when one could have seen a young man's face and what he looked like when he was walking down a country lane beside one, talking about Life and Love and things.

By this time it was so dusk I couldn't see what the expression on Mr. Curtis's face was like at all.

But I daresay it was just as anxious and agitated as his voice as he turned to me and said, "I want to know what you mean. I want to know what reasons you have for supposing that—that—that what you have hit on is the truth."

I said, with the proud consciousness of being perfectly truthful, "I didn't hit on it. I shouldn't have believed it, but that—well! Evelyn told me so herself."

"What?" cried Mr. Curtis, and turned round in such agitation and so quickly that his eyeglasses fell off his nose and dangled violently over his not-nearly-broad-enough chest.

"Yes," I said firmly. "Evelyn told me. I had it all out with her, more than a week ago. She'd simply murder me, too, if she knew that I was talking about her to you and telling you all about it at this moment."

There was a long, long pause as we walked along.

The voices of the Class came faintly to us from further down the road as they tramped along, singing:

"There's a sil—ver loin—ing
Threw ther dark claoud shoin—ing——"

And then Mr. Curtis said to me in the quickest, most uncertain voice, "Quite right. I ought not to be discussing—HER, even with you."

Then another pause, after which he said, more quickly still, "I've got to know. Please tell me exactly what she did say; every word, if you can."

Well, thank goodness, I have a memory like a gramophone. I can remember every syllable that people said and how they said it.

I simply took this memory of mine back to that afternoon when I found Evelyn sobbing in her bedroom, and I rattled it all off, with much expression, to the young man who had been the cause of those sobs.

He said in that quick voice, "I can't believe it. I can't believe it!"

"You will have to," I said. "If you had any sense," I added, to this young man who'd been what they call "so-brilliant-up-at-Oxford," "you would know that I couldn't possibly have made that story up. Made-up stories," I said, "always sound so much more like Life than a real one. That is one of the ways by which you tell the difference. That is what they mean by truth is stranger than fiction. There is nothing more improbable than the things that go on in real life," said I, meditatively. "I have been finding that out all this autumn."

But I found that Mr. Curtis hadn't been listening to one word of my interesting theories.

He was striding down the road beside me again so fast that I had to run a little, muttering, "Nancy! She minded that about Nancy?"

Just as he was saying this we arrived at that end of the village where those semi-detached and furnished with those castor-oil plant villas are that I told you about, where the Masters are in billets.

No light coming out of them, of course, but you could tell them by the dark gables against the pale sky.

Here, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, Mr. Curtis stopped.

"Miss Elizabeth," he said earnestly, "you have said on your honour that you are in earnest? You are serious about what you have just told me?"

"Yes, I don't say on my honour twice as a rule," I said, rather snappily.

"It is true, then," said Mr. Curtis, going off in his daze again.

Then again he woke up out of it and said briskly:

"Very well. In that case there is only one thing to be done, Miss Elizabeth."

I urged him to let me know what it was, of course, but he went on to say, "Thank you very much for what you have told me. I'll say good evening."

"Good evening?" I echoed, astonished.

"Yes, I think we part company here," he said firmly, saluting again. "I must go in and call upon Mrs. Masters."

"No, you don't," I said, gently but firmly. That is, not very gently, but quite firmly. "You don't go in and see my sister Nancy without my hearing what it is all going to be about."

For, you know, although I had promised Evelyn solemnly that I wasn't going to tell Nancy anything, he hadn't. I certainly didn't see why I should be done out of hearing him do it. Of course, I knew that it was about Evelyn that he was going to talk to Nancy.

He said, very stiffly, "This matter is between ourselves, Miss Elizabeth."

But I said, "No fear. I told you everything. I don't see why I should be cut out of all the fun now, just as if I were a little child that you talk French before as soon as the conversation begins to be a little interesting. In fact, I won't. I'll be 'opinionated.' I am coming in with you now!"

CHAPTER XXI

NANCY TO THE RESCUE

All this wrangling was going on in front of the creaky gate of the Masters's billet, me holding Mr. Curtis by the sleeve.

I daresay I wasn't behaving like a lady; I didn't care if he thought I was a perfect un-lady and how could I be that angel's sister? Matter of utter indifference to me. He'd already said I was artless, and a kid. All right. But I would hear the end of all this, and besides, I had to see that he got my side of the story right to Nancy.

So, taking the bull by the horns again, I rang the bell, three times.

And when the scared rabbit came to the door who's the landlady's servant, I said firmly, "Mrs. Masters," and I clumped in in my rather heavy boots, shoo-ing Mr. Curtis in front of me as if he were a horse I had to turn in to a field.

A door a little further down the passage opened, and a soft voice, almost a coo, called out, "Is that my beau'ful boy come home? Is that my handsome love?"

Fancy! It was Nancy! Quite a strange voice to me, it sounded; like hearing the chime of a new clock, that you've not got accustomed to, strike in the house. And fancy hearing her say those extraordinary things! Was that what she called Harry when she thought he was by himself? Her handsome love! Well, so he is, I suppose, but it sounded so unexpected from her! I always knew she was sentimental, but not that she would go to these lengths! Wasn't it funny?

Even while I was thinking this, I'd called back quickly, "No, it isn't him. It's only Mr. Curtis and me."

"Oh! Rattle, my dear child, do come in," cried Nancy, relapsing into her usual voice again. "Come along; you're just in time for the muffins."

"I don't think I will come in, Miss Elizabeth," was Mr. Curtis's last effort. "I—I will look in to-morrow."

"Yes, and to-day," said I, clutching him firmly, "to your right. Quick—March!"

And I fairly pushed him into the Masters's little, overcrowded sitting-room, with all the vases and the enlarged photographs of the landlady's sailor-sons mixed up with the wedding presents, and Nancy on her knees on the hearthrug, taking a dish of muffins out of the grate.

Nancy had got on all new clothes, I saw.

A new blouse, that you could see her pink satin ribbon tie-ups through, a skirt I hadn't seen before, delicious silk stockings and shoes that made her feet look quite small, though she knows perfectly well that she and Evelyn and I all take large sixes, and why should we mind, being much taller than most men in the place? Mr. Lascelles told me one day that he would hate a very small foot on a rather large woman. Make her all out of proportion, and remind him of wooden legs.

However, to get on to Nancy. (By the way, she has got her hair done quite differently. This is just to show you what a mass of changes married life brings about!)

She beamed upon Mr. Curtis, and said, "Hullo, Edwin. So you have come, too. Sit down. No, not in that easy chair. You will never get up again with your long legs. Take the sofa, it's higher. You been taking my baby sister for a walk, you incorrigible philanderer?"

This remark annoyed me so intensely that I snapped out:

"No! Your baby sister has been taking him for a walk, and for a good talking-to. And now he has got something to ask you. Go on, Mr. Curtis. Go on," I said mercilessly, seeing him turn turtle and not wanting to go one bit. "Your shot."

"Well, Edwin, what is it?" said Nancy, in the kind young married woman's voice.

Edwin said desperately, "It is something I would have liked to ask you about by ourselves. That is—I don't know exactly—I—er—Ahur!" he cleared his throat. "I really think we'll leave it alone, perhaps."

Nancy turned to me.

"Men are so bad at beginning always," she said, encouragingly. "Rattle, you tell me."

"I can't—that is—I mustn't," I said regretfully. "I promised Evelyn on my solemn word of honour that I wouldn't breathe a single syllable."

"Oh, it's about Evelyn, is it?" said Nancy, a sudden light coming into her face. She added, quite as a matter of fact, "Won't she have anything to say to you, Edwin?"

I could see by "Edwin's" expression that it was a bombshell to him that Nancy should have guessed he ever wanted to have anything to say to Evelyn.

Men always think that nobody knows what they are up to except themselves.

It's such a rest to come back to the society of one's own sex!

Yes, it was perfect relief to me after all my uphill, heart-to-heart talk with Mr. Curtis, to whom every mortal thing has to be explained!

Nancy, without another word having to be said, caught at once the wireless messages that were going on all round in the atmosphere, so to speak, and said rapidly, "I'm sure she likes you awfully. Or if she won't have you it's simply because she thinks you've been making love to me first. Is that it, by any chance?"

Mr. Curtis looked at Nancy with a glance that was one quarter admiration and three quarters disapproval, which I suppose is what a man always does feel when he thinks that a woman has been at all clever in any way.

He said, "Mrs. Masters, you are a witch!"

Nancy said, "If you will excuse me a minute, I will run and get my broomstick and my steeple hat—I mean, I'll just get my things on and come out."

"Where to?" I asked, rather staggered, because I knew she was expecting the adored Harry ("the beau'ful boy") to come in to his sumptuous, newly-married tea at any minute.

