BOOK II

MRS. HAMMOND

JANUARY, 1914--SEPTEMBER, 1915

XIV

Against the car the wind hurled the challenge of a thousand angry spears of rain. With blow after blow they assailed the leather hood, only to break and fall helplessly to the streaming road.

"What a night for a dance," groaned Mrs. Hammond. "If I had known what it was going to be like, I really shouldn't have come, though I hate to disappoint you."

But even if she had known, she must still have come, and not only because she hated to disappoint the girls. For matters at Miller's Rise were growing desperate. Morning after morning Mrs. Hammond had come downstairs to find her daughters confronting her like the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual failure, Connie always bored and restless, Muriel becoming yearly more prim and silent. It was 1914 already, and nothing done. Adelaide Waring's husband at York earned £2,000 a year. Nancy Cartwright was now Nancy Buchanan, and even Daisy Parker, as Daisy Weathergay, lived in a little corner house along the Avenue, and kept a nice little maid, and paid calls, and shopped down the village street with one of those painted wicker baskets on her arm.

Of course there was Dr. McKissack. Surely, surely he must mean something. If only one were more certain of Connie. If only that queer, reckless strain in her nature would not make her do unconventional things that men disliked. She was so like Arthur, and yet in a woman, somehow, it did not do to be like Arthur. In the darkness of the car, Mrs. Hammond's face grew weary, thinking of bitter things. Her troubles were not confined to the spinsterhood of her daughters.

The car lurched and jolted round a corner into the mean street that crouched before the Kingsport thoroughfares.

"Muriel, I do wish that you would not tread on my shoe," complained Connie. "You know that they're my best ones. It isn't as if I could get a new pair any day."

"I'm sorry. I didn't see."

"No. You never do see. Mother, why can't we have an allowance? I'm sick of this beastly dependence upon Father. It's all to gratify his vanity. He'll take us in to Kingsport to buy a rotten hat, like when he bought my velour before Christmas, and I was simply pining for new furs. It's just to hear us say thank you, and to feel how generous he is."

"Oh, Connie, I've told you before that I have done my best. Don't let us start the discussion all over again."

"It's all very well, but if you'd only let me go on that chicken farm with Hilda there wouldn't have been any need to discuss it."

"And you wouldn't have been going to a dance to-night either. You know quite well that you would never have made it pay. We don't want to start all that again, surely."

They were passing through the main streets now, and the lamps looked through into the warm stuffiness of the car.

"At any rate," said Mrs. Hammond, calling up her courage, "it is going to be a nice dance." She had said that so many times. "You did say that the doctor was coming, didn't you, Connie?"

"He said he might." Connie's manner was off-hand, but in the darkness her face softened, and her brown eyes glowed with expectation.

She didn't care twopence for the little Scotch doctor, she told herself; but she was sick, sick, sick of Miller's Rise. She was sick of dressing up her fine young body, which nobody cared to see. She was sick of living through the long months of the year all on top of Muriel and her mother, sick of scenes with her father, because he would neither let her go away nor give her the allowance that she considered necessary. And she was sick of her mother's fretful hints and of her father's stupid chaffing. She was weary of cinema romances, where true love always triumphed. She was weary of Marshington reality where her school friends and neighbours smirked at her above their diamond half-hoops, or simpered at her over piles of trousseau _lingerie_. At twenty-one she had smiled when other girls talked about proposals; at twenty-two she had blushed and answered irritably; at twenty-three she had lied shamelessly and shrieked her noisy, jolly laugh. At twenty-four she would have no further need to lie.

She pushed back a curl of springing hair, and tried to imagine married life with Hugh McKissack. The wind enfolded the car in the fierce caress of brushing wings, tumultuous as love, as love, thought Connie. "Love," she whispered to herself, "Love, love, love," as though by an incantation she could call it to her.

There was a sentence in _The Romance of Emmeline_ by Sylvia Carlton, that had sung itself into her seeking mind.

". . . And as he approached her, her heart beat faster. In all that crowded room they were alone. He only took her hand, but his eyes caressed her, and youth and spring, sweet with laughter, clamorous with birdsong, leapt from the loneliness to meet them. Their formal greeting sang like a passionate poem, and in the shadows of her eyes he saw the amorous darkness of the perfumed night."

"Hugh McKissack," thought Connie, remembering the way in which his kind, short-sighted eyes peered through his glasses. Could men ever make you feel like that? Godfrey Neale, Freddy Mason, Captain Lancaster whom they had met at Broadstairs. She let a procession of "possibles" pass through her mind. At least if Hugh loved her he would take her away. "Let now thy servant depart in peace," thought Connie foolishly, "according to thy word. For my reproach hath been taken away from me. . . ." She felt strangely happy and yet urged by a strong desire to cry.

"Muriel, just see if that window is quite shut. There is such a draught."

"We're just there," said Muriel, peering through the rain-smeared glass, and wondering if she would be able to catch Mrs. Cartwright in the cloak-room to ask about the nursing subscriptions. Muriel's life had centred largely round the Nursing Club, ever since Mrs. Potter Vallery had taken up the Fallen Girls' Rescue Work, and Mrs. Hammond had abandoned the Club for her committee.

"Is there an awning up? I do hope that there is. Where is my bag, girls?"

The cars crawled forward, spilling their burdens of satin and furs and gleaming shirt fronts on to the damp red felt below the awning. As the Hammonds passed, a girl in a rain-soaked hat trimmed with wilting plumes called from the dingy group watching on the pavement:

"Good evening, Mrs. 'Ammond, 'opes you enjoy yourself!"

"Who was that girl?" asked Muriel, slipping off her cloak.

Her mother frowned. "One of the girls who used to be at St. Catherine's. They have no business to come and waste their time watching the people arriving at a dance. We got her into a decent situation too."

Muriel, who liked to see pretty things herself, thought, "Now that is just the sort of thing that I should have thought that those girls would have liked to do." For the streets of Kingsport on a winter evening were curiously devoid of colour, and the procession of pink and mauve and lemon-coloured cloaks gleamed like the lights from a revolving lantern down the pavement.

Connie murmured with a hairpin in her mouth, "What awful cheek." Being unconventional in her own behaviour at times through lack of self-control, she had little patience for other people who had suffered from an aggravation of the same offence. Muriel, whose behaviour was always scrupulously regulated, had more sympathy to spare for the exceptional. All the same, she did not know very much about St. Catherine's. Her mother would never let her go near the Home. It was not nice that unmarried girls should know about these things. Muriel, whose mind was singularly incurious, accepted without question the convention that only substantially married women could safely touch their fallen sisters. Her mother, Muriel heard, was most zealous in their cause, so firm, so sensible, so economical upon the House Committee. It had been her work upon that committee that had brought her to the notice of the Bishop. There was no doubting her ability. Better leave such work to her, thought Muriel; yet, as she clasped a bangle over her white glove in the cloak-room, the girl's eyes haunted her, mocking from the rain. Beyond this room with its cosy fire, beyond the decorous safety of Miller's Rise, lay a world of tears and darkness, of sudden joy and hopeless ruin. Muriel shivered, then followed Connie and her mother from the room. It was, at least, another world.

In the door-way they met Mrs. Waring, still slim and elegant in pale grey satin.

"Ah, I'm so glad that you were able to come," she smiled. "And the girls. How nice; Adelaide has brought a few friends of Sydney's from York. I must introduce them to you. There's an Eric Fennington and Tony Barton, such dear boys and devoted to Adelaide. She's so popular in York, you know. Naughty girl, I tell her that Sydney will be jealous if she always has a trail of young men following her about. And then, what will the unmarried girls do if staid matrons like her monopolize all the men?"

Mrs. Hammond smiled gently. "Ah, well, you know. There are still just a few men left in Marshington. We are not all as adventurous as Adelaide, going to York. But then, of course, a different generation----" She glanced across the room to the goodly paunch and receding hair of Sydney Rutherford, who was earning £2,000 a year and who looked every penny of it. Then she broke off. "Oh, there is Mrs. Potter Vallery. I promised to keep her in countenance as the only woman here in a last year's dress."

Only since her acquaintance with Mrs. Potter Vallery had Mrs. Hammond dared to say nasty things to the Marshington ladies. The relief, after so many years of restraint, was immense. She crossed the room, leaving Mrs. Cartwright, whom Muriel had just released from contemplation of the Nursing Club, Class A. Subscribers, to keep Mrs. Waring company near the door.

"Poor Rachel Hammond is growing quite thin, isn't she?"

"Yes," murmured Mrs. Waring into her fan. "Running after Honourables is hard work. And then, of course, they say"--Mrs. Waring dropped her voice--"that Arthur Hammond----" She shrugged her shoulders.

"Well, poor woman! poor woman! I hope it's not true. I dare say that she feels Marshington relaxing." Mrs. Cartwright's good humour led her always to attribute human trouble to the defects of impersonal locality. It saved her from having to blame people. "I'm sure that I haven't been well all this winter. I did think of going to Buxton in the spring, but Mrs. Marshall Gurney says that it didn't do her a scrap of good."

"But I don't think that it was for a change of air so much as a change of scene that Annabelle went to Buxton."

"Scene?"

"Scene. For Phyllis and for herself. An exclusive view of the Weare Grange becomes a little tiring after a time. I dare say that Mrs. Hammond may try for a change soon, but I rather think that she has the more staying power." Having tried the waiting game herself and abandoned it, Mrs. Waring felt that she had a right to find amusement in a contest that had once engaged almost the whole of Marshington, but which had now, she considered, been reduced to the final round.

Meanwhile, having secured her smile from Mrs. Potter Vallery, Mrs. Hammond reviewed her daughters' programmes. She had grown accustomed to these early arrivals, followed by a determined search for partners, while she shepherded stray young men gently up to her waiting girls. She did it well, and also contrived to achieve a reputation for introducing men to other people's daughters; this was one of her more clever strokes of statesmanship. To-night she felt that her burden might be easier. For some time things had been working up to a climax. Well, if Connie went before Muriel, what matter?

"Let me see, Muriel, was it the first waltz or the fifth that you were going to have with Godfrey Neale? The fifth? That's right. And Connie, let me see, where was it you said that Dr. McKissack promised to meet us?"

"He never exactly said," Connie began.

"He's over there, talking to that girl in green. They've just come in," said Muriel.

"I expect that he's waiting for us; I'll go and tell him that we've come." As Mrs. Hammond crossed the room, she was thinking, "Dickie Weathergay proposed to Daisy at the Tennis Dance . . . Hugh McKissack, Dr. McKissack, my son-in-law. A very old Scotch family. I only hope that Connie keeps her hair tidy for once. A doctor. A professional man." But when the tender smile curved her lips as she approached the young man, it was because she had thought for a moment of her husband.

Dr. McKissack turned with a slight flush to face her greeting. Being not entirely shameless, the memory of many Sunday night suppers oppressed him. But he was a Scotchman, and wanted to marry, and had no private means, and cold saddle of mutton had been welcome.

"Ah, Mrs. Hammond, good, good. And how are ye? Glad you were able to come." Seeing her pretty, waiting face, he felt more nervous than was reasonable. But he was a man of courage. Had he not been, he never could have enjoyed his saddle of mutton. "I want to introduce you to my fiancée. I think that you know Miss Hemmingway."

Mrs. Hammond, who did not know the daughter of a retired grocer, bowed. She even continued to smile. "Of course. I am so pleased to meet you at last. Naturally I remember having seen you at dances and things for years, haven't I? But we've never really managed to meet."

She was even able to search out Mrs. Cartwright, and to remark casually:

"Seen the latest couple? That Hemmingway girl and Dr. McKissack? He's just told me that they are engaged."

Mrs. Cartwright nodded comfortably. "Yes, it's been coming on for a long time, I understand. I'm so glad for her sake, poor girl. People haven't been very nice to her."

"Well, I had never come across her before, but, considering who she is, I thought that she seemed quite a nice sort of girl. Most suitable, I think. I know the doctor a little. Used to entertain him when he first came here."

"Yes. I know how good you always are to the boys," Mrs. Cartwright said without irony. Because she had a charitable mind, Mrs. Hammond found her restful; but when she had left the shelter of her disarming simplicity, and found herself surrounded again by Warings, Parkers and their friends, her courage almost failed her. She had needed it so often lately. The infamy of it! The graceless, wicked ingratitude! All that cold chicken and salmon, and the saddles of mutton. Besides, she had liked the little man. She had thought that he liked her. She could have sworn that he liked her. Connie. Her small, tightly gloved hands locked round her fan. She felt tired and suddenly old; but there could be no respite for her. Already the orchestra was groaning and wailing before the first dance. The girls must have partners. Connie must be told without being upset. It was difficult to tell with Connie. She rather liked to make a scene, like Arthur, but without his faculty for success. Mrs. Hammond drew the soft feathers of her fan across her aching forehead, and went into the ball-room.

Adelaide Rutherford was leading her young men across the floor. Now if only Connie were sensible and had a fairly full programme, she might still carry things off. She certainly looked well to-night, and one of Adelaide's young men from York, while talking to Gertrude Larkinton, seemed continually to be watching Connie's gay blue dress. Supposing that Connie, unconscious of the doctor's perfidy, were keeping dances for him? She must be told, and told quickly. Muriel, who did not mind, would do it best, but Muriel was talking to Rosie Harpur. That was one of Muriel's irritating habits. People might begin to think of them together, as poor Rosie Harpur and poor Muriel Hammond. Failure is so contagious.

"Muriel, dear, just a moment."

"Yes, Mother?"

"Is she--do you know whether she has been keeping any dance for Dr. McKissack?"

"Several, I think."

"You've got to tell her, now, that he's engaged to that Hemmingway girl." Her voice quivered fiercely. "It's disgraceful. Disgraceful."

Muriel's mouth twisted into a small, cold smile. "It's not the first time that it's happened. Are you surprised?" Being used to these reverses, she was hardly interested. The little doctor was just one of the many men who had come to their house, and gone. Then she saw that her mother had been surprised. Pity as usual froze her to stiff shyness, though she wanted then to carry Mrs. Hammond away home and kiss her better, for she had looked for a moment as small and defenceless as a hurt child. But Mrs. Hammond was not a hurt child. She braced herself for battle.

"We must tell Connie." She had seen the young man from York leave Gertrude Larkinton to ask Adelaide some question, looking all the time in the direction of Connie's blue dress. If only Connie could have this little piece of flattery to soothe her directly she had been told about the doctor, like a chocolate after the dose, it might just save the situation. Mrs. Hammond hurried to her daughter.