But she said, "Where do you think? I am coming on to tackle Miss Evelyn at once."

"Oh, no, please," said Mr. Curtis and I together, both looking absolutely aghast. "Evelyn mustn't know anything about our having told you—not that we did really tell you anything, but—but——"

But Nancy had whisked out and presently whisked down again in furs that were evidently another wedding present. A perfect plantation of them, in fact, and new boots with pearl grey suede tops and the cheekiest tassels dangling from the tops of them.

"I am going to revisit my girlhood's home with my younger sister, and you aren't invited, Edwin," said that puss-in-boots, Nancy. "You had better disappear to your billet and resign yourself to having seen absolutely nothing of the Verdeley family for the last forty-eight hours."

So out we went again into the pitch black evening.

On the doorstep we met Nancy's new husband, who exclaimed rather angrily, "Hullo! hullo! what's this? You are not going out, Honey, just as I am going to get my tea, are you?"

"Only for a few minutes, on urgent family affairs, darling," said Nancy sweetly. "You take Mr. Curtis back with you and get him to share your lonely tea. Yes, do. Don't forget the hot muffins in the corner by the fireplace."

So, having shaken the two men, off we pranced again.

"What are you going to say, Nancy?" I asked her as we got to the garden gate of the Moated Grange.

"I am not sure till I'm in the middle of it," said Nancy gaily, but in a low voice. "Still, I am determined that if I am the only obstacle it will soon be cleared out of the course of true love between Evelyn and Edwin Curtis! They are just made for each other, for Evelyn is such a bundle of scruples and conscientiousness and all that sort of thing. And she wouldn't be happy with what you might call a normal kind of young man! (How could she be? Look at them.) Now, Edwin Curtis is the kind of young man for whom nine women out of ten haven't any use at all, as Harry says. I confess he would bore me stiff in ten minutes," said Nancy frankly. "So it would you, Baby. But birds of a feather flock together. And there's quite a pretty name for that sort of young man, Harry says. He's an 'idealist.'"

We found that other bird of a feather, by which I mean Evelyn, pretending to knit in the Lair, which was unlighted except for the red-hot log fire into which she was gazing, seeing pictures I expect of herself and Mr. Curtis living in a little home of their own for the next ninety years! Just think how awful!

"Do you mind if I shed a little light on the subject?" said Nancy, apologetically. "I want you to look at these patterns and tell me which I am to have for an evening dress. Choose by candle-light for candle-light, you know." And she brought out one of those little books of many-coloured silk of various soft shades—rose pink, Nile green, blue and palest heliotrope.

"But I thought you had got five evening frocks, out of your grandfather's allowance?" said Evelyn. She had already confided to me that she thought it perfectly dreadful to spend money on clothes in war-time, however newly-married you might be! Surely one nice plain coat and skirt and a few serviceable Vyella shirts and some country boots ought to be quite enough for the trousseau of any war-bride whose husband expects to be off to the front before they had eaten up what was left of the wedding cake!

"Yes; but Harry wants me to have a new frock as much as possible like the mauve one I was wearing the first night he saw me," explained Nancy, treading hard on my foot with her new French heel to draw my attention to how she was just going to begin. It hurt like anything, but I was a Spart and did not give a sign.

"You remember, Evelyn, that party that those three—poor Frank Lascelles, and my Harry and Mr. Curtis——?"

"Yes, I remember," said Evelyn in her shortest and most discouraging voice, not realising how absolutely impossible it is to discourage any young newly-married woman who's had a whole week of getting her own way and doing absolutely anything she fancies in this world. Nancy went on in tones of a rather gay grandmother reminiscing over her past of about forty years ago. She does talk much more, and with much more "go" since she's been married, anyhow!

"Dear me! I wonder what made me behave so awfully badly that evening? Because I felt like it, I suppose. Do you remember, Evelyn, what a fearful lecture you gave me for getting Mr. Curtis to kiss me?"

"Getting him to!" exclaimed Evelyn, quite suddenly. "Allowing him to, I suppose you mean?"

"Good gracious, no! I don't mean 'allowing to.' If I did, I should have said so. It doesn't so much matter saying what you mean once you are married," said Nancy, gaily. "You can allow yourself a little luxury in the way of telling the truth now and again, after that.... Do you think this would look pretty with the gold waist-band and a little edging of this, Rattle?"

Here there was another prod of Nancy's heel on my instep. Evidently a signal, so I rose to it and said, "Never mind the gold belt. I am far more interested in these 'glimpses into the Past.' You don't mean to say, do you, that that evening when you went and sat out with Mr. Curtis on the landing over that rattling window that you actually asked him to kiss you, did you?"

"Oh, no! Not in so many words, my dear," said the shameless Nancy. "But it amounts to the same thing, doesn't it, when you allow yourself to lean so close to a young man's shoulder, when he is wedging a window, that your curls get rumpled against his cheek?"

She went on in an awfully good imitation of Evelyn's shocked voice when she doesn't like something that has been said.

"In that case a girl knows perfectly well what to expect. She has only got herself to blame. The young man naturally has to take advantage of the situation or look like a fool, which naturally Mr. Curtis did not wish to do."

"But what about you?" I asked, since Evelyn said nothing. She had her golden head bent over the book of patterns. But I could see that she was greedily devouring every single word that passed between Nancy and me.

"Oh! I—I just wanted to see what he would do. A young man with that reputation of never having kissed a girl before in his life. I thought it would be so amusing, Rattle!"

I put in the question that I saw Evelyn was simply dying to ask.

"And was it amusing?"

"Rather not!" said Nancy with fervour. "Just a peck on the cheek as if he were rubbing a smudge off, and then a look of, 'Oh, Great Scott! Why have I done this? For Heaven's sake let's get back to the others!'

"You see, Rattle, the Mr. Curtis type of young man isn't a success at flirtations. He doesn't want to kiss a girl casually just because she happens to be there and rather pretty, like Harry does—did, I mean. You see, Rattle, Mr. Curtis is the kind of man who cares about nothing but The Real Thing, the One Love of a Lifetime. Taking a girl and setting her up in a niche in his heart, to worship her forever, without a look or a thought for any one else. It's a—a rather rare type, Harry thinks. But Mr. Curtis certainly is that type. What one calls The Idealist."

Here she gave a lightning swift wink at me as she pronounced the word the second time this evening with oh! such a different tone of voice. You would have thought that Nancy considered an idealist was the only type to be! She went on with the same earnestness, "He keeps his real kisses for his real love-making, for the girl whom he wants to make love to for keeps."

Again I asked the question that I knew that the silent Evelyn was longing to have answered.

"But look here, Nancy. Aren't you the girl that he would have liked for keeps?"

"Me!" said Nancy, with a little shriek of laughter. "Good Heavens! what made you dream of such a thing?"

"Why," I said, "I always thought that Mr. Curtis was longing to marry you, and that Harry was his successful rival!"

"I must tell Harry that," said Nancy with her enjoying laugh. "Only last night we were talking about how odd it was to think of the different kinds of girls by which the different kinds of men were attracted. Harry said the kind of girl he was crazy about, such as me," drawing herself up in the new furs, "always had left old Curtis as cold as mutton, his idea of an attractive girl being the sweet, womanly sort of creature who thinks about Life and Duty and taking things seriously, and never putting any powder on her nose, and all that sort of thing. That is so unlike me! I am perfectly certain that Edwin Curtis is only too thankful that he wasn't asked to be best man at the wedding, in which case he would have been required to give me another kiss! Too trying! Well, I must be off now to my married home," she chattered on, after one glance had shown her that Evelyn had lapped up every word of this. "Good-night, Evelyn, thanks so much for your advice about the frock. Good-night, Rattlesnake. Don't bother to come to the door with me."

But of course I went to the door with her, and to the gate. "You might tell me one thing," I whispered as I kissed her good-night.

Another newly-married change is that she has taken to using some rather nice scent like honeysuckle and raspberry jam mixed.

"You might tell me," I said, "how much of that rigmarole is true?"

"Rigmarole? I don't know what you mean, Rattle," said Nancy very solemnly. "True? I don't know what you are talking about." And she stalked off without another word. I am sure I heard her laugh as she turned the corner of our lane, where I saw the red point of a cigarette (Harry's) coming to meet her.

But I am sure she will never tell me now.

That is another of the things that I shall never, never know!

CHAPTER XXII

TWO MORE ENGAGEMENTS

I'm sorry I can't tell you exactly what happened next, because, you see, I don't know myself.

The history of any family is bound to have some of these hiatuses in it.

What Nancy went back and reported to Mr. Curtis I never heard. However, my conscience was simply beaming upon me for having done my little best to make two people happy. The afternoon after that talk with Mr. Curtis it beamed some more.

For the very moment that he could get back from his Class (and he must have galloped!) there came the gallant Curtis to call. He asked quite unabashedly for "Miss Evelyn Verdeley," with the accent on the Evelyn.

I heard him, because I happened to be in the hall when Mary opened the door, so I said, "You'll find my sister in the drawing-room."

He didn't, of course; there not being a soul in the drawing-room, as Aunt Victoria was enjoying that convenient siesta of hers upstairs, while Evelyn was knitting in the Lair in the most awful old delaine blouse—the last sort of blouse that any young woman would want to be proposed to in. It really was truly thoughtful of me not to let her, I think. I came into the Lair with a perfectly un-give-away face on and said, "Evelyn, be an angel, will you? Go into the drawing-room and talk pretty to the curate until Auntie has finished her nap. He's come," I said, sorry for the fib, but what else could I tell her? "he's come about some subscription or other."

Evelyn sighed. "Can I go in this blouse?"

"No. I don't think you can," said I, critically. "It is all undone at the back, and there are two loops off, and pins look so untidy. I am sure the curate would be horrified."

This awful thought drove Evelyn upstairs and into a nice clean white silk shirt and her hair done again before she ran down to the drawing-room to see the curate.

Curate was good, wasn't it?

Well, of course I didn't wait in to see what was going to happen when Evelyn discovered her mistake, and found herself face to face with the rejected Curtis youth. I slipped on my belted green blanket-coat and the little leather cap that I had worn at the Junction on Nancy's wedding-day, and I went out for a prolonged prowl by myself all over the charming country scenery, don't you know! of Mud Flats. I do think I was rather an unselfish angel, because you know I couldn't go to tea with Nancy even. I knew that the beloved Harry would be in, and that he would be perfectly furious at having his tête-à-tête spoiled two days running by tiresome sisters-in-law, so I walked doggedly all over the place, and even when it began to rain that drizzling, mizzling, depressing way it does here, I wouldn't go in. I thought the emptier the house is the better for Evelyn and Mr. Curtis to come to their understanding!

Then I thought, yes, presently the house will be quite empty when two out of us three girls are married, and then I shall be left alone with Aunt Victoria.

Well, I suppose that is only to be expected. The youngest ought to be the last to be married, even if she ever gets married at all, which is not always the case. Very likely I shan't get married after all. I shall be the spinster aunt, and just live on at the Moated Grange, spinsing. It isn't very often that out of a large family of girls the whole lot get married and live happily ever after. And who have I had to like me awfully much, since there were no young men who you could count as young men at Mud Flats?

Nobody at all!

Not unless you could count Mr. Lascelles, I thought, walking along quickly to keep myself warm in that chilling drizzle. Of course, he did write charming letters to me when he was the Lonely Subaltern. I was reading them all over to myself last night when I was going to bed, and really they're the kind of letters that any girl might be jolly pleased to get!

It's true I didn't know who was writing to me, but he knew who it was that he was writing to when he said all these nice things to me.

Then there was all that that Nancy told me before she was married about the other men, and how they all said that Frank Lascelles was frantically attracted by the youngest of the girls at his billet.

Of course it's all rubbish, that.

Still ... I do wonder what first put the idea into their heads?

(Later.)

Now, would you have believed it? Could you have imagined that any one would have been so unkind and shown such black ingratitude as my sister Evelyn?

When I got in to the Moated Grange, very late and very cold, and absolutely dying for my tea, which I had gone without all for the sake of that girl, what do you think had happened? Why, I didn't even see her and the Curtis youth, who is just as ungrateful as she is. They were in the Lair; still in the Lair, if you please, though he had arrived at three, and you surely might have thought that they had got through all they wanted to say to each other by a quarter to six!!

But, oh no! Apparently not!

It was Aunt Victoria who met me and beckoned me into the drawing-room with the most extraordinary mixture of expressions on her face. "Rattle, I have some wonderful news for you," she said. "Evelyn and Mr. Curtis have just told me that they care for each other and wish to be engaged to be married."

"Good heavens! Auntie," I said, with my best surprised face on. "Are you going to let them?"

"Let them!" said Aunt Victoria in a resigned tone. "I have given up thinking about letting or not letting any of you girls do anything you want; after Nancy and Harry I assure you nothing will surprise me—nothing!"

Well, I thought that was good news in case I ever wish to get engaged to anybody. I mean, if there were anybody to get engaged to!

Mr. Curtis stayed on and on and on, missing an appointment which he had with the adjutant at the "Pearl and Oyster," and keeping Evelyn as well as us from having a speck of anything to eat; but such is love! It seems to be quite as good as any concentrated food as far as going without your meals is concerned, but it does take up a lot of time!

At last! At long last! we heard the front door bang and Mr. Curtis's heavy boots going scrunch, scrunch down the gravel.

And then at last Evelyn condescended to come in.

She was very pink and very untidy haired and looked so happy. She was absolutely a different girl from when I had seen her last.

I was so awfully bucked! I went up to her at once to kiss her. I couldn't help noticing the careful way in which she gave me the edge of her cheek to do it on! You could have seen from that that she was an engaged girl! As soon as I could I got her alone and said: "Now, Evelyn, do tell me. I have been simply dying to know all about it!"

Evelyn smiled kindly at me and said, in a far-away sort of voice, "Oh, but I thought you knew. It is quite all right. Edwin and I are engaged to be married, and I am the happiest girl in the world!"

"Yes, but I don't mean that," I said a little impatiently. "Don't keep the conversation so general; I want to know all about it properly. Every detail. What he said and what you said, and what happened next, and all that."

"That," said Evelyn decidedly, "you will never hear!"

"What!" I exclaimed, simply appalled, as you can imagine, by this black display of sisterly ingratitude. "Do you mean you are not going to?"

"I am certainly not going to discuss it with my youngest sister," said Evelyn, just as if her youngest sister hadn't been responsible for all her happiness! "Some things are too sacred to be talked about." Well! Comment is superfluous; so I'll simply leave Evelyn's behaviour at that.

She's been engaged a week now....

And the more it goes on the more one feels that this event has touched the summit of all earthly excitements and that nothing further will ever happen!

Now something has happened. This afternoon something happened by the second post. A letter came for Aunt Victoria in a rather determined handwriting that I didn't know.

Mary took it in to her where she was playing patience as usual in the drawing-room.

In a short time she cried: "Oh, Rattle, my dear, it never rains but it pours; here is news of your young friend, Mr. Lascelles."

"Oh, three cheers!" I said, feeling really pleased, for it had seemed ages and ages since we had heard anything about him.

Also, I was only just beginning to realise how frightfully I missed him. You see, there really is nobody young about the place for me to talk to. Nancy married, and Evelyn worse, namely, engaged! I should be truly thankful to have had Mr. Lascelles's merry prattle and his footstep on the stair, if only to cheer me up for the loss of my sister.

I said: "Is he well enough to come back to his billet?"

"No, my dear, apparently not," said Auntie, still holding on to Mr. Lascelles's letter. "But it is suggested that he is well enough to have visitors, and that some of us might be allowed to go over to the Junction and see him.... Now, I'd go myself with pleasure, poor dear little Mr. Lascelles! But you know what rheumatism it gives me to travel in that horrid little draughty train in this weather. And Evelyn has arranged to meet Mr. Curtis' sister, who is coming down. So I think, Rattle, that you will have to go over and make our apologies."

I could have skipped for joy!

You see, I was really longing to talk to somebody about the Evelyn-Curtis affair. I knew Mr. Lascelles would be simply thrilled to hear the details of it, considering he was the person who had first introduced the noble-minded Edwin to the bosom of our family! And you know how cheering it is to have an interesting story to tell to any one who you guess will drink in every syllable with gusto!

Hence my glee. But I didn't want Aunt Victoria to change her mind about my going, so I said quite casually, "Oh, I'll go if you like. I'll do my best to cheer up the wounded."

Aunt Victoria said, contemplating her cards on the green table, "Yes, I daresay he will be quite glad to see one of us again. Though I don't suppose he will need any 'cheering up' at present. At least, not judging by Mr. Curtis and Harry."

"Judging by Mr. Curtis and Harry?" I repeated. "How do you mean, Auntie?"

Aunt Victoria moved the Queen of Hearts and then replied, "Well, you see they are engaged too."

"Engaged too?" I echoed, thinking I couldn't have heard what she'd said. "Engaged too? You can't mean that Mr. Lascelles is engaged?"

"That won't do," said Auntie, slipping the Queen down again. "What did you say, Rattle? Oh, yes; Mr. Lascelles. Why shouldn't he be engaged?"