"Connie, you'll never guess." They must take it lightly. "_Such_ a piece of news, isn't it, Muriel?"

"Oh, I suppose so. Dr. McKissack and that Hemmingway girl are going to be married," remarked Muriel without enthusiasm.

Adelaide was leading the young man across the room. Connie started and looked up.

"How did you hear?" she asked quickly.

"He told me now. She's here. In the green dress."

They waited for a time that seemed to be years long, while the first notes of "The Pink Lady" summoned couples from their seats. Then Connie's shrill laugh rang out.

"So you've only just heard? You know, he told me days ago."

Adelaide was there with her young man.

"Hullo, Addie, how's the world with you?"

"I am very fit, thanks, and I want to introduce you to Mr. Fennington, or rather, he wants to be introduced to you. He's been pestering me all the evening."

Adelaide smiled indulgently. Out of her plenty she could afford to throw an occasional partner to the Hammond girls.

Mrs. Hammond and Muriel withdrew, well pleased.

"No partner for this one, dear? Oh, well, that's that. I wonder why she never told us, though? She'll be all right this evening, I think. That young man meant business. And what about you?"

"Oh, I'm all right. Don't worry about me."

What need to worry about her, about anyone? Muriel sat against the wall, her brooding eyes fixed on the kaleidoscope of colour before her. Two years ago, she would have smiled uncomfortably over her fan, pretending to wait for a non-existent partner. But now she was tired of pretence. The world was like that. There were always some people who danced and some who sat by the wall, watching until the candles guttered in their sockets, until the dancers wearied of encircling arms, until the bleak, grey light peered through the curtained window. Muriel was just one of those. That was all.

Connie passed, dancing with the young man from York, her red head high, her eyes bright. Which was Connie, one of the dancers, or one of those who watched? It was hard to tell about Connie. Nobody might ask her to dance, and yet, and yet, Muriel could not somehow picture Connie sitting by the wall. But to go forward on one's own was against the rules of the game. And never was game more hedged about with rules than this which women played for contentment or despair.

These were silly thoughts. Nobody was asking Muriel to be contented or desperate. She was simply being sentimental because the little Scotch doctor, who was nothing to the Hammonds, had become engaged. Her next partner, Mr. Mullvaney from the Bank of England, had come across the room to claim her.

The dance passed much as other dances. Muriel's partners were scattered but reliable. Connie seemed to be more than usually happy. Everywhere that Mrs. Hammond looked, she seemed to see the bright hair and laughing face of her younger daughter. Then, after supper, the strange thing happened.

Muriel's waltz with Godfrey Neale had come, the waltz that he unfailingly offered her. Godfrey liked regularity and tradition. They had waltzed sedately, and now sat on a plush-covered sofa in the corridor, silent as usual, for they had little enough to say to one another. Even the excitement of thinking that she really was dancing with Godfrey Neale had left Muriel. He had been too long the goal of Marshington maidenhood.

She wished that the passage were not so draughty, and that she did not feel so dumb.

Suddenly from behind a screen along the passage, rang out a clear, shrill laugh. A resounding kiss shattered the silence more boldly than a cannon shot. There followed the sound of a slap--bare flesh on flesh. A voice called, broken with laughter, "Oh, you naughty boy!"

Muriel and Godfrey sat up. Such things simply did not happen in Marshington ball-rooms.

Muriel always remembered the stiffening of Godfrey's figure. He hated so emphatically all that sort of thing. And yet, she herself shuddered with fear. For she thought that she had recognized the voice.

In another moment the orchestra would play. The next dance would begin. Probably the couple might emerge from behind the screen. It couldn't have been Connie. She was sometimes rather silly, but she would never do a thing like that. All the same, it was not safe to wait until she was sure.

Muriel never knew whether she ran away because she did not want Godfrey Neale to know, or because she did not want to know herself. She always tried to hide unpleasant truths for as long as possible.

"Isn't there rather a draught here?" she asked. "Shall we be strolling back?"

They went, and Muriel thrust misgivings from her mind.

As she undressed that night, her mother came to her.

"I think that Connie's all right now, don't you?"

The misgivings returned. Had Connie cared?

"Oh, quite all right, I think, mother."

What business had Muriel with misgivings? Mrs. Hammond was pitifully tired and needed to be reassured.

"Well, good night, then, dear. We needn't have worried, need we? Really, I'm very glad that it has turned out like this. He _is_ rather a commonplace young man."

"Oh, I never thought that there was anything in it."

The memory of Connie's face before she had laughed returned to Muriel. Yet she could not have cared for him, not Connie, for that little man.

"Well, then, it all went off very nicely."

"Very. Good night."

The door closed. Her mother's soft slippers padded away down the passage, and Muriel went to bed. But through the early morning darkness her thoughts strayed in drowsy confusion, and she saw again the glittering ball-room, and heard that horrible laugh from behind the screen, and saw, though she had forgotten them during the curious evening, the mocking eyes of a girl in the rain-dark street.

XV

It had all happened so quickly that Muriel found no time to readjust her thoughts to the hurried sequence of events, Delia's engagement, Connie's queerness about it, and the invitation to tea at the Vicarage.

"Go by all means," Connie had said. It was a wet day, and she could not even play golf, and nobody had asked her out, and she was bored. "If you like to be patronized all over about this Twentieth Century Reform League, or whatever it is that Delia runs, go by all means. But don't expect me."

"Didn't Mrs. Cartwright say that he was quite a distinguished man?" Mrs. Hammond murmured dreamily. It was hard that Delia should not only have defied Marshington, but have defied it with success, moving steadily from college to a secretaryship in London, and from this to the organization of the Twentieth Century Reform League. Mrs. Hammond could not approve of the Reform League, but she had to admit that the list of Vice-Presidents impressed her. And now, here was this Martin Elliott added to Delia's triumphal procession through life. She sighed, aware that she had never thought before of Delia with such toleration. The girl might be unpleasant, but she was not negligible. Perhaps Muriel had been wise to maintain with her that queer, half wistful, half antagonistic friendship.

"His book, _Prosperity and Population_, is supposed to have revolutionized sociology," said Muriel.

"The warden of a slum settlement," Connie sneered. "She's welcome to him. Still, it's surprising really that she's caught anything. She must be over thirty, and that skinny figure of hers and then all those stories about her being a suffragette, and going to prison. It's just the kind of thing that all nice men hate."

So Connie, in spite of Mrs. Hammond's protests, had refused Delia's half-smiling invitation to meet Mr. Elliott at tea at the Vicarage, and Muriel found herself walking down the road alone. She felt strangely excited, because of the absurd though insistent feeling that there existed between her and Delia some tie. It was as though Delia in her London office, looking up from the work which her brilliant, courageous mind directed, might think of Muriel in Marshington, living her drab ineffectual life among tea-parties, and nursing accounts and faded dreams, and might say to herself, "There, but for the grace of God, goes Delia Vaughan." Most successful people, thought Muriel sadly, have a shadow somewhere, a personality sharing their desires, and even part of their ability, but without just the one quality that makes success.

"All the same, I was right," she told herself fiercely. "I had to look after Mother. I had no choice. It was not my fault, but theirs. People don't choose."

She stopped to unfasten the bars of the big Vicarage gate. It had been wet all day, and the garden was musical with the manifold noises of the rain, of the murmuring runnels through the clean washed pebbles of the drive, of the ceaseless rustle of water in the branches. All the spring garden sang with youth and promise. The crocus chalices had overflowed. Here and there the wind had overturned their brimming cups, showering their burden to the grass below, in a mystical communion of earth and rain.

Muriel stood by the gate, listening and looking. As though this were the last hour that she would look on beauty, she opened her heart eagerly to scent and sound and colour. The deep significance of the spring oppressed her. Beyond the sodden trees, a firelit window glowed like a jewel of warm liquid light. Undoubtedly that was where Delia now sat with her lover.

Muriel had no part in the silent movement of nature's slow regeneration. Delia, who had striven in the artificial world of books and men and jangling rules of government, was now to be akin to wind and water, obedient to an older law than man's. She had won the best from both worlds, because she had been selfish. Wise, fortunate, beloved Delia! Was there no justice in life's scheme of things?

Muriel, who had neither success nor love, nor any great emotion, moved forward slowly, a small grey figure beneath the dripping trees.

Delia opened the door for her.

"Did you get wet? You must be washed away." She was a new creature, thought Muriel, gentler, saner, with an indefinable bloom of happiness that lent to her real charm. "If I had known that you were going to walk, I should have told that idle creature Godfrey Neale to call for you with his car."

"Father does not like us to use our car when it's wet. I did not know that Godfrey Neale was coming." She had not met him since that dance in Kingsport when the girl had laughed. She did not want to meet him now, when she had intended to forget everything except her sympathy with Delia's happiness.

They entered the comfortable, book-lined room, splashed with liquid firelight. The chairs and tables and people seemed to float as in a fiery sea. She could see nothing clearly until Delia followed her with a lamp.

"Father, Martin, Miss Hammond. Muriel, this is Martin. Godfrey Neale you know."

The room seemed to be full of books, tea-cups, and men. Mr. Vaughan smiled blandly through his spectacles. Godfrey rose and bowed beautifully. Then Muriel found herself shaking hands with Martin Elliott.

He was not at all as she had expected him to be, ironic, lean and scholarly. She stared openly at the short, stocky man, dressed like the shabbier kind of farmer, and smiling at her from a broad humorous face. His untidy hair stood up on end, his tie was crooked, giving a curious effect below his unexpectedly pugnacious mouth and chin, so that he always looked as though he had just emerged from a street row, which indeed, more frequently than most people, he had. Altogether the effect of him was so surprising that Muriel forgot her manners.

He bore her scrutiny for a moment. Then he turned to Delia.

"Delia, she doesn't like me. She doesn't like me a bit."

"I'm not surprised. You look like a perfect hooligan. Have you been arguing with Father again? Muriel, don't mind them. Clear some books off that seat and sit down."

"But I do like him," exploded Muriel, not sitting down, because she found nowhere to sit, except a pile of formidable looking volumes crowned by an ink-pot.

"Delia, you are a shocking hostess," remarked the vicar mildly, handing Muriel his own plate and a half-eaten scone with the well-intentioned vagueness that characterized his dealings with all such mundane objects as tea-things and collar-studs.

"Sorry, Muriel. It's all right, Father." Delia quietly transferred the scone to its rightful owner, cleared a seat for Muriel and passed her a clean plate. "Muriel's used to me. I scandalized her years ago, when I told her that she was wasted in Marshington, and she came prepared for an uncomfortable afternoon."

"My dear, how arrogant of you to say such things to Miss Hammond," reproved the vicar, stirring his tea absently. "That's so like all these strenuous young people who call themselves reformers, isn't it, Neale? They think all activity except their own a waste of time. They forget that if every one thought as they did, they would be out of work."

"Think, think!" cried Delia, laughing. "We don't expect them to think at all. That would be hoping for too much."

"Delia wants to teach people so many things," continued the vicar calmly. "She is certain that human nature can be rendered perfectible by parliamentary institutions. I am an old man. And I have written three standard textbooks upon parliamentary institutions. And I should hesitate to put into the minds of my parishioners anything but some simple and final expression of wisdom like the Gospels."

"Of course you are right as far as you go, sir," broke in Martin Elliott, obviously resuming some hot but interrupted argument. "My contention was simply that in a district like the Brady Street area in Bethnal Green people cannot understand the Gospels; and in a case like that to sell all that you have and give it to the poor simply is unsound economics. Don't you agree with me, Neale?"

"I'm afraid it's not much in my line." Godfrey was sitting upright in his chair, glowering a little, as he always did if the conversation passed beyond his sphere of interest.

"Muriel is the person to argue with on economics--and on morals," interposed Delia. "Try her, Martin. She has the mind of a mathematician. She ought to have been on the staff of the _Statistician_ instead of giving sewing-classes in Marshington."

Martin Elliott crossed to Muriel's side. "How much am I to take seriously from that madwoman? Do you really take sewing-classes? I think that must be rather interesting, because all teaching is rather fun, I think, don't you? If only one's pupils are kind to one; but sewing must be more satisfactory than most things, because you can actually see the work growing under your fingers."

"I know what you mean. But I don't really do much sewing."

"You read then?"

"Not much now. I used to, but the books in the Kingsport libraries are all so much alike, and one gets out of the way of ordering other things."

She spoke diffidently. It was incredible that a man should really want to talk to her about herself. Men talked about motors, or their own insides, or hunting.

Martin Elliott smiled at her. "Have you found that too? Don't you think about the books in most circulating libraries that they are nearly all the wrong way round. Short stories with happy endings and long stories with sad ones. Quite wrong."

"Why that?"

"Ah, surely the short story should end with tragedy, for only sorrow swoops upon you with a sudden blow. But happiness is built up from long years of small delightful things. You can't put them into a short story."

It was true. Muriel looked across at Delia sitting by the tea-table in her red dress. She thought, "This is what he means. Years of sitting by Delia in a firelit room full of books and talking pleasant nonsense. Friends who know what you mean and speak your own language. Rain-washed gardens when the birds call. Work that's fine and hard and reaches somewhere. Marriage, such as theirs will be. Children, perhaps, and laughter that they share. You can't put all those into a short story."

She felt cold and dull, shut out from a world of small delightful things. She made no answer, sitting with her chin on her hand, while the talk flowed round her, talk of books, and socialism, and plays, and people that they knew, and what you ought to take on a walking tour, and whether Sir Rabindranath Tagore should have won the Nobel prize, and school care committees. (They weren't really any use, Mr. Vaughan said.) And all the time she felt herself being drawn to Martin Elliott by surprised delight. She was at home at last, among people who spoke her own language, even though the things of which they spoke were strange. She felt as though after many years she had returned to her own country. But she never spoke.

Then she became aware that her thoughts had slipped away from the conversation altogether, and that Delia was teasing Godfrey, and that he was protesting, half uncomfortable, half amused, because he could never become really angry with the vicar's daughter.

"Now, look here, D--Delia. That's not true."

An impish spirit had seized upon Delia.

"Oh, yes, it is, isn't it, Muriel? Godfrey's never yet proposed to any girl because he knows that he'd be accepted, and if he had to marry that would upset his habits. Godfrey dear, you don't realize how much you hate to be upset."

"You know t--that's untrue."