"Why—but—but—— Yes, why shouldn't he?" I said, with a most peculiar mixy sort of feeling in my chest; pure surprise, you know, and unexpectedness. "Of course; everybody is, nearly. It—it—it seems to be in the air. But, Auntie, is he?"

"So it seems," said Auntie, glancing at his letter before she slipped it back into her knitting bag. "I hadn't heard anything about it before, had any of you girls?"

"No, I'm sure we hadn't," I said, rather dismally. For, you see, this meant I shouldn't have even a friend left to myself! Everybody under sixty engaged—except me! And who on earth was this other girl—I mean this girl who had got engaged to the Lonely Subaltern? He must have been engaged all the time he was here, I supposed.

Well! He might have told us before! Pretending to be such friends, and keeping a thing like that from us all the time! No wonder I felt sort of sore and hurt.

I said, "Auntie, has he told you her name?"

"Oh, yes," said Aunt Victoria blandly. Then she exclaimed, "Ah!" in great delight, for the patience had "come out" unexpectedly. She gloated over this for what seemed like ten minutes before she condescended to go back to the subject of Mr. Lascelles's fiancée.

"Quite a surprise to me, though I am making up my mind never to be surprised at any engagement," said Aunt Victoria, gathering up her cards again. "I see now why she was so anxious to nurse him herself——"

"What?" I almost shrieked. "Is it that awful domineering, self-satisfied, blue-and-white nurse from the Nursing Home who was here?"

"No. Oh, no," said Aunt Victoria. "It's not the nurse, it's the matron of the Nursing Home herself."

"Miss Gates?" I ejaculated in a kind of mixture of a whisper and a scream. "D'you mean Mr. Lascelles is engaged to be married to that old Miss Gates?"

"So it seems, my dear," said Aunt Victoria, starting another patience. "But you couldn't possibly call her 'old'!"

Couldn't I?

I could call her lots more things than that! That woman engaged to Mr. Lascelles?

Why, he's twenty-four, and she must be at least ten years older than that! Years past any thought of engagements, and loves, and follies of that sort!

Why—why——!

I hope she knows what they call the behaviour of an elderly woman who goes and commandeers the affections of a mere boy? Cradle-snatching!

Robbing the nursery!

Good gracious!

So that's what she meant by calling him "Frankie" and pretending to be a sister to him!

That's why she motored down here and swept him off to her den like the spider and the fly!

She was sick and tired of being an old maid, I suppose, and she took him to be a comfort to her declining years!

As for him—— Well, what he can see in a withered frump of thirty-four——

Never mind. It's nothing to me. As far as I'm concerned he can marry his grandmother if he likes—I mean, anybody else's grandmother.

The only annoying part about it to me is that you can't possibly chatter away to an engaged man or woman as you can to a bachelor, because you know perfectly well that it will all be passed on to whoever they're engaged to. This sad phenomenon in natural history has cut off a lot of my conversations with Nancy, also with Evelyn. Now, of course, I shan't be able to say another word to Mr. Lascelles ever.

So that's taken most of the interest out of my trip to the Nursing Home at the Junction to-morrow.

I have a good mind not to go.

Horrible woman! I shan't go.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE VISIT

Well, I went.

I mean, to see Mr. Lascelles in the Nursing Home for wounded officers at Nowhere Junction.

I thought it would be rather cat-like not to when he did want to see me, after all, even if he is engaged to somebody else—I mean, to somebody. Besides, he might want to say something about some of his things that he had left at his billet with us.

So off I went on what you can only describe as a pious errand. It was a horrible day, neither wet nor dry, but cold and piercing and depressing. I think the most depressing day I've ever spent in the whole course of my life.

Everything went wrong from the start. First I forgot one of the parcels that I'd got to take Mr. Lascelles. Then my suspender broke. And though I fastened it up with a safety-pin at the Junction waiting-room, still, you never know when a thing like that may not give, and there it is hanging over you like a pale-blue sword of Damocles the whole time that you're out.

Then I missed my way to the place and wasted about a quarter of an hour going back to the right turning.

Then, when I had got to the blessed home—a large, new, red-brick building surrounded by sprouts of laurel—there was some mistake about my having come.

They didn't seem to realise that I had been asked to visit a wounded officer.

They showed me into an awful little bleak waiting-room with nothing in it but a gas-fireplace and a framed photograph of a lot of nurses in a group, with Miss Gates in the middle with her hair done like they used to when mother was a girl.

I waited for what seemed like an hour, which, of course, made me furious. I should have been far better employed sitting at home going on embroidering Nancy's chemise-top or darning my own stockings or something really productive like that, instead of hanging on waiting until this wretched matron-fiancée person of Mr. Lascelles's chose to think that I had been there long enough.

I wondered why a woman like that with a big nursing home of her own and what they call one of the most sacred professions should choose to go and get herself engaged to be married.

And at her age, too!

Just as I was thinking this the door opened, and in came the so-called fair fiancée herself—Miss Gates—the matron.

She had a little starchy cap perched on her brown hair with lots of grey in it—I mean the hair, not the cap—and she also had on a business-like looking navy blue alpaca gown with little lawn collar and cuffs, but no apron. What a very different sort of bride she'll make from Nancy!

Well, in she came and shook hands very briskly with me and said: "Oh, yes, Mr. Lascelles does expect you; so I think I may permit you to see him for a few minutes."

Permit you, you know! That made me so annoyed that I didn't do what I intended to do—namely, ask if I might congratulate her on her engagement to our old friend.

Yes, I say old friend because when a person has been billeted on you, you get to know him better in a week or two than you would get to know in years and years some young man that you only saw at hockey matches or at Badminton or subscription dances and that sort of thing.

Well, led by this matron, I went upstairs to an upper landing that went all round the well of the staircase.

There was a sound of playing the piano and singing "When the Girls come up to Town——" from one of the rooms where I suppose a lot of them were, and a quite young youth came out in very beautiful grey mufti and only one leg, poor darling, hopping and holding on to the banisters and laughing at some one behind him.

"Now, Mr. Tracey, Mr. Tracey," the matron called, "where are your crutches?"

"Oh, Sister, I do hate the beastly things," said this young wounded officer in a very drawly sort of voice, looking hard through a monocle at me. "They simply ruin the set of one's coat, don't you know."

"Once a nut, always a nut, I suppose," said Miss Gates, and then she opened a door and said, "Here's a visitor to see you, Frankie."

Mr. Lascelles was sitting up in bed, looking, I must say, not nearly as well as he did when he left the Moated Grange. I don't believe he is one bit better for having left there, in spite of being nursed by his fiancée. He was wearing the same striped cream and pale blue pyjamas that he had on the night of the Zeppelin raid, and his red-gold hair was all rumpled under the bandage round his head, and his eyes were much brighter than they had any business to be, and his cheeks were flushed—feverishly flushed.

As for his hands, I could have cried over them! They were shrunk so very tiny, and they had got so white and transparent, with blue veins showing through the backs of them. They felt so absurdly soft, too, for a man's hands, for he took both of them to hold my hand when I put it out to him and said, "How do you do?"

Never again shall I call the young man, as I have once or twice called him, by his sort of pet name of "Lonely Subaltern"!

You see, never again will he be that, now that he is engaged to this business-like person who owns this nursing home.

I suppose she will never leave him. I thought she was never going to leave him, even this afternoon, when I came to see him, for there she sat smiling patronisingly upon me as I brought out the various little presents and parcels that I had got with me.

"Thank you, it was most awfully sweet of you, Miss Elizabeth," he said, smiling for the first time really as he touched a little white china jar of lemon-cheese that I had made for him, tied up with lemon-coloured ribbon off a chocolate box.

Then I said something about the weather being very warm for the time of year, and Miss Gates said that personally she had thought it was rather cold, and Mr. Lascelles said in a sort of duty voice that being in bed still he hadn't noticed much what the weather was like.

And then a terrible pause ensued, and nobody said anything or seemed to know what to say next.

I was just going to get up and say that Aunt Victoria was expecting me back immediately.

Just then the door opened and the nurse came in and said: "Sister, there is an officer downstairs come to ask how many patients you will be able to take in by Wednesday."

"Oh, I will come down and see him at once," said Miss Gates, getting up briskly. Then she said to me: "Excuse me a moment," and went out.

I was only too thankful to excuse her for any number of minutes. All curiosity, of course, because of what I had to ask Mr. Lascelles. I was determined not to go back without having found out something I had been bothering about ever since I had first got his message.

So no sooner had the door closed behind Miss Gates's blue alpaca back than I turned to Mr. Lascelles, and began gabbling quickly so as to get it all in. "Oh, before I go away, there is something I simply must ask you, Mr. Lascelles."