"No, no, no. You're afraid that you won't be able to afford both a wife and hunters, and you prefer the hunters. Martin, Godfrey is one of those people who pretend to cultivate the earth in order that they may destroy its creatures. He is that odious relic of barbarism, a sporting farmer."

"I--I'm not a farmer," stammered Godfrey.

It was a shame, thought Muriel. Delia had no right to tease him so. How he must hate being chaffed in front of her.

"Then if you aren't a farmer, you are simply a social parasite, and your existence would not be tolerated in any ordinary, sane society. Oh, I don't mean that you aren't very much tolerated to-day, because this society is neither ordinary nor sane. But when Martin and I and the Twentieth Century Reform League have been at work for a score of years or so, say seventy-five . . ."

She rattled on, foolishly, happily, teasing him with the kindest smile in the world on her thin face. But Godfrey was not happy. His sense of humour had become atrophied from want of use. He did not understand Delia's fooling, and to him the incomprehensible was the unpleasant. He passed from boredom to indignation, and yet felt too much his old debt of friendship to show indignation before Delia's lover. He was not going to have the fellow think him jealous.

Muriel watched him and, as she watched, she too grew indignant with Delia. It was unlike the vicar's daughter to go so far, but she had always said that Godfrey needed teasing. All the same, it wasn't fair. She took him at a disadvantage, and he really hated it. Muriel leaned forward, quiet but resourceful.

"Delia," she interposed unexpectedly, "I do wish you'd tell me, for we hear nothing up here, what do they really think in London about the Irish Question?"

Now Godfrey really did know something about the Irish Question. He had once been asked to stand as the Conservative member for the Leame Valley Division, and although he had rejected the offer, as he always rejected the unknown at this time, yet a faintly political flavour still clung to his mental palate.

He drew a deep breath, like a diver emerging from the sea, then, slowly, with solemnity, he began to contradict Delia's picturesque but unorthodox opinion on the Irish Question.

Not, however, until he was seated again in his small covered car driving back to the Weare Grange did he recover his usual composure. Muriel had been tucked in at his side by Delia, to be dropped at the gates of Miller's Rise. The familiar feel of brakes and wheel, and the smooth running of the little car, reminded Godfrey that there was a sane and ordinary world in which to live. He sighed comfortably.

"I don't think that that fellow Elliott has improved Delia much. She tries to show off a bit, I think."

"Oh, no. It isn't that. She's just happy, and when Delia's happy she talks nonsense."

"All very well for her to be happy at other people's expense," Godfrey grumbled. He was enjoying himself now. The car responded to his touch, and the Hammond girl responded to his mood. The world was all right.

"Oh, I know that she teases. But one doesn't mind, because you know all the time what a splendid person she is. I do hope that Mr. Elliott will make her happy. But I think that he will."

Godfrey liked girls who stuck up for one another. She had her wits about her too, the little mouse of a thing. The Irish Question! He had given Delia as good as she gave about the Irish Question. Delia was a clever woman, but when women got on to politics it just showed. Now Muriel Hammond showed her good sense by keeping quiet when there was a subject which she did not understand. On the whole, he liked quiet girls. Besides, there was another reason why he should feel rather tenderly towards Muriel Hammond.

"You've not been to see us for a long time," he said.

"No. It is a long time," said Muriel dreamily, thinking of Martin Elliott, and what life might be like, if one could meet such men as he. "Not since that time Clare stayed with us, and Connie tried to ride your horse, and it ran away with her."

"No." The car jerked forward under Godfrey's hands. He did remember, ah, how he remembered, the turn of her head, the laughter in her eyes, her clear, triumphant voice. "Yes. I remember, of course. Clare Duquesne." He liked to say her name again. "By Jove, what years ago, and what kids we were!" He turned the car carefully in to the winding, elm-shadowed drive of Miller's Rise. "Do you ever hear from her now, at all?"

"No. I haven't heard for years. She married, you know. A Spaniard. They went to live in South America. I have not heard since, but I should think that the life there would suit her. She loved warmth and sunshine and gaiety. He was rich, I believe, and musical too. I don't know much more, but I should think that she would be happy. You somehow can't imagine Clare unhappy."

"No. You can't." He was bringing the car to the circle of gravel before the door. She could not see his face, but something told her that he had been profoundly moved. She became immensely sorry for him and yet glad that he had loved Clare, glad that he had not forgotten. His faithfulness belonged to her romantic dreams of him, when she had been a child, and had worshipped with the rest of Marshington. "If by any chance you should see her again, or be writing," he said very slowly, trying to control his stammer, "you might remember me to her, and say that I--I hope that she's very happy."

The car had stopped before the pillars of the porch. Muriel unwrapped herself from the rugs.

"If I ever am writing, I will," she said. "Thank you for the ride. The car runs beautifully."

"Yes, she's not a bad old perambulator, is she? Are you keen on cars? Would you care to come out for a spin in her in better weather?"

"Thank you. I should like it very much."

It was the first time that a man had asked her to come for a ride in his car. She felt the occasion to be immense.

As they shook hands in the rain, he held her small glove for just the fraction of an inch longer than was necessary. She forgot to ask if he would care to come inside.

"Good-bye, and thank you."

"So long, and we must fix up a day for a run, a fine day."

She passed into the house.

"Well, dear," said Mrs. Hammond, "did you have a nice party?"

"Yes."

"You're back early, aren't you? Did I hear a car just now?"

"Yes. Godfrey Neale brought me back."

"Oh." Mrs. Hammond smiled. She was tired, and the day had been difficult for many reasons. Muriel knew this. She felt the passion of admiring pity for her mother, which was always her strongest emotion over any person.

"He has asked me to go for a ride in his new car, some day soon," she remarked indifferently.

Mrs. Hammond threaded the needle that she was holding.

"Well, dear, that will be nice, won't it?" was all that she said, but as Muriel turned to leave the room she looked at her, and for a moment they waited, smiling a little at each other.

XVI

The War came to Marshington with the bewildering irrelevance of all great catastrophes. It came also at a most upsetting time for Mrs. Hammond. Really, it was vexatious when everything was just going so nicely. Connie had settled down with quite good grace to the prospect of calling upon Mrs. McKissack, _née_ Hemmingway. Two visits to old school friends at Buxton and Harrogate had sufficed to cure her wounded vanity. As for Muriel, of course it was too early to say anything definite, but Mrs. Hammond had confided in poor Beatrice that really, you know, Godfrey Neale was showing her an uncommon amount of attention. Ever since April, or was it March? those motor rides, that party at the Weare Grange, all spoke of possibilities.

"After all, he is really quite young yet, only about thirty. And with his temperament and his social position he would naturally go slowly. That was the mistake that Mrs. Marshall Gurney made. She would hurry him, and he grew frightened. By the way, I hear that she is taking Phyllis to Germany to learn music or something. Very wise, I think."

Aunt Beatrice nodded, approving Mrs. Marshall Gurney's double wisdom. Music was a sovereign remedy for broken hearts, and foreign travel would add distinction to an already pretty and taking girl. Her absence, however, would leave the field clear for Mrs. Hammond, by a process of elimination. Well, that did not show that she was stupid, but only that she knew when she had been fairly beaten. Rachel had been wonderful again, but then Rachel always was. It was impossible to believe that in the end she ever could be beaten.

And then the War came, right into the very middle of the tennis tournament.

Of course, as it happened, the tournament was not going to be quite such an event as usual, for Godfrey Neale had gone camping with the Territorials at Kaling Moor, and Connie had sprained her wrist and could not play. But still it was the Annual Tennis Tournament and that was no small thing.

The day after it had opened was the 3rd of August, and people began to feel uneasy. Just as the Hammonds were preparing for supper, Mr. Hammond rang up from Kingsport to say that he was waiting for the last train to pick up any more news that might be coming through. "Particularly trying of him to-night," said his wife, "because I've got such a nice little duck." After all, every one knew that nothing really would happen. There had been scares before.

The evening was close and, even up at Miller's Rise, oppressive.

"Wouldn't it be rather nice to walk down to the village after supper and see if we could buy a paper?"

So, after supper, they went.

Aunt Beatrice said that she never had liked Germans, so stuffy, that sleeping with the feather beds on top of them, and then the way they bought all that cooked meat and sausage stuff at shops.

All the way down to the village, she said that she had always known that the Parkers' German governess had been a spy.

The village street was strangely unfamiliar in the half light of the summer evening. Unexpected shadows and whisperings moved and rustled in the quiet air. Little knots of people stood round the open doorways of shops that should have been shut long ago. Noises, from down the road, the horn of a motor-car, the call of children at their play, broke in upon the stillness. With significant reiteration, a dog in a far-off farm-house barked persistently.

"Go into the Ackroyds', Muriel, and see if you can get an evening paper. I want to talk to Mrs. Cartwright. There's that bazaar on the 4th."

The paper shop was small and very crowded. It smelt of paraffin from the swinging lamp above the counter. Muriel watched two great moths flapping with unbelievable clumsiness against its flyblown globe.

She pushed her way to the counter. The proprietor, a meek little man with a fierce black moustache, stood shaking his head nervously. "The ultimatum expires to-night at midnight," he said hoarsely. "That's a very serious thing. A very serious thing." Then he saw Muriel. "Good evening, Miss Hammond."

"Have you any papers left?"

"I'm sorry, miss, I'm very sorry. I always like to oblige anyone from Miller's Rise. You might get one at the station perhaps."

He bobbed with forlorn little curtsies, pulling at his moustache, apologizing for the inconvenience of a European situation for which he, as the agent through which Marshington must see the world, felt a personal responsibility.

"Oh, well." Muriel turned to go.

An old woman in a man's cap, who for some inexplicable reason had planted herself on a chair by the counter, looked up at her.

"War's bloody hell," she remarked mildly. "Ah'm telling you God's truth. Two o' my lads went i' South Africa. Bloody hell. That's what it is."

She rose and hiccoughed unsteadily from the shop, the little crowd making way for her ungainly figure.

Unaccountably stirred by this brief encounter, Muriel left the shop, her mind wounded and yet quickened by the old woman's words. It was as though in her obscenity, she had been a foretaste of something to come, something sinister and violent.

The village street lay wrapped in the grey twilight of a dream. Bloody hell. Bloody hell. She saw the hell of a child's picture book, gleaming with livid flame. The blood smell faintly nauseating, like a butcher's shop on a hot day. Across the road, Connie and her mother talked to Mrs. Cartwright. "It's all over the village," Mrs. Cartwright was saying. "Mr. Marshall Gurney has telegraphed, and telegraphed, and can't get any answer through. They say that he is nearly mad with anxiety. If the war is declared against us, they're sure to be murdered."

"Nonsense," said Mrs. Hammond. "You don't murder people nowadays, even if there is a war on. The Marshall Gurneys will be all right, though I always did say that it was a mistake to go off abroad like that. It doesn't somehow belong to those kind of people."

Muriel looked at the four of them, and at their eager absorbed faces as they talked about the Marshall Gurneys. Yet somehow she felt as though her mother were not anxious so much as jealous, jealous because it was Mrs. Marshall Gurney and not herself who was enjoying the unique distinction of becoming involved in a European crisis. That Kaiser, whom every one in England was reviling, might turn Mrs. Marshall Gurney's failure into victory.

XVII

Mrs. Hammond was right.

The ultimatum expired. Great Britain and Germany assumed a state of war; and the Marshall Gurneys, miraculously unmurdered, returned to Marshington in triumph. The news of their escape through Switzerland outrivalled, at hurried and informal tea-parties, the problem of food shortage, the departure of the Territorials to join the camp near Scarborough, and the possibility of a German invasion. It was even rumoured that Phyllis had received a letter from Godfrey Neale congratulating her upon their escape, and that she, with the glamour of adventure like a bloom upon her youth, might yet warm up the tepid interest that her charms had once inspired.

After a spring and summer of reviving hope, Mrs. Hammond found herself facing the autumn of 1914 from much the same position as she had faced it in 1913.

Oh, when one was young and success was one's own to make or lose, then life was easy! But for a wife and mother whose success depended upon other people, then came the heart-breaking years. Of course the War must be over soon, and things would settle down to their normal condition, but meanwhile it was hard to see Mrs. Marshall Gurney becoming President of the Belgian Refugee Committee, while Phyllis, who had nothing like Muriel's ability for handling figures, was made treasurer of the Junior Red Cross Association, and went daily into Kingsport in her becoming uniform.

At the end of November they stood in the gloom of the unlit station, watching the 5th Yorkshire Guards entrain for Aldershot--well, if it was not Aldershot, it was somewhere in the South and so much nearer to the German guns. There was no particular reason why the Hammonds should have gone to see them. They knew no one besides Dickie Weathergay, Daisy's husband, and the station was cold and draughty. Mr. Hammond had stayed in late at the Kingsport Club as usual, but Mrs. Hammond was determinedly patriotic. In spite of discomfort she stood now with her girls among a crowd of curious, laden figures, distorted by their burdens out of all semblance to the human form. It was the world of a dream, when even the corporeal presence of such everyday people as Dr. and Mrs. Parker and Colonel Cartwright became part of a dim and dreamlike darkness. The crowd shuffled and jolted, appearing unexpectedly from the dense shadows into a circle of faint lamplight that flickered intermittently on bayonets and badges.

Mrs. Hammond was suffering from indigestion, the result of fragmentary and scrambled meals. The meals at Miller's Rise had not been hurried because nobody had time to eat them slowly, but because it hardly seemed to be patriotic in those days to sit down comfortably to enjoy them. Mrs. Hammond, dreading the secret murmurings about her husband, dreading the pity which could destroy more effectively than enmity the position which she had won, determined to kill pity by admiration for her patriotism. She stood in the darkness, while passing soldiers lurched into her, and knocked sideways her fur-trimmed toque. This must all be endured as part of the campaign. She felt her courage, born from her supreme passion, riding triumphantly above fatigue and pain.

"It would be nice if there were somewhere to sit down," she murmured, but without complaint. "Is that Daisy over there?"

Muriel, who had been standing all day in the newly instituted Red Cross Depot, shifted her weight from one aching foot to the other, and remarked:

"I'm so sorry. There are no seats," as though it were her fault. She added, "Yes, that's Daisy, in the blue cloak."

Daisy Weathergay stood just within the circle of lamplight. She was not travelling South with her husband because her baby was expected in December, but she had come to the station to say good-bye to him, and stood beside the 1st class carriage. Her small, flower-like face was upturned. Her close-fitting hat shaded her eyes, but the light fell on her soft little nose, and the sensitive outline of the mouth and chin.