"Oh, yes, do tell me what it is," he said, in a much more natural sort of voice—his old schoolboyish one, like before he was engaged. "I say, it was most frightfully ripping of you to come."

"Oh, not at all," I said politely; "somebody had to come, and Evelyn and Nancy were busy, and Aunt Victoria can't stand these draughty trains, so, you see, I was the only one who could manage it."

"Otherwise, I suppose you would have let one of the others do it?" said Mr. Lascelles, in rather a hurt voice, though what he had to be hurt about goodness only knows!

So I began again, and said: "Look here, Mr. Lascelles. You know you wrote a letter to me the day before you were taken—I mean, the day before you came here?"

"Yes, I did," said little Mr. Lascelles, flushing up to the roots of his hair again, "and look here! I've something to say about that. I never got any answer to it, Miss Elizabeth."

"Well! I don't think," I said, "there could be any answer to it. You see, in the letter, you asked me to come up and see you because you wanted to speak to me; and I couldn't very well come up and see you when you had just been whisked off—I mean, when you had just gone away to a nursing home."

"You might have written," said Mr. Lascelles, sitting up, a little, bolt upright figure, in the bed, and speaking quite resentfully. "I thought you might have written if you wanted to know what it was all about, that is."

"Of course I wanted to know," I said, speaking as dignifiedly and calmly as I could, and gazing aloofly at the bottle of eau de Cologne on his dressing-table. "I knew there was something you wanted to ask me, even before that night. Will you tell me what it is?"

"Sure you care to hear?"

"I shouldn't ask," I said, quite angrily, "if I didn't want to know!"

"Very well, then, I had better tell you," said Mr. Lascelles, also gabbling a little, as if he wasn't quite sure that his destined bride might not come prancing in at any moment.

"You—you—that—that——"

He actually began to stammer in a most absurd way and to look more feverishly flushed than ever as he went on at last: "You remember that blessed photograph that you sent to me when I was the 'Lonely Subaltern'?"

I said, rather sharply: "I don't think you need remind me of that now."

"Why not? Why not?" asked Mr. Lascelles, quite heatedly.

Well, of course, it was obvious why not.

It was because I didn't think an engaged young man ought to rake up any bygones, however merely platonic they were, with any sort of other girl, if his fiancée could be called a girl exactly.

However, I couldn't tell him this; it sounded so absolutely silly, so I adopted my cool, dignified manner again and merely said: "Well, but I thought we had arranged to forget about that idiotic quarrel of ours."

"It was the quarrel I was remembering," said Mr. Lascelles, pushing his hair off his fevered brow at he spoke; "although you did tear it, you know you did, and that is what I have been going to ask you about that photograph. You know I have got one half and you kept the other half of it. I want to know whether I mayn't have it to join on to my half." This was unexpected. In a kind of way it was touching, his still thinking about old friends and caring to have photographs of them. But I couldn't let him see I was touched. It would seem so absurd.

So I spoke as if I had a heart as light as a feather.

"Join on? Oh, no; I don't think so," I said. "It would be too silly; it would make such an idiotic mark right across. I think those bits had better be burnt."

Mr. Lascelles said nothing for a minute. Then he shut up his mouth very tight under his baby moustache as he said, rather shortly: "Very well, since you won't let me have that, can't you let me have another photograph some time, Miss Betty?"

I was so pleased—I mean surprised—to hear that old name coming out that I nearly said in the first moment, "Yes, I will send you another copy." However, thank goodness, I refrained in time. I think I was reminded by hearing the jingling of the keys and the quick step in the passage of Miss Gates, his fiancée.

Let her give him her photograph—hers is the only woman's photograph he has got any right to want, or even to say he wants, since I don't suppose he wants mine at all, really.

So I got up from the white bedroom chair and said with a conventional sort of smile: "I am so afraid I haven't got another copy of that photograph."

"Is there no such thing as getting another copy off the negative?" demanded Mr. Lascelles, quite in his own quarrelling voice.

"No, I don't think so," I said.

Mr. Lascelles, sitting up there in his pyjamas, and looking very nearly as angry as that afternoon when I had slapped his face for him, said: "Why not? Why not?"

In another minute I should have told him why, and I should have said something quite bitter, too, on the subject of the greed and grabbiness of engaged men who ask for the photographs of other girls as well as those of their own legitimate fiancées—but, of course! at that moment the door opened, and in whisked his everlasting legitimate fiancée once more.

"Now, Frankie, I think you have talked quite enough," she said, in that brisk, managing voice of hers which I should find so trying if I were her fiancé. "You will be getting a temperature, you know, and it will be ages before you are allowed out again, and as for duty—oh! no, no. Miss Verdeley," turning to me, "I am afraid that I shall have to send you away now."

But I was already at the door. I wasn't waiting to be sent away, I can tell you!

And so I told her practically, for I said: "Oh, yes, I have been longing to go for the last ten minutes. I have a really very important engagement at home that I have got to keep, only I thought I had better wait and say good-bye to you, Miss Gates."

And I shook hands with her, though I didn't want to a bit, really.

I noticed she wore a plain gold signet ring on her engagement finger.

I suppose Mr. Lascelles will choose the real engagement ring for her later when he is well enough to go out.

I didn't shake hands with him; I just didn't think he deserved it. I only nodded to him and said: "Well, good-bye again, Mr. Lascelles! I am so glad to have seen you looking so much better."

Which I hadn't, of course!

"And in such good hands."

Which, of course, I thought awful—still, of course, they were his choice!

Then I went out of the room and downstairs and out of the house and through the town again, walking so quickly that when I got to the station I found I had three-quarters of an hour to wait for the train back to Mud Flats.

CHAPTER XXIV

A MIDDLE-AGED ROMANCE

There I had to sit, feeling depressed to tears, with nothing to look at but a stack of dark grey milk-cans and an advertisement for Bovril. It seemed a century even when I found by the station clock at the Junction that I had only been there half an hour.

Fifteen more minutes to wait! There I sat, getting more cold-toed and low-spirited and angry with that woman every minute.

For, of course, it was her fault. It was she who had bundled me out of Mr. Lascelles's room ages before the time, and consequently kept me hanging about here.

Well might I tell you that this was the most depressing day I had ever had in the whole of my life.

I suppose it was another five minutes before I saw, coming through the station entrance with a lovely "swing," and a quite unconscious glad eye, and taking a Tommy's salute as if he'd been accustomed to them for generations instead of only since the War, a tall, British-Warm-clad form that I knew. In fact, Nancy's "handsome love." Her "beau'ful boy."

He turned his really very good-looking face towards me and broke out into smiles as soon as he saw who it was.

"Hullo! Rattle, my child," he exclaimed gaily, as he saluted, "you are looking rather blue."

"I should think so, indeed," I said. "Blue with cold! Sitting in this disgusting station for hours and hours and hours waiting for the revolting train. Are you coming by it, Harry?"

"Yes, I am. I had to come over and see the O.O. My motor-bike is in hospital again, and I am reduced to going by rail. We will travel on together to our charming hamlet, shall we?"

"Oh, yes, Harry, I would love to," I said, quite affectionately. "It's so nice to see somebody I know, after the truly rotten afternoon that I have been having!"

"Why, what have you been doing, Baby Juno? Shopping, and not able to get anything to match?" asked Nancy's good-looking husband. "Come and sob it all out on my shoulder, in here——" He settled me in a corner seat of a nice first-class compartment (that is to say, it is nice for our line, which is too awful!), and put a foot-warmer just in the right place for my feet, and was altogether so comforting and nice that I could quite imagine why Nancy seems so blissfully happy since her marriage!

She has got, as Mr. Lascelles would say, "some" husband!

One hears a lot of talk about people boasting of their husbands, and saying how "splendid" they are because they "never have eyes for another woman or even see when one is there!"

This, I think, must be rot!

For I should think that the nicer a man was to the others the more chance his own wife would have of getting treated as a woman likes to be treated by him. I've always thought that; long before I knew a lot about men, even.

I know that if I have a husband (which, of course, I never shall have) I shouldn't want to be the first one to teach him how a woman likes to have a foot-warmer put under her toes, or a cushion stuffed into the curve of her back! Cutting his teeth on me, so to speak; no, ta!

However, why dwell upon this painful topic of husbands? It doesn't matter what sort of a fad I should have about them, considering, as I say, that I am destined to live and die an old maid to the end of the chapter.

I shall have to content myself with feeling very happy to have one brother-in-law who can spare a little time to be nice and polite to his old-maid sister-in-law.

So I smiled gratefully at him, and said: "Oh, no, I haven't been doing anything nearly as nice as shopping. I just went up to the nursing home for wounded officers with a few things from Aunt Victoria, and to inquire after your friend, Mr. Lascelles."

"My friend, is he?" said Captain Masters, and bit his moustache, looking at me in a quizzical way under the peak of his cap. "Well, and how was old Frank?"

"Oh, he is not quite well yet, of course," I said, as at last the train began to steam out of the Junction and to thread its way over the gloomy-looking marshlands towards our village. "Still, he is being very—er—very firmly looked after. Naturally, he is getting every care and attention given him, since he is being nursed by his fiancée."

"By his what?" exclaimed Captain Masters, suddenly sitting up in his corner of the compartment and staring hard at me.

"By his fiancée—the woman—I mean the lady—that he is going to marry," I exclaimed. "Why do you look so awfully surprised? Didn't you know of his engagement?"

"Know of old Frank being engaged to somebody else—I mean, being engaged to somebody?" said my brother-in-law, still staring at me. "Who is he supposed to be engaged to?"

"Oh, I thought everybody knew; I thought it was official," I said, feeling awfully horrified that I had gone and put my foot in it again by publishing something that was meant to be a secret. "I thought that as you are a great friend of his you must have heard that he was engaged to Miss Gates."

My brother-in-law opened his handsome eyes so wide that I wondered they didn't fall out on to his moustache. "Miss Gates! Rattle," he said. "Do you mean the matron of that place where he is?"

I nodded. I couldn't help feeling a little bit cheered up by my brother-in-law's evident surprise.

For at all events it hadn't only been me that thought it was extraordinary for a quite schoolboyish and jolly sort of young man like Mr. Lascelles to go getting himself engaged to an old thing, or, at any rate, a middle-aged thing, like that woman who was nursing him!

"Why, she might be his mother!"

She would be the mother of subalterns like him if she had only managed to get herself married at a reasonable sort of age! Like my sister Nancy, for instance! instead of waiting and waiting on the shelf until she finally contrived to catch the last train home, as they call it!

Meantime, here were Harry and I sitting in our train home—the real one, I mean, and he staring his eyes out as if he had just heard the most astonishing news of his life.

He said again, "Miss Gates? Isn't she ashamed of herself?"

This cheered me up some more. I do think Harry is a sensible man. He said just exactly what I had been thinking myself.

I said: "She didn't look a bit ashamed of herself when I was at the home just now. In fact, she looked jolly bucked up and proud of herself, swanking about with his engagement ring on her finger and giving orders to him exactly what he was to eat and drink and do!"

"Ye gods! The poor little beggar! How on earth did he manage to get himself into that galley?" ejaculated Nancy's nice husband. "Poor old Frank! I always said that he is absolutely helpless in the hands of a woman! As soon as he gets away from all of us, here he is driven like a sheep to the slaughter by a blue alpaca matron! Anything in petticoats, and if it is sufficiently determined he is a lost man! It's the colour of his hair, I expect, Rattle! Red hair always is a danger signal!"

"Well, I don't know—your hair is black enough, and you were quite helpless in the hands of Nancy," I argued. "And as for Edwin Curtis, he is mud-coloured, and with him it was first Nancy and then Evelyn! So it doesn't seem as if any coloured hair could be a safeguard, Harry!"

Harry Masters shook his head bewilderingly. He was still murmuring to himself. "Miss Gates, Miss Gates. Thank goodness I am married, otherwise I know I should get swooped on and dragged to the altar by a hospital nurse the first time I got pipped. This is what I call adding fresh terrors to being wounded!"

Then he turned to me, and said, "Rattle, my dear, are you perfectly sure of the news?"

I said dolefully, "I wish I were even half as sure that the Germans are running short of food. Oh, yes! I am quite sure."

"Frank told you so himself?" asked Harry Masters, quickly.

"No! I knew it before I saw him," I said. "He wrote to Aunt Victoria to tell her, himself."

"I am blessed," said my brother-in-law, staring first at me and then out of the carriage window at the familiar landscape of Mud Flats.

For we had crawled into the station now.

I got out, and held out my hand to say good-bye to my brother-in-law.

For I expected he would make a bolt to his billet, in the opposite direction from The Grange.

Rather to my surprise he said: "Oh! I am coming with you, Rattle, if you don't mind. I expect MY WIFE" (excuse my putting it in capital letters, but that was how he pronounced it) "is having tea at The Grange to-day, as I said I might be late. I will come in and fetch her.

"Besides," he added, as we set off at a good pace down the road towards our house, "besides, I really feel that I have got to ask Aunt Victoria to explain to me in cold blood exactly what's happened about poor old Frank and his engagement. I really don't seem as if I can believe it just yet."

My goodness! it is so comforting when one has been in very low spirits to be talked to by a really sympathetic soul.

My spirits, which, as you know, had been right down in my boots all the afternoon, were quite high by the time we reached The Grange, and found ourselves in the middle of nice warm firelight and the smell of muffins and the society of my two pretty sisters—just a contrast to the bleak and blue-alpaca plainness of the woman at the nursing home! I could see they'd heard about the engagement and were almost dead with surprise, and no wonder!

I was just finishing my muffin, and then opening my mouth to say that I had found Mr. Lascelles as well as could be expected in the circumstances, when I was interrupted before I began by a ringing at the front door.

"Who on earth is this?" said Nancy. "There isn't very much tea-cake left for him, whoever it is."

Evelyn, who was sitting drinking her tea with her left hand, as her fiancé was sitting on her right, said rather guiltily: "I expect it is a message sent round from my bandaging class to ask why I haven't been there lately. Somehow I do seem to have been so very busy."

At this moment Mary opened the dining-room door and announced "Major Lawless."

Now, I expect you have all forgotten the very name of Major Lawless?

I am sure I had, and so had the rest of us.

But Major Lawless was the first person who arrived down here at Mud Flats to make arrangements for the billeting, and he has been in and out several times since the others have been here, only somehow he isn't the kind of man who makes the slightest impression on me. He is a kind of pale, round-shouldered, khaki shadow, besides being at least forty years of age, and I have always called him to myself "The Knight of the Rueful Countenance."

That name wasn't a bit appropriate this evening.

My goodness! He was beaming all over his face. He wasn't stooping a bit, but holding himself up and smiling away under his grey sprinkled moustache, and out of his eyes, which really are rather blue and nice.

Aunt Victoria made room for him to sit close beside her behind the tea-tray, but he said, "I mustn't stop a minute, Mrs. Verdeley, really! No, thanks, I have had tea—honour bright, had an enormous one with the colonel at the 'Pearl and Oyster' just before I came along. The fact of the matter is, you have been so kind to me ever since I came to Mud Flats that I felt I ought to look in and tell you a great bit of news about myself."

Here the poor dear old dug-out drew himself up again, and looked as if he had been made at least Commander-in-Chief, with a D.S.I, and K.C.B. and all the rest of the letters of the alphabet into the bargain!

But it was Nancy, my married sister, who guessed at once what had happened.

She called out merrily across the table:

"Major Lawless! I believe you are going to be married!"

"You have guessed it in one, my dear young lady. You have guessed it in one," said the funny old thing, and then there was a general chorus of "Hearty congratulations, sir——"

"Wish you joy, sir——" "Delighted to hear it—I hope you will be as happy as my wife and I——" (this from Captain Masters).

And then in a sort of concerted burst came the question that sounds like a comic song.

"Who's the lady?"

Standing by the door just about to go out and beaming all over his face, Major Lawless said, "Ah, I was sure all you young people would be certain to ask that."

Clever of him, wasn't it, to guess?

"I think one or two of you have met her already," he said. "I believe, Masters, that you have. The lady has been a very dear friend of mine all my life; in fact, I may tell you that ten or fifteen years ago I asked her to become my wife——"

Fifteen years ago, girls, think of it. Why, I was only just three, with little white socks and bare legs and a frock like a cutlet-frill, when this lady of Major Lawless's was old enough to become his wife! Isn't it funny!

"—and she refused me."

"Oh!" cooed Nancy sympathetically, but pinching me under the table, "how could she!" (Talk about marrying and settling down, well, that's not the effect it's had on my second sister. All the mischief she didn't know already she's being taught by her husband, it seems to me.)

"She was wedded," Major Lawless went on with this Romance of the Middle Ages, "wedded to her profession at that time. Then, three weeks ago we met again, and—well!" said Major Lawless, laughing as he opened the door, "with a little persuasion I found I could bring her round to the belief that—er—love was better than a profession——"

"Good!" from Harry Masters, with his eyes glued to his wife again.

"—and that a home and husband of her own are what every woman needs."

"Hear, hear, sir," said Mr. Curtis.

By this time the Major was out in the hall.