"Isn't she splendid?" murmured little Miss Dale, who had burrowed her way to Muriel's side through the crowd like a small mole. "So brave! Not a tear! Like all these splendid, heroic women, whom one reads about in the papers. I never knew what it was to be so proud of my country before."

The wind uplifted for a moment Daisy's brave, blue cloak. She seemed to float, borne high upon a wave of heroism. Dickie's red, comely face leaned towards her from the carriage window.

"A symbol of Womanhood," murmured Miss Dale tearfully.

The whistle blew. A feeble, fragmentary cheer rose from the watchers on the platform as the train moved slowly, cleaving a line between the moving faces at the windows, and the crowd that stood below. And still Daisy waited, her small figure bent sturdily against the wind, looking at Dickie, while all Marshington looked at her. It was her moment. Then she was no longer Daisy Weathergay of the neat little house in the Avenue. She had become a symbol of womanhood, patient and heroic as the patient heroism of Nature itself.

"And there's dear Phyllis Marshall Gurney," continued Miss Dale. "She does look nice in her uniform, doesn't she? So splendid of her to have taken on this work in Kingsport, isn't it? But of course, after her terrible experiences in Germany----"

The train swept round the corner into the darkness. The tension of the watching crowd snapped suddenly. Muriel became aware of Connie at her side. Connie's eyes were fixed in front of her. Her breath came in low, gasping sobs. Her cheeks had flamed from white to crimson, and the hand that held her handkerchief was quivering.

"Connie," whispered Muriel. "They are only going to Aldershot."

A sudden suspicion seized her lest Connie's mercurial affection should have lighted for the moment upon Dickie Weathergay. But Connie laughed softly.

"Look at the little fool, Daisy! I bet she isn't half enjoying herself. Knows that she makes a pretty picture and that half Marshington is watching her. Thinks she's the only girl interested in this war." Her voice was thick and fierce.

Muriel watched her with wonder. But, then, Connie was always giving way to unaccountable emotions, and to-night Muriel also felt weary and sad, because her heart ached where it had no right to ache, for this was Daisy's war. Daisy to-night was the symbol of those heroic women who all over Europe were giving their men to die for an ideal, and suffering a thousandfold all the possibilities of suffering in war. Muriel, who could dream at night of unimaginable horrors, whose thoughts followed to Belgium the fleeting whispers of atrocity, who heard hammering through her tired brain the old woman's words, "War's bloody hell," Muriel had no right nor claim upon this war. She envied those wives and sisters with that envy of suffering which can burn most potently of all.

But if Connie was absorbed by finding relief in her emotions, and Muriel troubled by physical and mental weariness, Mrs. Hammond was fully alive to the possibilities of the situation. She, too, as both her daughters in their different ways had seen it, realized that Muriel and Connie were out of it in this war. She had seen the admiring group of friends round Daisy Weathergay, and the becoming uniform of Phyllis Marshall Gurney, but they summoned her like a call to arms. She wasted no time on tears nor vague repining. She drew her fur coat closer round her small, plump figure.

"Poor dears," she sighed appropriately. "Poor dears, this awful war!" Then, having disposed of her duty as a patriot, she continued, "Muriel, I've been thinking that since Aunt Rose has been so ill, and keeps on asking for some of us to go and see her, you and I might both go for a week to Scarborough before Christmas. What do you think?"

Muriel did not think anything much. Scarborough or Marshington was all the same to her, in a world where nothing ever happened in peace or war to draw her closer to the fullness of life which other people found and which her youth had promised. She stumbled along the sodden wood steps over the railway lines, having even forgotten that Godfrey Neale with the 1st Yorkshire Rangers was in camp three miles from Scarborough.

"Oh, I don't mind," she said, with the indifference that so much disheartened her poor mother; and splashed on, thinking of the cold, flat ham sandwiches and sugarless coffee awaiting them in the dining-room of Miller's Rise.

XVIII

Because Aunt Rose was not yet well, breakfast at 199 The Esplanade, Scarborough, was postponed until nine o'clock. Uncle George, of course, kept to his usual punctuality of half-past eight. Muriel at half-past seven that morning could hear him whistling cheerily as he trotted along to the bathroom.

She lay between linen sheets that felt chill and smooth. Her hot-water bottle had grown cold as a dead fish. Drowsily she moved it to the edge of the bed with her feet. She seemed to have lain like this all night, waiting for the maid to bring her water, and thinking sleepily of Godfrey Neale.

It had been such a funny evening. She and her mother and Uncle George had met him at the Princess Royal Hotel, and had dined together. A queer self-possession alien to her nature had seized upon Muriel. She remembered looking at her slim figure in the long glass of the corridor and thinking that she ought all her life to have worn that vivid cherry colour instead of blues and greys. It gave her a strange courage and merriment, so that she had laughed and talked, conscious of the flame of her bright dress, and feeling like a princess in a fairy tale suddenly released from her enchantment.

She had seen things about Godfrey too that she had never seen before. Most dearly she remembered how, when they were sitting in the lounge after dinner, his lean brown fingers had pressed the charred end of his cigarette into the saucer of his coffee-cup, and she had thought, "He is like that. When he has finished with a thing, he crushes it like that without thinking. He is not cruel, nor ungrateful, only a little stupid and lacking in imagination." She remembered the stories that Marshington told of his flirtations with Gladys Seton, and the Honourable Lucy Leyton, and then Phyllis Marshall Gurney. He had meant nothing. He simply had never given a thought to what they might have dreamed to be his meaning. She had felt old and very wise and disillusioned.

Then the orchestra played, and he had looked up suddenly, twisting his head and frowning and beating time against the arm of his chair. He said to Muriel:

"What is this tune? I seem to know it?"

"It's Mignon's song, 'Kennst du das Land.' Have you heard Mignon?"

"No," he said. A shadow of discomfort crossed his face. He struggled to remember something. Muriel, knowing what he sought, remembered the day in spring when he had driven her home from the Vicarage. "No. I can't say I have. Yet I heard that tune . . ."

"At our house," said Muriel. "The first time that you ever came. Had you forgotten?"

He looked at her then, and seeing that she offered him simple friendliness he said, speaking deliberately:

"No. I have not forgotten. I think, whatever happens, that I shall never forget."

And she had nodded, understanding him. And for the first time she had been aware that some day he might ask her to marry him simply because she would not ask him to forget.

As they walked home, wrapped in furs, along the Esplanade, Mrs. Hammond had murmured happily:

"Well, dear, did Godfrey suggest meeting us again?"

"Yes, he wants me to go to the Pictures with him on Monday afternoon. We could have tea at the new Pavilion place first."

The wind blew from the darkness against them. It lashed Muriel's hair against her eyes, and rushed against her, as though it were forcing her back along the road to Godfrey.

Mrs. Hammond seemed to be quite sure now. Muriel lay wondering. Until that night, she had never believed it to be possible, but now she saw that it was almost likely, for nobody else would ask from him so little, and he, she realized it at last, had not been proud but humble, aware how little there was for him to give. She had never liked him so well as now when she knew that he had been true to his idea of Clare. He was conceited. He was sure of himself. He was terribly limited and arrogant and complacent, but he was wistful, too, for something quite beyond his comprehension, and just because of that he might ask Muriel to marry him. There were, of course, other reasons, and to Godfrey they would be important, for nine-tenths of him was just the practical country squire, devoted to his estate and his position. The Hammonds had money. In spite of her father's recklessness, he was himself too able, and Old Dickie Hammond had been too cautious, to allow the business once built up to crumble. With the Hammond money Godfrey could keep hunters. He would not upset Mrs. Neale, who wanted to have a grandson, and who cared little for the smart young women from the county families. Arthur Hammond's daughter would present to her no insurmountable obstacle, because Muriel was also Rachel Bennet's daughter, and the Bennets had once been as good a stock as any in the East Riding. Muriel too, was all Bennet and no Hammond. She was not like Connie, with the coarse strain that gave her vitality hardly curbed by Bennet gentleness.

If he asked her to marry him, she would, of course, accept. It would be a splendid triumph, the end of her long years of waiting and feeling that she was a complete failure. It would be the consummation of her duty to her mother, of her success as a woman. She would be the mistress of the Weare Grange, the mother of its heir. She would be mistress then of Marshington, and of her own rich destiny.

Strange, it seemed to her, that her body lay limp and unresponsive between the cold sheets, that the word marriage conveyed to her, not a picture of Godfrey but of the Wears Grange, that she shrank from the thought of further intimacy with his bodily perfection and his limited mind. He was nice, far nicer than she had thought. There was even that little unexpected strain of the romantic in him. She was sure that she could love him. "I _have_ loved him all my life," said Muriel, and lay, waiting to feel the glow of love warming her coldness.

"This is not as it should be," she felt. But nothing ever was as it should be in a world where the best conclusion was a compromise. She turned her face into the pillow and thought of Martin Elliott, and the happiness that glowed about Delia's swift mind. "Well, if Godfrey had been like Martin Elliott," she thought.

Crash!

As though the fury of a thousand thunderbolts had hurled, crashing against the house, the noise shattered the morning and then ceased.

So swiftly the quietness closed in again, it seemed as though the sound were but a jagged rent across the silence, letting into the world for a moment the roaring of the spheres. Yet, though this one blow crashed and then was still, Muriel felt as though such violence must last for ever, and silence became the incredible thing.

She lay quite still, her limbs relaxed in the flat darkness of the bed, her arms lying beside her, heavy with sleep. She did not believe that the sound had really happened. Her thoughts returned to their path. If Godfrey had been a man like Martin Elliott, someone in whom one could seek companionship of mind, with whom one could feel as much at home as with one's own thoughts . . .

Crash! Crash! Crash!

It really had happened then.

It was not an illusion. She drew one hand across her forehead that felt damp and cold.

Of course this was what Uncle George had said would happen. The noise was the noise of guns, big guns firing. This was what the little pamphlets had told them to prepare for. This was the War. Only it had no business to happen so early in the morning before they were properly awake.

Crash! Crash!

Huge sounds, flat and ugly, dropped into the silence of the room. Slowly she turned and sat up in bed. Her curtains were drawn aside, but she could see nothing through her window. The panes looked as though they had been painted grey. Solid and opaque, the fog blotted out the sea.

It seemed absurd that this blinding, shattering immensity of sound should yet convey no impression to the eye.

She lay back in bed, her mind completely calm and rather listless, but she could feel the perspiration from her armpits soaking her nainsook nightgown. That was curious.

"Muriel! Muriel!"

In an interval of silence her mother's voice called to her. The door opened. Mrs. Hammond in her dressing-gown of padded lilac silk stood by the bed.

"Muriel, are you there? Are you all right?"

"Yes. Of course I am all right. What is it?"

She wished that her mother would go away and let her lie there quietly.

"Get up, get up. Come to my room. You mustn't lie there, facing the sea." There was a sharp note of anxiety in her mother's voice.

Facing the sea. Why shouldn't she face the sea? Slowly Muriel thrust her feet out of bed, her toes twitching in the cold air as she felt for her slippers along the carpet.

"Quick, quick, never mind your slippers. Ah!"

Another sound broke about them, sharper than any before, as though the whole world had splintered into fragments round them. Muriel still fumbled below the bed.

"I can't find my slippers," she said stupidly.

"Look!" gasped Mrs. Hammond.

Muriel looked at the window. The shattered edges of the panes still shivered in their wooden frame. On the floor below broken glass lay scattered. The noise had become visible at last.

After that, a series of odd and ridiculous things all happened very quickly. Uncle George appeared in his shirt-sleeves, with one side of his face lathered for shaving.

"I'm going to the Garbutts'. Their car must take Rose. Get her ready."

Mrs. Hammond and Muriel hurried to Aunt Rose's room. Muriel always remembered afterwards kneeling by her aunt's bed and drawing cashmere stockings, two pairs, over those fat legs, where blue veins ran criss-cross below the tight-stretched skin. It seemed to her a fantastic sort of nightmare that could bring her to such close contemplation of her aunt's legs. Then Uncle George returned, and they all bundled Aunt Rose's shawls downstairs into the car, hoping that she was still inside them, for they could see nothing of her.

As the door opened, and Muriel saw the blank wall of fog along the Esplanade, she felt as though she were standing on the world's edge, staring into the din of chaos. All the time the vast noise pounded on above them.

Then they were all running, Uncle George, her mother and herself, down a grey funnel with tall looming sides. They stumbled in a little tripping run as one runs in a dream. Muriel tried to tell herself, "This is an immense adventure. The Germans are landing at Cayton Bay under cover of the fog. Or they are on the foreshore. This noise is a bombardment from battleships to cover the landing, and we are running for our lives to Seamer Valley. This grey funnel is a street leading to Mount Road. I am running for my life and I am not afraid."

The noise crashed above them through the fog, as though a grey curtain of sound had shut out the light. Little knots of people in peculiar attire appeared from the grey mists, and blew like wandering smoke along the alley, only to vanish again into vapour.

"In another moment," Muriel told herself, "we may all be dead." But she could not make herself feel really interested in anything except her stockings, which were sliding to her ankles, and felt most uncomfortable. She would have liked to stop and fasten them, but she felt that it would somehow not be etiquette, to stop to fasten one's stockings in the middle of a race for life. "I was not brought up to adventures," she told herself. "I don't yet know the way to manage them."

Then her mother stopped. "I--I can't--run--any--more," she panted. Her small fat figure in its fur coat had been bouncing along in little hops, like an India-rubber ball. Now she stumbled and clung on to a railing for support. "You--go--on. I'll come."

"Draw a deep breath, Rachel, and count three," said Uncle George solemnly. He performed Sandow's exercises every morning before breakfast and was therefore an athletic authority.

Muriel watched them, while the running figures stumbled past, quiet beneath a canopy of sound.

"You--go--on," Mrs. Hammond repeated.

"Now, Rachel, go steady. Breathe as I count. One, two."

They were not afraid, any of them. They had a strange, courageous dignity, these two comical little people, standing beneath the desolation of deafening clamour and breathing deeply. "Mother," thought Muriel, "is thinking of Father." Uncle George was thinking of Aunt Rose. Muriel was thinking about herself, and the strangeness of it all, and how she was not afraid. For there was something that made each one of them feel stronger than the fear of death.

A woman rushing along the pavement with her perambulator pushed it into Muriel and nearly knocked her over. She sobbed as she ran and the two babies in the perambulator were crying.

"This is real," said Muriel to herself. "This is a really great adventure, and none of us know this minute where we shall be to-morrow and nothing matters like success or failure now, but only courage. This must be why the soldiers sing when they go to the trenches. It's all so beautifully simple." She wanted to die then, when life was simple, rather than face Marshington again and the artificial complications that entangled her life there.

An elation possessed her. She could have sung and shouted. She stumbled down the rough road again, holding her mother's arm and talking to her foolishly about what they would have for breakfast when they awoke from this strange dream. She remembered saying that she would have kippers, although she knew that she really hated them and rarely ate more than toast and marmalade. But then she didn't run for her life every morning before breakfast. She saw Seamer as some goal of human endeavour, very far away in the distance. It did not seem to be an ordinary place at all.

Suddenly from their feet, the Mere stretched, flat and lifeless beyond tall reeds, clouded like a looking-glass on which somebody has breathed. The noise grew louder. Somebody called, "Turn to your right. Your right. They're firing straight in front."

And even then, Muriel was not frightened. They wandered in a vague, irrelevant place among heaps of garbage, and cabbage stalks, and teapot lids, and torn magazine covers. Just to their left rose a little hovel, the crazy sort of shelter that allotment holders erect to hold their tools. She looked at it, blinking through the mist and noise, and then, suddenly, it was not there. It just collapsed and sank quietly down in a little cloud of smoke, hardly denser than the fog. It seemed appropriate to the absurd nightmare of the whole affair that a board on a post should grin to them out of the mist, saying, "Rubbish may be shot here."

"Ha, ha!" laughed Uncle George. "They're shooting rubbish, and no mistake."

And Mrs. Hammond pushed back her hair feebly with one free hand and laughed too.

Then they were all leaning over a gate, unable for the moment to run further. As though for their amusement, a grotesque and unending procession passed before them on the road to Seamer. There was a small child, leading a great collie dog that limped forlornly on three legs; an old man, leading two pretty young girls with greatcoats above their nightgowns, who giggled and shivered as they ran. There were little boys pushing wheelbarrows, and waggons holding school children, and motor-cars, and bicycles, and ladies in fur coats and lacy caps. Then a girls' school came trotting, two and two, in an orderly procession, laughing and chattering as they ran. Then more cars and cycles and donkey carts.

Nothing was quite normal except the girls' school. Every one else was a little fantastic, a little distorted, like people in a dream.

All the time on the other side of the road, the soldiers were passing into Scarborough, some marching, some swinging their legs from the back of motor-lorries, some flashing past on motor-cycles. As they passed, some of them cheered the procession leaving the town and called, "Are we downhearted?" And the refugees shouted "No!" And some cried and sobbed as they ran, and some shouted back and some said nothing, but plodded on silently looking neither to the left nor right.

A cheerful, round-faced man in pyjamas and a woman's flannel dressing-jacket nodded at Uncle George.

"Heard the news?" he shouted. "They've got into the town. That's why the firing has stopped. Our chaps are giving 'em hell. I'll give 'em half an hour until the fleet comes up."

Everybody talked to everybody else. And Scarborough was said to be in flames, and our men were fighting all along the foreshore, where the little cheap booths stood in summer. While they talked, the mist seemed to break, and the steep hills of Seamer shouldered up from the tattered cloaks of fog.

It was just then that a lorry swung by down the road, and stopped for a moment, blocked by the crowd. The officer in charge stood up to see what had happened, and Muriel saw, standing very tall and clear against the hills of Seamer, her lord and master, Godfrey Neale. He had seen Muriel. Their eyes met, and for a moment they became conscious of nothing but each other. He smiled at her and stooped down from the lorry.

"You are all right?"

"Quite. We're going to Seamer. We shall be all right."

She thought that he was going to his death, and then the thought came to her that she loved him. Here at last she had found all that she had been seeking. The fullness of life was hers, here on the threshold of death. She knew that it must always be so; and she lifted her head to meet love, unafraid.

"Good luck to you!" she called, and smiled to him across the road.

"Good luck!" he said.

The words came back to her, "Good luck have thou with thine honour. Ride on because of the word of truth of meekness and righteousness, and thy right hand shall teach thee terrible things."

The lorry swept him away along the road.

XIX

It seemed to Muriel just part of the futility of things in general that there should have been no invasion after all. The supreme adventure had dwindled into an uncomfortable wandering among the smells and indecencies of a refuse dump on the outskirts of Scarborough. There had been no heroism, no glorious simplicity, nothing but shame and querulous fatigue, and a long walk home.

At three o'clock in the afternoon they stood by the remnants of a strange meal of cold roast beef, celery and boiled eggs, discussing ways and means. The afternoon sun glittered on the sea, the cliffs, the metallic smoothness of the Esplanade. It shone through the windows at the back of the house on to the piled up kitchen table, and on to the small black kitten, the one profiteer of the morning's adventure, who, having disposed of all Uncle George's breakfast haddock, slept serenely now among its ruins.

It was the only member of the household who was not feeling very cross and tired.

However, everything had been arranged by Mrs. Hammond. Arthur, to whom she had telephoned, was to come with a car and fetch her and Aunt Rose away to Marshington. Muriel was to stay at Scarborough for the night to finish packing and to look after Uncle George.

That evening Muriel knelt in the littered bedroom before her mother's trunk. Her head ached, but her heart felt still more cold and heavy. She wanted terribly to go away at once somewhere where nobody could ever find her, and cry, and cry, and cry. But there was no time to cry, for her father had arrived with the car, and Mrs. Hammond was wrapping Aunt Rose again into her shawls, while Mr. Hammond walked along the front to see what damage had been done.

Faintly through the house rang an electric bell. The maids had somehow evaporated into the mist. Muriel went downstairs to answer the bell, smoothing her hair mechanically as she went.

On the door-step stood Godfrey Neale, in mud-splashed overalls. His motor-cycle stood out in the road.

"Oh, you are b--back," he said. "I'm on my way to Cayton. I just looked in to see if you were all right."

He came in and shut the door behind him. The hall was almost dark, but Muriel did not lead him into the sitting-room. She could see his tall figure towering above her, but she never moved.

"I saw you this morning," he said.

"Yes."

"What are you going to do?"

"Mother is taking Aunt Rose back to-night to Marshington. I am staying to pack and to look after Uncle George."

"You don't mind? You won't be nervous?"

"No, I shan't mind."

Her hands hung heavily at her sides. The gloom of the hall oppressed her. Her head ached dully. There was something that she wanted to remember, but could not, for her mind was empty of all thought.

"It's quite safe now," he said, as if to reassure her. "Nothing can happen now. A pity our fellows missed them, though, in the fog."

Dully her mind repeated, "Nothing can happen now." She stood there waiting.

But for Godfrey, whose reactions came more slowly, the golden hour had not yet passed. He lingered still beneath the spell of the morning's high adventure, when Muriel had smiled up at him out of the mist.

"I'm going away," he said. "I've got to report to Aldershot to-morrow. I don't know when I shall see you again."

"Oh, then I expect that this is good-bye."

She felt that she had known this all along, and that it was good-bye indeed. Her hour had come and passed her. She did not honour love the less, but knew herself to be unworthy of it. She stood silently, waiting for him to leave her, though she felt as though he had left her long ago. She held out her hand, but in the darkness she failed to find his. She touched his arm instead, with a touch, light as a flower. He brushed her hand aside and swept her into his arms.

She lay there, limply, unreasoningly, thinking of nothing but that the bitterness of parting had passed over her long ago, like the waters of Mara. His lips brushed the dark smoothness of her hair, the pale oval of her upturned face, and she did not resist. He had already left her. This was a dream.

"Muriel, Muriel!" Her mother's voice called from the landing. Here was something that belonged to her real life, that she could understand. "Muriel, come and help me to bring your aunt downstairs."

She responded to the claim that she had always known, broke from him without a word, and ran upstairs.

When she returned, five minutes later, Godfrey had gone.

XX

Muriel opened the front door wearily and glanced at the brass tray on the hall table. Surely it must come soon, to-day, to-morrow he must write. He could not just go off like that into the silence of an unknown world after what had happened.

There were three letters on the tray for her, one from Janet Holmes, now nursing in Newcastle, one from the vicar's wife at Kepplethorpe about the egg collection, one from a Nursing Club member.

Muriel hated the letters, hated the brass tray, hated sullenly and fiercely the weariness of her ankles and her shoulders. She had been standing nearly all day in the Red Cross Depot, lifting bundles that were too heavy for her. She leaned forward with her hands on the cool marble of the hall table, resting for a moment before she climbed the stairs. The smooth blades of an aspidistra plant confronted her. She hated aspidistras too.

From the dining-room came the flat reiteration of her mother's voice, scolding, scolding with gentle but monotonous persistence. Then followed Connie's shrill defiance, and her father's deep-toned boom. They were quarrelling again, always quarrelling. Connie was too bad, always upsetting everybody like this. As though the war in itself were not enough, lying like a heavy weight upon your heart, day and night, numbing your feelings to all but the bitter things.

She could not bear it much longer. She would have to go away. Why should not she become a proper army nurse like Janet? She liked nursing, that kept her body active and would not let her think. She loved to look after people. It soothed the soreness of her heart. Her daily visits to the Depot, her hours of dusting round carefully disinfected convalescents at the local hospitals were only sops for the unquiet conscience of Marshington. Marshington wanted to feel that it was doing its bit, yet desired the merit without too great discomfort. Muriel was not like that. She had a terror of finding the War over and herself as usual out of it. She saw a triumphal procession marching through the city square of Kingsport, with braying trumpets and flying flags, and herself isolated, sad, standing up a back street because she had no part in the rejoicing. For those who were in it, the War brought suffering, and anxiety and blinding sorrow. But these were glorious. You could make a song of them and sing it through your tears. For those who were not in the War, it was a grinding hunger, an agony of isolation; and of these things you could not make a song. You felt no pride of loss, no glory of sacrifice. There were only shameful tears to shed, and the long ache of pain which had no remedy.

Why was her mother so angry now? Her mother had been splendid. Every one said so. The way in which she had emerged from her terrific experience at Scarborough, shaken but undaunted, to resume her patriotic duties here in Marshington, had been quite admirable. Mrs. Marshall Gurney's escape from Germany paled before her greater heroism. Mrs. Hammond had been rightly elected President of the Local War Services Association.

Why didn't Godfrey write?

The dining-room door opened, and Connie flounced out, hurling defiance over her shoulder as she came.

"Well, I'm jolly well going, so there!"

She banged the door.

"Good Lord, Muriel, how you startled me! What on earth are you doing?"

"I've just come in. I'm going up to change."

"Oh. Then I suppose that you heard."

"No. I didn't hear anything except that you were quarrelling, as usual."

She was not interested. She climbed the stairs wearily, dragging at the handrail, wondering why the last five steps were always so much steeper than the others. Then she told herself that she was only tired, and that she must pull herself together. A hot bath soothed her body and mind. She put out her blue poplin dress on to the bed, and a blue ribbon for her hair. While she was changing, Mrs. Hammond entered the room.

"I suppose that you've seen Connie. Now, isn't it too bad?"

"I don't know. What is it?"

It appeared to be a great many things. Mrs. Hammond had gone into Connie's room at midday, and found the bed unmade, and Connie reading a novel. When she had remonstrated, Connie just threw the counterpane above the chaos left by last night's slumber. And when Mrs. Hammond discovered this, and pointed out very seriously what a bad example it set the maids, Connie had said, "That's all we keep maids here for--to set them examples. Why should we keep a dog and bark ourselves? There's no room for three women in a house. You should have let me go to that chicken farm."

"It's all too bad," sighed her mother. "You don't know how she hurts me." Mrs. Hammond pushed back her tears with a small lacy handkerchief. Connie was her favourite daughter. She had tried to do her best for her. But where Arthur was possible though difficult to manage, Connie was quite beyond her. "Connie's so inconsiderate. I don't know what's happened to her lately. I've done my best. I'm sure that I've done my best for you both. And now she wants to go and work on the land at some horrid place in the North Riding called Thraile."

"Well, why not?" Muriel clasped her necklace and set straight the things upon her dressing-table. She wished that this domestic wrangle had not come just when she was feeling calmer and more sane.

"Connie? On a farm? Well, now, Muriel, you do know her a little. And in any case, her father won't hear of it. The breeches, Muriel. And then, it isn't as if there wasn't plenty to do here. I'm sure that I could do with a little more help."

Muriel was ready to go downstairs. She shivered in the cold room. Her mother still talked.

"If only she would be reasonable. . . . So naughty to her father."

With Mrs. Hammond's complaints still trickling over her, Muriel went down to a supper of fish-pie and apple-tart. It somehow failed to stimulate her. Her father had gone out, as usual. Connie sat glum and injured, eating incredible quantities of fish-pie, to assert her independence.

Muriel lay afterwards in an arm-chair in front of the morning-room fire. There were magazines that Mrs. Hammond had collected for the Hospital, and Muriel loved magazines. She saw photographs of lovely ladies in pearls and white veils, "Working for our brave lads," "Helping with the wounded," "Among our hospitals." It had become fashionable for beauty to go meekly dressed, with clasped hands, and the light directed becomingly upon a grave profile.

"I ought to go to bed," she thought, but it was cold upstairs.

The lovely ladies soothed her. She almost forgot to think about Godfrey, and how she had let him go. She almost forgot the deathliness of spirit that her years of failure had left for her, and that had come between her and Godfrey, so that she could not hold him when he came. Indeed, she knew that she had lost him long before he came to her. But until he had kissed her, she had never looked like this into the future, to see how it held nothing more of life for her.

She lay back luxuriously, warming her toes, and letting the friendly heat of the fire steal through her body.

"Signora Clare Alvarados," she read, below a full page photograph of a most lovely lady, "is the daughter of Félix Duquesne, whose delightful comedies have taken by storm the French-speaking public. Signora Alvarados has recently returned to London to take part in the organization of concerts for our brave lads in the hospitals. All society is speaking of her beautiful soprano voice. It will be remembered that her husband was killed about a year ago in a tragic motor accident in Chile."

It was Clare, more radiant than ever, smiling out of the paper at Muriel with the friendliest of all friendly smiles.

XXI

The concert for the hospital was almost over. Muriel, who had been selling programmes, leant against the radiator and felt its friendly warmth comforting her. Across the row of bobbing heads, she could see Mrs. Neale's gaunt head and her untidy hair. Duty had brought Mrs. Neale to the concert, and duty was keeping her there until the end, but the strained lines about her mouth, and the misery in her long face could hardly be due entirely to Mrs. Purdon's rendering of "Little grey home in the west."