It was Nancy who called eagerly after him, "But, Major Lawless! Wait, wait! You haven't told us her name yet!"

The delighted face of Major Lawless peeped round the door again for a minute as he replied, "Her name is Angela. Miss Angela Gates. She is in charge of that nursing home at the Junction. Good evening!"

And off he dashed.

We heard the front door closed behind him. Then we heard him prancing off down the road like a two-year-old, whistling away to himself that old Scots song,

"My Love she's but a Lassie yet."

What d'you think of that?

Inside the dining-room our party sat round the tea-table and the wreck of the large tea that we'd had, and simply gaped and goggled upon each other in various stages of dumbfounded flabbergastedness.

Aunt Victoria found her voice first. In tones of mild surprise she exclaimed, "Did the Major say Miss Gates? Can he really have said Miss Gates? Yes? You all heard him? Dear me! Then how does she come to be engaged to poor dear Mr. Lascelles and to poor dear Major Lawless as well?"

"Because she's a wicked, designing woman," cried out an indignant voice that I found was my own, shaking. I gazed round at my O-mouthed family and said, "Just think of it! She's engaged to two men at once!"

Nancy said in a more hopeful voice, "She can't marry them both!"

"No! That's why she's going to unscrupulously jilt the first one," I explained, heatedly. "Don't you see? She won't want to marry a seared old yellow leaf like Major Lawless, when she can claw an attractive young one like Mr. Lascelles——"

Even as I said it I found myself gasping with astonishment over the extraordinary things that I was saying, and then, in a dazed voice I heard Nancy's husband bursting in with, "Aunt Victoria! If you've a spark of natural affection left for any of us, let me ask you a favour. I want to see old Frank's own letter about himself and this extraordinary harpy of a woman; the letter in which he told you of his engagement; may I?"

"Oh, yes, I think I've kept it," said Aunt Victoria, mildly. "That letter is in my knitting-basket in the drawing-room. Go, Rattle, and fetch it; be quick."

CHAPTER XXV

LOVE'S NEW NAME

This—this was the fateful note from Mr. Lascelles.

Nancy's husband, seeing that Auntie had mislaid her glasses again, read it aloud.

"The Nursing Home,
"Nowhere Junction.
"February 14th.

"MY DEAR MRS. VERDELEY,

"Thanks so much for kind inquiries. Yes, I am getting on very nicely, and I hope soon to be perfectly fit and back again at work and in my comfortable billet with you.

"However, as I shall not be out for a few days yet, would it be too much to ask if you or one of the Miss Verdeleys would be kind enough to come over and see me?

"I have no visitors, as the Junction is so far away from any people I know, and it gets a bit dull sometimes.

"Miss Gates asks to be very kindly remembered to you. She takes great care of me, in fact looks after all of us like a dragon, in spite of her engagement, in which she seems to be very happy.

"With salaams to all of you,

"Believe me,
"Dear Mrs. Verdeley,
"Yours most sincerely,
"FRANK LASCELLES."

There was a general silence of bewilderment round the table.

Then the voice of Evelyn said: "But, Aunt Victoria, is that the letter you thought was announcing Frank's engagement to Miss Gates? It is announcing nothing of the kind."

"No, so it isn't," said Aunt Victoria in her mild, soft voice. "What could have made me think so? Give me the note, Harry, my dear, will you? Ah! here are my glasses, under my lace as usual.... Now... Ah, yes! Of course. I see what it was," she went on, gazing over the top of her spectacles at the grey sheet. "Here it is. You know poor dear Mr. Lascelles's handwriting is so peculiar. Her engagement, he says. I went and read it 'our.' And of course I thought it meant their engagement—Mr. Lascelles's engagement to this Miss Gates."

Nancy's husband burst into a roar of laughter. "But, Aunt Victoria!" he cried, "did it seem likely?"

"Dear me! my dear Harry, I don't know how you can ask whether anything seems likely or unlikely, nowadays," protested Aunt Victoria in a quite injured tone of voice, looking first at Evelyn and her Mr. Curtis and then at Nancy and Harry. "There is a regular epidemic of engagements just now, what with one and another of you——"

Nancy took up, "Yes, but Auntie! It's not quite the same sort of thing. Just think! Mr. Lascelles, a mere boy, and so young for his age, even! and Miss Gates!"

"She seemed to me a very capable woman," said Aunt Victoria, rather severely. Upon which they all, even Mr. Curtis, went off into fits of laughter. All, that is to say, except me.

I was feeling far too horrified and beaten-up-eggish to indulge in any light-hearted girlish mirth.

You see what upset me! I'd snubbed him; I'd been rude to him, a wounded hero, and all, and for no reason.

You see if he were not engaged there was no earthly reason why I should not have let him have my absurd photograph and all if he had wanted it, and he did want it!

However, one can't explain that kind of thing at a tea-table before millions of aunts and brothers-in-law and people. So all that I could do was to pretend I was choking into my quite empty cup of tea, to get up and rush into the Lair.

And there, just as I thought I was going to have a minute's peace to collect my scattered thoughts in, Nancy rushed in after me!

"Rattle, darling!" she said, beaming all over herself. Then she put her arms round me. "Rattle!"

I knew exactly what she meant. Can you imagine anything more aggravating of her than for her to go imagining, if you please, that I was too overcome by joy that Mr. Lascelles wasn't engaged after all to face them? I said, bending over my skirt, "It's quite all right—it's nothing. It's only my suspender given way again. I did this up at the Junction pro tem., but I shall have to sew it now," and I reached for my work-basket on the table. "Do go back and finish your tea."

"Not any more, thanks," said Nancy, imitating the curate's voice. Then, very firmly in her own voice, "You may take in Aunt Victoria and Evelyn with your nonsense, but you won't take in me! I always knew you liked him. Didn't I tell you so, ages ago, the day before I was married, even? And Harry says that he (Frank) is simply mad about you, Rattle. He always has been. Don't be a silly girl and waste any more time about pretending that you don't care as hard as you can!"

"Go away," I said, stamping my foot and keeping my face well hidden.

"I will when I have just begged you once more not to waste any more time," said my married sister. "Look at Harry and me; we had the sense to be engaged the third time we met, yet we shall never stop regretting that it wasn't the first time, the night of the party——"

"What? When you kissed Mr. Curtis?"

"Oh, yes, that time," said the shameless Nancy. "Harry and I were married a fortnight after that. Why wasn't it a week? Nothing will give us back those days that we missed before we told each other so. In war-time, too, when they may—they might be the last.... And, Rattle! My baby sister!" She put her nice cuddley arm about my neck again and whispered, "I don't want you to have any more days to grudge!"

"Thanks," said I as dignifiedly as I could, still busy with the suspender-clip, "but I don't think I should ever feel like that myself——"

"Oh, you would! Oh, yes, you would. I can tell!" said that odd Nancy, smoothing her hair with that new scent on it against my cheek. "It's all very well for Evelyn to have a sensibly long engagement and a good 'start' and all that sort of thing. I'm sure she'll be quite happy, but——" Here Nancy laughed, and wound up, firmly, "I don't suppose she'll ever really know anything much about Love!"

This was a weird sort of thing to say, with Evelyn's new engagement ring actually on Evelyn's finger at that minute. Wasn't it funny?

"Of course they're fond, and devoted, and tastes in common, and I know that she cried buckets over it all.... There's more in things than that," declared young Mrs. Masters. "You're like me, Rattle, I think.... And you'll just see if I'm not right!"

(Later.)

I have been wondering—oh, I have been wondering whether Nancy knows what she is talking about....

It's an unsettling sort of day. The Early Spring weather, Aunt Victoria says it is. One doesn't feel like settling down to anything definite; isn't it funny? All this morning—the morning after the day I went to the Junction, I've just been wandering about doing sundry little odd jobs that there are to do about the place, washing my hair and polishing my nails.

Also I have fished out that torn half of the picture postcard of me that Mr. Lascelles wanted, and that has been hidden away in the pocket of my sports coat ever since the day of that dreadful quarrel of ours! Shall I send it to him?

He did beg for it. He really did seem as if he would like it better than a new copy. I have a good mind.... Or would it be a little too much as if I wanted to be nice to him?

I wish I knew what to do!

I think I will.

I shall put it into an envelope—the photograph, I mean—and send it off to Mr. Lascelles at that gloomy, gloomy home for wounded officers. I shan't write a letter, though. I don't feel I know what to say. He can write. Goodness knows he used to write long enough letters to me in the old days. This first one, that's all getting torn at the creases, took eight pages. Yes; let him write....

(Later still.)

I had just put that torn and crumpled photograph into an envelope, and while I was addressing it to Frank Lascelles, Esquire, I heard the hoot of a motor horn outside.