Something had happened to Godfrey. He was still in London, so it could not be the worst thing that happened to men during the war. Muriel hardly thought that it was even a sudden order to the front. She told herself that it was this, but she knew, just as she knew after the bombardment was over, that she had lost Godfrey now a second time.

She wished that the concert was over. She was so tired of everything that happened. Connie, working among the mud and turnips of the sheep-fold at Thraile, was immensely to be envied. How like her to win her domestic battles, when Muriel always lost hers! Since Connie had gone, Muriel was more securely tied to Miller's Rise than ever.

Against the other radiators, and by the two curtained doorways, the other girl programme-sellers talked, as they waited, to officers from the Wearminster camp. It was the same everywhere. At the Pictures, on motor-cycles, at the garrison sports, here at the concert; everywhere life was regulated upon the partner system. Since their visit to Scarborough, Mrs. Hammond had taken fewer pains to provide Muriel with a man to save her face, because she too was expecting Godfrey Neale to write. She did not know what had happened in the hall at 199 The Esplanade. She did not know that Muriel had made herself cheap and then just let him go.

A scattered fusillade of clapping followed the stately exodus of Mrs. Purdon from the platform. One far more vigorous heralded the entrance of Queenie Saunders, a florist's daughter from Kingsport. Queenie was an L.R.A.M. and really she played the piano quite well, thought Muriel. Also her silk-clad ankles below her short skirt were pronounced fetching by Captain Galtry.

"Fetching. I should call her very fetching," he remarked to Mrs. Waring with the air of a connoisseur.

"Fetching?" echoed that lady archly. "What does she fetch?"

Muriel turned away. That precisely was what she wanted to know more than anything else in the world. She lost the end of the concert in a bitter reverie.

Mrs. Neale stood beside her.

"Ah, good evening, Muriel."

"Good evening."

They made way for the crowd brushing past, and Muriel was conscious then that Mrs. Neale approved of her.

"It's a long time since I saw you."

"Yes." She would speak naturally. "The last time was when Godfrey brought me over to tea, when we met out walking."

"Yes." Mrs. Neale now was silent.

Muriel thought, "I believe that she would have been glad if he had wanted to marry me." She felt grateful to Godfrey's mother.

"Have you had any news of Godfrey lately?" she asked, feeling that it was perhaps the bravest thing that she had ever done.

"Yes. I suppose that you would call it news."

Muriel knew then what was coming. She knew too that she herself must say it.

"Is he engaged to Clare yet?"

Mrs. Neale turned upon her. "You knew?"

"Clare was my friend," said Muriel.

"She wrote to you?"

Muriel shook her head.

"I have not heard from her since she wrote to tell me of her engagement to Signor Alvarados."

"Then how did you know? Godfrey wrote?" Mrs. Neale's dark eyes flashed an accusation at her, as though she said, "You little fool, why couldn't you hold him? You had your chance, and you would have been inoffensive. If he had married you, he would still have been mine. You could never have stolen him from me, and now he has gone. You little fool."

"I knew that he was in love with her. I knew that she had returned to England. He loved her from the time that he first met her. And he has been accustomed to get what he wants."

"That was a boy and girl affair. And, then, she's so unsuitable. A girl like that would never settle down to the country. She'll paint the drawing-room yellow with black stripes and fill the house with Italian tenors and try to be Bohemian. Godfrey would hate it."

"Godfrey wanted to marry her. She--she'll find him a change from the men whom she has met lately." The thought came to her, "Who is Godfrey, that here we all are with our lives centred in his?" She thought of him as she knew him to be, a little stupid, kindly and sure of himself. Only in loving Clare had he ever been brushed by the wings of divinity, and Clare was the one person whom he could encounter who valued her own personality before she thought of his. "When it comes to it, Clare will be more selfish than Godfrey," she thought, and yet knew that for his sake she was glad that they had met again. For herself, she only knew that life had conquered her. She could not look into Mrs. Neale's sad, ugly face.

"I'm sorry," she said, shuffling her foot along the floor. "Men do as they like. That's where they're different. We just wait to see what they will do. It's not our fault. Things happen to us, or they don't. We stretch out our hands and grasp nothing."

Godfrey's mother turned on her again.

"Stuff and nonsense. A clever woman can do as she likes. I was eight years older than Godfrey's father, and I have never been a beauty, but I married him and I bore him a son, and I've kept Godfrey's confidence till now. I let him do as he pleases, because I want my son to be his own master. I did as I pleased when I was young. He must face his fences and take his tosses himself. He's been his own master since his father was killed, but he is that because I please that he shall be."

"Some people never do as they please. They are bound by a sort of burden that they call duty."

"Duty? I've no patience with this pother about duty. I suppose that some people would say that it's my duty to keep Godfrey from making a fool of himself now. I shan't. Life's too short. I've no patience with this talk about souls."

Nobody, reflected Muriel, had been talking about souls, but Mrs. Neale was like that, frequently breaking through the barrier of speech and alluding to the hidden thought that lay beyond. That was why Marshington privately thought her a little mad.

"My Sealyham bitch pupped in the drawing-room on Tuesday afternoon. I've lost my parlourmaid in consequence."

"Really? Oh, aren't maids impossible these days?" broke in the soft voice of Mrs. Hammond. She had drifted gently up to Mrs. Neale, after having just given Mrs. Waring to understand that the present mistress of the Weare Grange was talking to her successor.

Her mother would have to know about Godfrey, thought Muriel. This was going to be the part that hurt her most of all. She remembered the incident of Connie and Dr. McKissack. Better use the same treatment here, and have it over quickly.

"Mother," she said brightly, "have you heard Mrs. Neale's splendid news? Godfrey's engaged to Clare, Clare Alvarados, Clare Duquesne, you know. They met again in London."

Only for the flicker of an eyelid, did Mrs. Hammond hesitate.

"Really?" she said. "How splendid, dear! I am glad, Mrs. Neale; such a nice, bright girl. Do you know, I always had a feeling that something like that might happen there. I've always had a warm place in my heart for Clare."

She did it so well that Muriel herself hardly knew how much was true. Perhaps more than she thought, for her mother had already seen a way to transform her defeat to victory. As Muriel bent over the treasurer's table five minutes later, counting the money from the programmes, she heard her mother say to Mrs. Marshall Gurney:

"Yes, you know, she was Muriel's great friend. We are so delighted. Right from the first. . . . I take quite a credit to myself for the match . . . Lord Powell's niece, you know, so suitable. And so nice for Muriel if she comes to live at the Weare Grange."

XXII

"The strain of this terrible time," remarked Mrs. Hammond, "is almost too much. We must have a little recreation sometimes to take our mind off--all the horrors." Her small hand fluttered vaguely, brushing aside the horrors like a swarm of flies.

On the table before her the cards made bright little flower-beds on a green baize lawn. She touched their shining smoothness delicately, reassuring herself that her room was all right, and her guests, and the tall vases filled with daffodils and expensive branches of white lilac. Empires might crash and gay youth march to dark destruction, but the ace of trumps was still the ace of trumps, and Mrs. Hammond had taken her place in Marshington.

"Hearts," announced Mrs. Parker. "Connie home on leave, I see."

"Two diamonds. Yes. She's home for ten days. So nice to have her back," murmured Mrs. Hammond, hoping that Mrs. Parker had not seen the vision of Connie in her breeches. "The girls have gone to Kingsport to the Pictures."

"She looks well."

"Yes. The country life suits her splendidly. She always was fond of animals and things. Oh, what a _nasty_ hand you have given me, Mrs. Cartwright! I'd never have let you be dummy if I'd known. Of course the work is hard, but so many girls are working so hard now. The Setons of Edenthorpe, both Gladys and Hilda, you know, are helping on the stud farm at Darlidd."

The Setons, thought Mrs. Hammond, gave a flavour of respectability to Connie's doubtful profession. Again, since Connie had gone, she had been forced to build a victory on the foundations of defeat. It was lonely, tiring work, though the bright room helped a little, and the flowering chintzes, and the sight of Mrs. Parker's sensible face across the table. But all the time, at the back of her mind, a memory haunted her of Mrs. Neale's gaunt face, and of Muriel saying, "Have you heard the news?"

"So nice," she murmured above her cards, "to know that at last Connie has quite found her vocation."

She smiled gently, as she gathered up the odd trick with the gesture of innocent surprise that explained why Marshington never realized that Mrs. Hammond always won her games.

Mrs. Parker raised her bushy eyebrows.

"Vocation? Girls have no business with vocations. Their vocation is to get married, as I told Daisy when she wanted to study art. Art! Have you seen the great child lately?"

Mrs. Cartwright made the appropriate observations upon the charm of Mrs. Parker's grandchild, and then asked her hostess, "You mentioned the Seton girls just now. Wasn't it Gladys that Godfrey Neale used to flirt with so?"

"Gladys? Well, people talked of course, but we knew that there was nothing in it. All the time since he met her at our house when she was almost a schoolgirl he has been in love with Clare Duquesne. He and Muriel are such good friends, you know. He used to confide everything in her."

If only Muriel would give her a little help! The girl had been so secretive and queer lately. Mrs. Hammond knew that she used to adore her. But she had been so silly, always so cold and stand-offish even with Godfrey. She never gave him half a chance.

"No trumps," she declared vigorously, and settled down to enjoy a sporting hand.

But she was to be allowed no peace.

"Have you met Lady Grainger yet?" asked Mrs. Parker.

"Er--no, not yet. Dummy's lead, I think."

"Of course they are bound to be rather exclusive. People in their position. I naturally had to call, because my husband is to be her doctor. Lady Grainger is quite charming."

Mrs. Hammond rearranged her cards, stately queens, complacent kings, cherubic knaves. The hearts were chubby and gracious, but pointed too, like herself, the diamonds slim and elegant, like Mrs. Waring. If only people could be arranged as easily as cards! Here was a shy spade queen, and here the king of hearts, magnificently stiff and spectacular. Put them together, Muriel and Godfrey. Here was Connie, a jolly little diamond queen. One could couple her with this club knave, and so be spared from the menace of any failure there. And Arthur, he was this diamond king, blandly helpless, staring at her face upwards from the cloth. She could lead off with him, seeing that she held the ace in her own hand (she would always do that, she thought) and then gather him, safely, safely, into the pile of tricks before her. There need be no more nights of waiting, no heart-breaking humiliation when she held her head high before Marshington, knowing that Arthur down at the Kingsport Arms was making love to the fat barmaid. Of course he was drunk. He had once told her that no husband of hers would make love to another woman while in his sober senses. But since he had taken to playing billiards with that Ted Hobson, there were too many occasions upon which his sober senses forsook him. Ah, if only she could gather him safely in among the decent people. If only, for instance, a man like Colonel Grainger, horsy, genial, yet to be trusted, so they said, would take him up! Arthur responded so to his environment.

"I have done my best. I have done my best," she told herself. But she knew that there were new heights to scale. Besides, now, the stakes were doubled. She felt that Arthur's future depended upon her success with the Graingers. If the new Commandant at Kepplethorpe Camp opened the doors of his Mess to Arthur, then Mrs. Hammond might sleep at nights again. Besides, in spite of everything, she loved him.

She marked her score in firm old-fashioned figures, beautifully formed. It was from her that Muriel had inherited her pretty writing. Her jewelled fingers hovered above the tablet. She knew what she must do. As though she had hitherto been too much absorbed in the game to mention it, she said, "I haven't called on Lady Grainger yet, but Mrs. Neale has promised to take me up with her one day."

As she shuffled the cards, the rings on her white fingers twinkled above the green baize table, but though she drew satisfaction from her lovely, polished nails, she sighed a little.

XXIII

Meanwhile Muriel and Connie sat luxuriously on the two-shilling red plush seats at the Palace Picture Theatre in Kingsport. Muriel had paid for the tickets and for the blue paper bag of chocolates on Connie's knee. This was to be Connie's evening out, because Thraile was a remote place, dull and far away from cinemas or railway stations. Even if you have found your vocation, reflected Muriel, it must be queer to live eight miles from a railway station.

That was a rhyme. Station, vocation. "Dear Connie has found her vocation, eight miles from a railway station." "Dear Muriel has found her vocation in no particular occupation." So nice, you know. That was the kind of thing that Mrs. Hammond was always saying.

Well, perhaps it was true, regarding Connie at any rate. Somehow the calves and sheep-folds described in her uncommunicative letters had smoothed the lines of discontent from her full lips, had deepened the glow of her rich hair, and lit in her eyes a light of happiness. Connie talked so much that she never explained anything, but all day long her jolly laugh filled the house. When she was silent, Muriel could hear its echo. Yet it was difficult to believe, although Mrs. Hammond said that it was so, although her common sense told her that it must be so, that these changes were only due to sheep and calves.

The film which Connie had chosen to see was called, "The World Heart of Woman, a Story of Deep Human Interest, of the Triumph of the Mating Instinct. For Adults Only." According to the Cinema authorities there was only one thing in which adults took any interest. But Muriel found that this bored her rather terribly.

She turned from the triumph of the "Mating Instinct" on the screen to its manifestation among the audience. She could watch that little girl nestling cosily against the soldier's tunic just in front of her. She could watch the couple on her right, while they groped for each other's hands before the warm darkness shut them in together. She watched the couple on the screen, grimacing through a thousand flickering emotions, until they faded into each other's arms and out of the picture, to the long drawn wail of violins from the Ladies' Orchestra. Why did everything always conspire to mock and hurt her? To show her how she sat alone, shut out from the complete and happy world?

The man on the screen wore his hat like Godfrey's, a little to one side; but he lacked Godfrey's solemnly unconscious realization of his own importance. There was a moment during the picture when he stooped above the heroine and brushed with his lips her hair, her forehead, her upturned face. The heroine appeared to respond in the correct and satisfactory manner. Why could some women do these things, and others simply throw away their chances? Muriel hated this competent cinema heroine.

"I wish that they'd put on Charlie Chaplin, or some one really funny," she said crossly. "I'm so sick of all this sentiment."

She disliked the couple in front of her so much that she wanted to hurt them. Their smug, self-satisfied faces munched chocolates so stupidly. The girl lifted her lashes just as Clare lifted hers, heavily as though they were weighted.

"I adore Angela Tharrap, don't you?" mumbled Connie, her mouth full of chocolate cream. "I saw her once at the camp cinema at Hurlescar. They get some jolly good films there. This was called 'Midnight Passion,' and was simply great."

"I thought that she was much too fat for the part and was rather vulgar," said Muriel.

"Oh, Mu, she's ripping. And the fellows at Hurlescar all go crazy over her. Have another choc? You're so terrified of anything with a bit of go in it. You ought to let yourself go a bit more. Be jollier. I wish that you could meet Poppy Saddler, one of the girls at Thraile. Now she _is_ a sharp little customer, vulgar as you make 'em, but clever. By Jove, she can beat Violet Lorraine on her own ground any day. We have some ripping sing-songs after work."

Muriel did not reflect that the life at Thraile sounded less desolate than they had all imagined. She was thinking, "Let myself go?" and feeling again the gloom of the passage closing round her, and the numbness of her will as she lay in Godfrey's arms, and the shock as her mother's voice dropped into the emptiness of her mind. She had broken away because she always had run when her mother called; but Godfrey would never understand.

The thought that she too had known romance came to her from the scented darkness of the cinema. For the first time she felt pride in the episode at Scarborough. She began to hug the thought that, if they all knew what had happened to her then, they would feel greater interest in her. "I am like Mariana in the Moated Grange. I am like Elaine the Lily Maid of Astolot. I loved him, and he left me. He would have loved me if Clare had not come." She told herself that Clare had wooed him away; Clare, La Belle Dame sans Merci, the enchantress who had cast a spell upon his heart long, long ago, so that when she called him he must go to her, though it were half across the world. And he had followed, lured by her strange wild beauty, and she would lead him through perils and dark places, hungry and thirsty for her presence. But now and then in the hot evenings, he would remember a grey northern town, and the crashing tumult of those nightmare guns, and the face of a girl who smiled at him below the lifting fog. Surely he would remember her as a cool, gracious presence. Perhaps, even, long afterwards, when Clare had wearied of him and left him sad and old and disillusioned, he would return to where Muriel awaited him, faithful and tender still across the years.

The Ladies' Orchestra played slowly, the long notes dropping one after the other into the close atmosphere.

"The winter has gone and the spring is here, The spring is here."

They played Solveig's song, and Muriel followed to herself the wistful words, building a charmingly sentimental dream out of her relationship to Godfrey.

When the Pictures were over, she walked with Connie to the station.

"Jolly good?" said Connie.

"Not bad at all. I liked the funny one at the end," replied Muriel, still in her softened mood.

But they missed the 9.45 train, and had to wait for the 10.20, and Muriel, as she walked up and down the platform, began to remember that all this was nonsense, that Godfrey Neale had never thought about her any more than he thought of Phyllis Marshall Gurney or Gladys Seton, that every man kissed a girl these days before he went off to the front, and that she really had not even loved him, and never would be loved, and that the world was a grey place where nothing ever happened.

The station seemed to be perfectly enormous and nearly empty, except for some porters playing about with milk cans that they clashed together like giant cymbals. The London train slid silently along the platform, its doors falling open and the passengers tumbling untidily out on to the platform.

"Why," said Connie, "isn't that Delia?"

Turning, Muriel found her hurrying along the platform, a suit-case in her hand.

"Good evening, is the 10.20 still running? Good. I did not want to spend a night in the hotel. Hullo, Connie. You having a holiday? How goes the land work?" As usual, Delia went straight to her point.

"Great, thanks; I'm chief shepherd, head cook and bottle washer to the pet lambs." Incredible good humour! Muriel, accustomed to Connie's sulky antagonism to the vicar's daughter watched them with amazement. Connie continued, "And how are you getting on? Got leave?"

"Yes, ten days. I've come home to be married." Delia's fine lips twisted comically. "A fearful indiscretion, but Martin bought a special licence, and Father insisted on doing the thing himself. We had not intended to ask the blessing of the Church upon the union of two sceptics, but it appears that Father hardly thinks a registry office legal."

The solemn round face of the illuminated clock stared down at them. Muriel expected Connie to say something nasty, but she disappointed her. With a shock, Muriel realized that she was disappointed, that she would have taken satisfaction in her sister's sarcasms, though she herself felt incapable of showing the unaccountable resentment that she felt against Delia's drooping slenderness, and the ironic delicacy of her pale face.

"'The Triumph of the Mating Instinct,'" whispered a horrid little voice in Muriel's mind. "She's just like all of them, fearfully proud of herself."

Connie merely said:

"Oh, how exciting. Which day? When are you expecting Mr. Elliott? Shall we be allowed to the wedding? What are you going to wear?"

It was all very curious, and not a bit like Connie.

As they jolted back to Marshington in the hot, stuffy train, Muriel looked at Connie and Delia sitting opposite her, side by side. And on Delia's thin brown face, and on Connie's plump jolly one, brooded the same expression of serene expectancy.

It was very curious indeed.

XXIV

Muriel could not forget that expression upon Delia's face. It haunted her throughout a restless, interminable night. It rose with her next morning and stared at her across the breakfast table. All the way down to the hospital she repeated, "Martin Elliott's coming home to-morrow to marry Delia." Somehow she felt that if it had been anybody else but Delia she would not have cared.

At the hospital she was cross and intolerable. She snubbed poor Rosie Harpur, who gushed to her about the beauty of Delia's face now that she was happy. When she stood behind the screen, dusting the mantelpiece in the hall outside the nurse's room, she heard their voices as they drank their eleven o'clock cup of tea.

"My dear, don't speak to Hammond unless you want your head snapped off."

"What's come over her these days? She used to be so meek and mild and now she's like a hedgehog--all claws where she isn't prickly." That was Nina Farrell, whom Muriel had liked.

"Sour grapes, I should think. Sick that her little friend, Delia, has got off at last, and they say that Connie's clicked with a young farmer up in the North Riding. Muriel's just getting to be a thorough-going cross old maid."

"Oh, no, she's not," protested Rosie Harpur, in her thick, rather foolish voice. "She's all right. She told me this morning that she does not want to get married, she doesn't approve of it or something. She's frightfully clever really, full of ideas and things."

Muriel flicked her duster above charts and inkpots, and then fled. She knew now what they thought of her, a thorough-going old maid, mean and spiteful. She saw herself with the eyes of those young girls beyond the door. She contrasted their gay, ruthless youth with her bitter maturity. She saw the ten wasted years that lay behind her, and her barren future. She saw herself, grown sour with disappointment, grudging to Delia her happiness, to Connie her liberty, fretting herself over tasks that others might have performed as well, and having to learn generosity from women whom she despised, like Rosie Harpur.

She did not go to the Nurses' Room for her tea. She loitered instead about the wards and passages. The hospital was as usual over-staffed, and there was little enough to do. She walked the mile and a half home, hating herself with a fierce and bitter hatred.

Yet where had she gone wrong? What had she done? All her life she had tried to do the right thing. It was not her fault that things had gone wrong. She had wanted to be clever, but had sacrificed her intellect to her mother's need. She had meant to be like Delia and had grown like Rosie Harpur, because her duty had lain at home. She could have made Godfrey propose to her, but her fatal diffidence betrayed her. She could not stir herself to effort for her own sake. She had let him go.

And Delia was to be married to-morrow.

She endured the evening, though at supper she was curt and silent, hardly speaking to Connie, who had returned in high spirits from playing tennis with the Masons. Deliberately she seemed to wound herself by her resentment, forcing her lips to ungraciousness and her eyes to cold distaste, because she was conscious of having behaved badly, yet felt too weary of spirit to make amends.

Later, when Connie settled down to play rag-time, she could bear it no longer. She took her hat and walked out by herself along the road to Wearminster. She did not care in which direction the road lay, so long as she could walk away from herself and her own wretchedness. Her feet were tired, and her back ached, but the more her physical weariness oppressed her, the more she forced herself to go forward.

A dull sea of mist covered the valley, and the road stretched before her into a grey twilight.

Martin Elliott was coming back to Marshington to-morrow. On Friday he would marry Delia. Nobody would ever want to marry Muriel, and Godfrey was engaged to Clare.

She thrust her head forward, and walked into the mist, blind with pain. She never saw Delia until she was right upon her. They stood on a slight rise of the ground, where the tattered foam of mist curled round the hedge, like waves of a soundless sea, then fell away into the low lying fields. Delia had been walking towards Marshington, and the two women met face to face.

Afterwards Muriel remembered that, clear beyond the haze, three bright stars shone above the sycamore tree. She looked at the stars, because she could not bear to see Delia's face.

"What has happened?" asked Muriel, with a small hushed gesture.

Delia's voice came out of the mist, flat and dead:

"Martin was killed yesterday. Knocked down by a motor-lorry in Amiens station. Just the sort of idiotic thing that he would let happen to him."

A light breeze crept up the valley and shook the branches of the sycamore tree. It lifted a lock of dark hair and blew it against Delia's eyes. Delia never stirred nor spoke. She and Muriel stood quite still, with the knowledge of this thing between them.

"If he had been killed in action," Muriel said at last.

"He had no business to go and die now," stormed Delia. "He hated the war. He hated its barbarous futility and cheap sentiment. He only wanted to finish his great book. There were a thousand things for him to do. He had a great desire to live."

"You must finish the things for him."

"Don't be a fool. It was his work. He wanted to do it. If he had been a cripple, he could have borne it. If he had been blinded, he would have triumphed over it. There was no handicap that he could not have conquered. But now, now, he has no chance to fight."

She struck her hands together, in her urgency of pain. Then abruptly she said, "Good night," and swung off down the road. Her tall, bare-headed figure was engulfed in the soft grey distance.

Muriel did not go on, and would not follow her. She sat down on a heap of broken flints beside the road, feeling as though a storm had swept past her, with the force of Delia's angry grief.

Her lips moved, "Poor Delia, poor Delia," but there was no pity in her heart. She thought of Martin Elliott as she had seen him that afternoon at the Vicarage. She remembered his words, "Only sorrow comes upon us with a sudden blow, but happiness is built from long years of small pleasant things. You can't put that into a short story."

Where was Delia going, raging with her grief and anger through the mist? What should she do? She would walk away into the night with her sorrow, but she would return to face what life might bring her. And she would find that there were still amusing and exciting things, interesting friends, companionable talk, a little fame perhaps, and the consciousness of good work done. She would not forget, but her busy mind would have no time to linger with grief, and when she remembered it would not be with bitterness. She would still keep her love letters to read over, and her fresh unspoilt memories of happy hours. She had been lifted above envy or reproach. Sorrow such as hers would give her pride to bear it, and everybody would honour her dignity of loss. The dead, reflected Muriel, at least are always loyal.

"But I--but I," she moaned, "have been cheated even of my memories. There is no past hour on which I can think with pride. Delia thinks herself sad because she was once loved. But I would give all that I possess to share her tears if I could have her memories. I--I am hungry for her pain."

Then like a storm her tears swept down upon her.

XXV

The spring passed; the summer came, and in September Mrs. Hammond gave her dinner-party. It was no formal party, and therein lay the proof of that lady's genius.

The Graingers had been satiated with Marshington hospitality. Their simple souls had quailed before champagne suppers with the Marshall Gurneys, and exclusive little dinners with Mrs. Waring. But these Hammonds seemed to be natural, homely people. Where other ladies talked of the County and politics and the vulgarity of their neighbours, Mrs. Hammond gossiped gently about servants and the price of butter. She seemed generous too, and spoke kindly of the queer, absent-minded vicar, attributing much of his parochial deficiencies to the shock of that terrible tragedy in the spring when his would-be son-in-law was killed. The old man had cared so much more than his daughter. So Lady Grainger came to think of Mrs. Hammond as a nice woman.

Meanwhile, Miller's Rise had been thrown open to the young officers of the camp. Sunday after Sunday they came to play on the tennis-courts, to strum rag-time on the drawing-room piano, and to consume quantities of cigarettes. Two pleasant but foreseen results rewarded Mrs. Hammond. The first was that Mr. Hammond became interested in the young men, and liked to talk aeroplanes with Bobby Collins, and machine guns with Captain Lowcroft, and horses with young Staines. The boys found him to be a jolly good sort, and missed him when he was not there. All of which was excellent for him.

Secondly, the fame of Miller's Rise reached the ears of Colonel and Lady Grainger, and since they took a real interest in their subalterns, and since the tone of Marshington society had distressed them, they became immensely grateful to the Hammonds. So it happened that one evening in September Colonel Grainger met Mrs. Hammond at Kingsport Station, and stopped to thank her for her kindness to the boys.

"I wish that Maude and I were young enough to be included in your invitation," he added wistfully.

"Well, if you promise not to spoil their fun, as a great favour, I'll give you a pass!" laughed Mrs. Hammond. "As a great favour."

The only thing that spoiled it was that Mrs. Marshall Gurney could not hear.

On this Thursday evening, the colonel and his wife had joined the party. Till now, it had been uproariously successful. The colonel sat pulling at his moustache and smiling quietly, and Lady Grainger's kind little round face beamed all over with pleasure, and Mr. Hammond was on his very best behaviour. He had told her only his most presentable stories, and treated her with the exaggerated gallantry that he sometimes thought fit to show to his wife's friends, and which Lady Grainger found to be "so quaint and old-fashioned and nice."

As for the boys, they needed no entertainment. They were eating dessert now, and Bobby Collins with an intent, serious face, bent over the orange skin that he was carving.

"What is it, Mr. Collins?" asked Muriel. She rather liked these boys, who treated her like a pleasant kind of aunt, and whom even Mrs. Hammond never regarded in the light of anything more intimate than a stepping-stone to the Graingers.

"Pig," replied Bobby comprehensively.

"I beg your pardon?" Young Smithson raised his head from Muriel's other side. "Kindly repeat that word."

"Pig," repeated Bobby obligingly, and continued to play with his knife.

"Do I understand," shouted Smithson in mock wrath, "that this epithet is intended as an insult to that charming lady?"

"Understand what you like. Aha! I've done it," cried Bobby in triumph.

Smithson rose with dignity and bowed to his hostess. "Pardon me, Mrs. Hammond," he declared with dignity. "But words have just now been said in this room which no gentleman could pass. An insult has been offered to your charming daughter. Ahem! Mr. Collins, in the name of Miss Hammond, I demand satisfaction."

The table was in an uproar. Muriel, blushing but amused, looked along a line of laughing faces to her mother.

"A duel, a duel!" shouted Captain Lowcroft. "Pistols for two and coffee for one on the Hangman's Heath in the morning."

Bobby Collins, very round and solemn, arose and faced Smithson across Muriel's dark head.

"A plague upon your mornings, sir. I will fight now, with oranges, upon the lawn. And it shall be to the death."

"Outside with you then, for goodness' sake," cried Mrs. Hammond. "Remember my china!"

They trooped outside together.

The September night was warm and still. A great harvest moon hung low above the elm trees. The windows, carefully curtained by order of the government, left the house mute and dark, but white moonlight lay along the level lawn, and moonlight touched the laughing, running figures.

There was madness in the air. Even Muriel, as she stood on the steps with Lady Grainger and her mother, felt the excitement, and laughed with them. She watched the figures on the lawn, moving out of the black shadows of the elm trees into the white field of moonlight. She watched young Staines and Captain Lowcroft separate the antagonists, measure sedately the paces between them, and supply them with their ammunition. Quick words of command rang out. A handkerchief fluttered down, silver-white in the moonlight. The fruit flew, the oranges glittering like golden metal.

"Your oranges," murmured Lady Grainger. "They are very naughty boys."

"Not at all," sighed Mrs. Hammond. "This is so good for them, a little innocent fooling. The oranges will be all the sweeter." She waved a pathetic little hand. "You see, I had no son to give."

"You have at least a very nice daughter."

"Two. My baby, Connie, is working on the land."

There came a burst of shouting from the combatants on the lawn.

"A hit! A hit! A palpable hit. (Whatever that means. I seem to have heard it somewhere.) Miss Hammond, your insulter is wounded."

With a groan Bobby Collins flung himself upon the lawn.

"Come and render first aid."

Muriel ran down.

Always afterwards she remembered kneeling there with her delicate dress carefully tucked up, binding a silk scarf round an imaginary wound in Bobby's shoulder. She remembered the sticky feeling of his tunic where an over-ripe orange had burst, and the sound of mad-cap laughter and those gay young voices. Then something made her look up, and beyond the drive, in the shadow of the elm trees, she saw a figure moving. Somebody was walking slowly and furtively, stealing from the darkness of one tree to another, a figure bowed and drooping, as though in pain or weariness. Almost it seemed to be familiar. Muriel thought of Delia, who had walked off through the mists four months ago; but it was not tall enough for Delia.

"It'll be somebody coming to see one of the maids," she told herself, and rose to her feet, for Bobby Collins was being lifted from the ground by three of his friends, and the procession moved towards the house.

Mrs. Hammond opened the front door to receive them. A flood of golden light poured out on to the steps, the drive, the disordered returning figures. Colonel Grainger bore a dish piled high with yellow oranges. Bobby was carried shoulder high by the laughing boys.

"The children. The absurd children," laughed Mrs. Hammond. "Come in. The Zeppelins will catch us if we leave our lights showing, and Arthur is a special constable."

As she watched the colonel tossing oranges to her husband, her face was happier than Muriel had known it for many years.

"Are they all in? Shut the door," said Mrs. Hammond.

Muriel turned to obey.

Out in the garden the watcher from the shadows had crossed the lawn. Somebody stood in the moonlight on the edge of the drive. The face was hidden, but again a curious familiarity in the attitude stopped the beating of Muriel's heart for a moment.

"I'm seeing things," she told herself. "That can't be Connie, for she's at Thraile. Somebody has come from the road to see whatever we were doing. We are being mad enough to bring anyone in."

She drew the heavy curtains across the hall door.

They flocked into the drawing-room for music, such music as had become part of the Miller's Rise programme. Mrs. Hammond and Lady Grainger sat in the big armchairs, and Colonel Grainger and Mr. Hammond looked as though they had smoked cigars together all their lives.

The boys grouped themselves around and on the piano at which Muriel sat, accompanying indefatigably.

"Prithee pretty maiden, will you marry me?" sang Bobby Collins, still bandaged and orange-smeared.

"Hey, but he's doleful, willow, willow, waly," shouted the chorus cheerfully.

Annie came into the drawing-room, her face stiff with importance, and crossed to Mrs. Hammond. Muriel saw her mother leave the room.

"The coffee's overboiled again," she thought, and yet for some reason, she felt stupidly uneasy. She could not put out of her head the thought of that watching figure on the lawn.

Mrs. Hammond did not return. The singers laid aside Gilbert and Sullivan, and took up the Globe Song Book.

"There is a tavern in the town, in the town, And there my true love sits him down, sits him down, And takes his cask of wine across his knee And never, never thinks of me, thinks of me!"

"We want a drummer," declared Bobby.

"The gong. Where's the gong? Miss Hammond, may we get the gong? We can't live without a drum."

"Of course you can have it. Mr. Collins, go and fetch it from the hall."

Bobby went, leaving the door ajar. They watched for their drummer, Colonel Grainger and Mr. Hammond in high good humour, humming the refrain,

"Fare thee well for I must leave thee,"

From the hall came a sharp exclamation and the sound of a scuffle.

Then Bobby questioned sharply and a voice, Connie's voice unmistakably, was raised in protest.

They all turned towards the door.

Then Bobby returned. In one hand he carried the large brass gong and its padded stick; the other hand was firmly grasped round Connie's wrist.

"See what I've found," he cried triumphantly. "Not only a drum, but a drummer! Allow me, ladies and gentlemen, to introduce to you Miss Constance Hammond, youngest daughter of our respected host and hostess, just this moment returned on unexpected leave from her strenuous duties upon a farm in the North Riding, where she has been carrying on the splendid work of feeding our nation in its hour of peril."

They rose, they shouted, they went forward to drag Connie, blushing and protesting, into the room.

"Three cheers for Miss Constance Hammond! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! Three cheers for the land girls in khaki! Cheers for the girls who grow the spuds to beat the U Boats!"

The room rang with their cheering. Colonel Grainger stepped forward and introduced himself, shaking both Connie's red, trembling hands, and telling her how good her mother had been to his boys. Muriel, mystified, profoundly stirred by some strange premonition, stood silent while Connie shook hands with the colonel and kissed her father. Then she asked:

"Have you seen Mother?"

"Yes," said Connie, and no more, for Bobby made all the necessary explanations with delighted volubility.

"She was sneaking away upstairs because she didn't want to see us before she'd made herself look beautiful. She came from Market Burton on the 9.50 unexpectedly to give her family a surprise. _I_ think that it was to see how they behaved while she was away. Aha, Miss Hammond, but now we've caught you, we'll keep you. You are conscripted as our drummer."

Muriel, from the piano, said:

"Connie, this is nice. How long have you?"

Then for the first time she saw Connie clearly through a crowd of chaffing, chattering boys. Connie's cheeks were flushed. She held her wild head high and recklessly, but her eyes were fierce with the desperation of a trapped animal.

"I don't know for certain," she said, in her high, shrill voice. "It depends on how you treat me." Then quickly she turned to the men. "What were you singing? Come on. Don't stop. Where's my drum?" She sprang on to the back of the sofa, and Bobby held the gong before her. "Go on. Play up, Muriel!"

With a sense of impending doom, totally unreasonable, Muriel struck the keys with stiff, frightened fingers. The voices shouted again, madly joyous, punctuated by Connie's crashings on the gong.

"He left me for a damsel dark, damsel dark, And every night they used to spark, used to spark, And now my love, without a thought of me Takes that dark damsel on his knee, on his knee."

Crash-crash-crash, went the gong. The room rocked to the stamp of feet and the roar of voices, while high above them, from where she stood on the sofa end, smashing at the swinging gong, shrilled Connie's wild, mad gaiety.

So Mrs. Hammond, returning to the drawing-room, found them and stood spellbound, like a frozen figure in the doorway. Lady Grainger saw her and smiled, beckoning. Muriel, between the gusts of laughter, heard their voices.

"They kept you a long time," murmured Lady Grainger. "I hope that it was nothing bothering. You--you'll excuse me saying so, you look a little tired. I hope that our rowdy boys are not too much for you."

"Oh, no. Not at all. I like it."

"I'll hang my harp on a weeping willow tree, And may the world go well with thee, well with thee."

chanted the chorus.

"Chorus again," called Connie. "I'm bandmaster to-night."

"Fare thee well for I must leave thee, Do not let the parting grieve thee . . ."

As the refrain died down to the reverberations of the gong, Muriel heard Lady Grainger say:

"If only more girls were brought up like yours, with such a healthy, homely influence, an atmosphere, I'm sure that you'll understand me, dear Mrs. Hammond. It does help the boys so."

Then her mother answered in that soft hurrying voice that was so much her own:

"It's very kind of you to say so. I don't know, I'm sure. Of course I've always tried to--to give them a high ideal of--of home life and--and so on."

She faltered, and Muriel, looking over her shoulder, saw her mouth set to a despairing smile, and her tongue pass over her dry lips.

"I--we try to, you know," repeated Mrs. Hammond, as though she were saying a lesson.

Connie, from the sofa head, turned round and looked at her mother. Muriel felt the tension in the room to be unendurable. Somehow they were torturing that gentle little lady on the sofa. The evening became abominable to her. The laughter, the rollicking songs broke round her like a nightmare sea. Her hands slid from the keyboard and she clenched them on her knee.

"Oh, come along, Muriel," called Connie. "Are you tired? Then let me come."

Muriel was pushed aside from the stool, and Connie swung herself into her place. Connie's red, work-soiled fingers rattled over the keyboard.

"What shall we have now?" Her jangling discords changed to the clashing refrain of an old song.

"I went down south to see my Sal, Singing Polly Wolly Doodle all the day."

The party was jollier than ever.

At last they began to go. There was a scramble for coats and scarves and leather gauntlets. Then the lamps of the motor-cycles would not light. Captain Lowcroft's little car refused to start. The colonel stood on the door-step and smiled down on them benignly.

"I can't tell you how grateful we are, Mrs. Hammond. This is just the sort of thing to keep the boys out of mischief, what? Your husband has promised to come and look over our horses one day. I hope that we shall see you both up at the Mess one of these days."

The boys shouted. Somebody began to sing, "For He's a jolly good fellow." Muriel went back to the drawing-room. Her mother still stood on the steps. Mr. Hammond had gone to lock up the garage.

Connie stood in her tweed coat and skirt still by the fire-place, kicking a mouldering log with her mud-splashed boot. Her face was turned aside from Muriel, but her whole figure drooped with weariness.

"Connie, has something happened?"

"You'd better ask Mother," replied Connie's muffled voice.

Muriel looked round at the desolation of the disordered room, the cigarette ash spilled upon the carpet, the scattered sheets of music, the cushions overturned. Outside she could hear the hum of the motor, the call of last farewells, and her mother's answering "So glad that you were able to come."

Connie lifted her head to listen, and Muriel saw then that she had been crying.

"Oh, Connie," she began.

Mrs. Hammond came into the room and shut the door behind her.

Connie stood looking at her. "A top-hole evening, Mother, was it? So glad that they were able to come."

Then the storm broke.

"Connie, in Heaven's name, what induced you to come in?"

"Come in? I didn't come in. Do you think that I wanted to come and entertain your jolly friends? I was going upstairs when that young idiot found me. Then I had to come. But at least I played up. You must own that. I saved your party for you."

"Oh, yes. You played up." Mrs. Hammond came forward and sat down, crouching over the dying fire, a tired old woman.

"Well," demanded Connie, "now that I am here, what are you going to do with me?"

"We must tell your father," said Mrs. Hammond. "We shall have to tell your father." She spoke as though in this telling lay some unendurable agony. Her voice was bitter with defeat. "Yes," she repeated softly. "We must tell him."

"Oh, tell as many people as you like. Tell Muriel. Tell her now. She'll have to know some time. I'd lie willingly, only I can't. I can't think of a good enough story. You've always been so much better at that sort of thing than the rest of us."

Mrs. Hammond did not speak, but sat, crouching forward, sliding a pearl and ruby ring up and down her finger.

"Why don't you tell her?" jeered Connie. "You do so hate doing anything disagreeable, don't you? Very well, then I will. Muriel, you may be interested to hear that I have left Thraile because I have been dismissed. And I have been dismissed because I am going to have a baby, and the baby's father is Mr. Ben Todd, and I do not happen to be Mrs. Todd. And the worthy Ben's respectable parents seem to object to my staying in the house. Well? . . . DON'T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT!" Her voice rose to a scream.

Muriel felt her way to a chair and sat down.

"Well?" persisted Connie. "Well?"

"Oh, Connie, I'm awfully sorry. I----"

"Are you? Do you hear that, Mother? Muriel's awfully sorry. It's more than Mother is. Mother's awfully angry, because I let Bobby Collins drag me in to the party, which I couldn't help. And she's angry because I'm going to make this family not respectable, but she isn't sorry."

"That's not true, Connie," came the stifled voice from the sofa.

"She's always brought us up to have such high ideals, you see," Connie continued, in her high, hard tone, ignoring her mother's protest. "She liked us to have a good influence over the young men, so that Lady Grainger would be awfully grateful to her, didn't you, Mother? And you wouldn't let us work or go away, or have any other interests, because you were afraid of our spoiling a chance of a good marriage. And if we didn't get partners at dances we were beastly failures. And if our friends attracted more attention than we did they were sent away. And it was all because of our healthy homely influence, wasn't it, Mother? And now that one of us has taken the only means she saw to fulfil your wishes and get married, and it hasn't come oft, you're very angry, aren't you, but you aren't sorry, and if I'd been successful, you wouldn't have been angry, would you, Mother?"

As though Connie would strike her, Mrs. Hammond held up her hand against her face. Her small figure rocked backwards and forwards on the sofa in comfortless distress.

"If I'd been like Muriel," cried Connie, "I'd have sat at home perhaps and waited for things to happen. But I wasn't like that. I wasn't made to spend my life sewing for the G.F.S. If you wanted your daughters to be perfect ladies, why did you marry Father? You knew what he was like!"

"Connie! Be quiet. You shan't speak like that. Oh, what shall I do? The shame, the shame! Connie. Don't take it like this. I didn't know . . . I couldn't . . ."

As though it had been broken, the delicate mask of prettiness fell from her. Uncaring for the crushed silk of her new grey dinner frock, she flung herself forward among the cushions of the sofa, utterly defeated.

Muriel sat as though frozen, helplessly watching.

The front door shut with a clang. There was the sound of a key being turned. A bolt was shot. Mr. Hammond's voice hummed cheerfully:

"And now my love without a thought of me Takes that dark damsel