I looked out and there I saw the big brown car that had pulled up beside Mr. Lascelles and me on the road on the fateful day of Nancy's wedding.

And in it, who do you think? Miss Gates, driving, and beside her, looking like a Knight of Very Cheerful Countenance indeed, Major Lawless.

Behind them in the car, with his face peeping out of a mass of wraps, and his whole self looking like a teddy-bear with three coats on, sat—the man whose name I'd just been writing down.

I didn't know what to do.

I suddenly felt far too nervous to go and open the door. How perfectly terrible that I should have to see these people!

For Aunt Victoria was upstairs, and Evelyn was out as usual at that time in the afternoon watching her Mr. Curtis instructing his class of sappers! Petrified, I sat there at the writing-table in the drawing-room, waiting for Mary to announce the party. To my astonishment, after I had heard the bell ring and Mary go to the door, I saw the car drive off again, with Major Lawless and his fiancée talking and laughing together like a boy and girl.

They weren't coming in, those two! Only Him!

And here there's another of those hiatuses in the family history of us. For I don't believe I shall ever be told what my brother-in-law Harry must have said to Major Lawless after he left the Grange last night, nor what Major Lawless thought about it all, nor how he'd managed to induce his fiancée to allow "her" patient to get up from his bed and come careering away to his own billet for the first outing since he'd left it!

Still, it had all happened.

Well, Mary (all smiles) showed him, Mr. Lascelles (all smiles also), into the drawing-room and we sat him down in Aunt Victoria's big chintz-covered armchair.

Well, I stood there looking at him in khaki that seemed suddenly to have stretched too big for him. I couldn't think what to say. About a hundred sentences seemed buzzing in my head at once.

All I could say was: "Were you really fit enough to come over here to-day?"

"I should jolly well have had to be at death's door if I hadn't come," said Mr. Lascelles, very quickly and decidedly. "What do you think?"

No answer to that sort of question, is there?

Then he asked another unexpected question. Pointing with his wasted scrap of a hand to that envelope that I'd not yet fastened up, and that I was still holding, he asked suddenly, "What have you got there, Miss Betty?"

Now, it is an absurd thing, and I can't explain it a bit, but though I had addressed it to him, though I had made up my mind to send it to him, I suddenly felt horribly shy of his seeing it now.

I longed to put it behind me.

But he said: "Has it got anything to do with this?"

He fumbled in the breast of his jacket.

I knew what he was going to pull out before he did it—the other half of that photograph!

He laid it down face upwards, just as if he had been playing cards on Aunt Victoria's little square, green cloth-covered table.

I couldn't help being reminded of ages ago in the Lair, when we three girls had played that absurd game of cards over the unknown young officer who was coming to be billeted on us!

I had won that game!—the Queen of Hearts——

And, of course, at the remembrance of it the family blush must needs come on and cover me from head to foot. At least, that is what it felt like.

I also felt Mr. Lascelles looking hard at me. He said coaxingly, peremptorily at the same time, "You to play, Betty."

So I saw there was nothing else for it.

I took the top half of that torn photograph, and I threw it down on the table beside his.

He gathered them together as if they had been his trick.

(Exactly what they were, of course.)

Then he fitted them together.

And, holding them so in his left hand, he drew me down with his right hand—the wounded one—to sit on the arm of his chair.

Perhaps you will now think that he was going to propose to me?

I don't mind telling you that it was what I thought myself!

But, oh, no! Nothing so conventional! I may as well let you into the secret of something very odd and unprecedented about this affair of mine. I always knew I was an unusual sort of girl, with everything happening to me in an unusual way. Listen to what happened—at least, didn't happen. There was no proper "proposal" at all!!! Perhaps there are no such things as definite proposals nowadays. I wish I could get some data about them out of Nancy or Evelyn; but, oh, no! Not a word will they say. Mean, mean I call it.

Of course, it makes no difference, because we are all getting married just the same, in spite of our parents' will that told Aunt Victoria they didn't wish their girls to go rushing into the evils of early matrimony before they were twenty-five.

And, talking about that—here's a surprise!

What do you think? Aunt Victoria has just opened a note that was left at the lawyer's at the same time as that will.

And what it goes to prove is that that will was all a put-up job.

It says that they (father and mother) who, as you know, got married the instant father was of age, had been so happy in their early marriage, and thought it such a pity that so many girls seemed taking to the habit of postponing marriage until they were all sorts of ages.

They—father and mother—were determined that their own children should follow their own good example.

And as they knew the contrary nature of girls, as they knew that nothing was so attractive as that which was supposed to be forbidden—they had arranged this plan between them of pretending they would be against our marrying just so as to drive us into it all the more certainly and quickly!

A curious scheme, wasn't it?

And yet it has come off!

But to go back to Mr. Lascelles and me in the drawing-room. (Though, mind you, I shan't dream of saying a single word about it to Nancy or Evelyn.)

He gathered up the photographs with one hand and me the other, and said quite as coolly as if we had been on these terms for weeks: "I say, darling! it's a pity you tore that photograph like that in your naughty little temper—even when I get it mended and framed there will always be a great mark showing just here."

But when he said "just here," it wasn't the photograph that he touched at all. He put his hand under my chin and kissed me full on the mouth!

And then I knew—oh! Then I knew that it must be true what Nancy had said. I must have always liked him dreadfully. That was what let me behave so hatefully to him. That was why I'd have wanted to die if he had. That was what made me fit to murder poor dear Miss Gates—I'd have killed anybody that I thought he was going to marry instead of me.

Yes; then I knew that if it hadn't been me he cared for, there wouldn't have been any point in my having been born.

Books don't give you the leastest idea of what I feel!

And which of those young idiots of girls was it that said there wouldn't be room for anybody on his knee? There's miles of room. Oceans.

I said presently: "Really, you take a great deal for granted, Mr. Lascelles."

He said: "I say, you will have to call me by my right name now, you know."

I let him beg a little, and then I said, "Frank."

He said: "Yes, that will do for when Auntie and the girls are there; you will have your own name for me when we are alone."

"Oh, will I?" I said. "Very well, then—'Lonely Subaltern'!"

He laughed, but he said: "Not now—it isn't appropriate any more."

So then I laughed and said teasingly: "Incubus!"

He said: "You will pay for that, too! Thanks.... Wait for the change, please. But you know perfectly well what I want you to call me, Betty. I haven't heard it since the first day I came here and met you all in the kitchen. What was it you were saying you would call me then? 'Now, Bil——'"

"Ah, no, don't, don't!" I begged, with my cheek against his. "Don't, please, tease me about that time in the kitchen. I honour bright felt awful. I can't say it."

"Write it, then," he said.

Men always seem to have things to write with planted all over their persons. Before you could say "knife" he had brought out a stump of pencil and a tiny leather-covered note-book, and turned over to a blank page. He put it and the pencil into my hand.

"Write it down, Betty, darling," he said tenderly into my ear.

And with our heads close together over the notebook I wrote down, with a long kiss for where the hyphen comes:

"Billet-Boy!"

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GIRLS AT HIS BILLET ***

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Table of Contents

- THE GIRLS AT HIS BILLET
- CHAPTER I THE HEN-PARTY
- CHAPTER II THE "BOY AT LAST"
- CHAPTER III THE INCUBUS IN THE HOUSE
- CHAPTER IV THE STRANGE CASE OF MR. CURTIS
- CHAPTER V THE NEW INTEREST
- CHAPTER VI THE DISGRACEFUL PARTY
- CHAPTER VII THE LONELY SUBALTERN AGAIN
- CHAPTER VIII THE FRIGHTFUL ROW
- CHAPTER IX ANOTHER SHOCK!
- CHAPTER X THE ZEPPELIN NIGHT
- CHAPTER XI THE MAKING OF A MAN-HATER
- CHAPTER XII THE ANYTHING-BUT-JOY RIDE
- CHAPTER XIII THE SEARCH FOR THE BRIDE
- CHAPTER XIV MOSTLY ABOUT RELATIONS
- CHAPTER XV THE BRIDE WRITES HOME
- CHAPTER XVI SOMETHING QUITE UNEXPECTED
- CHAPTER XVII AN EVENING OF THRILLS
- CHAPTER XVIII A DAY OF DESPAIR
- CHAPTER XIX OUT OF DANGER
- CHAPTER XX I PLAY PROVIDENCE
- CHAPTER XXI NANCY TO THE RESCUE
- CHAPTER XXII TWO MORE ENGAGEMENTS
- CHAPTER XXIII THE VISIT
- CHAPTER XXIV A MIDDLE-AGED ROMANCE
- CHAPTER XXV LOVE'S NEW NAME
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE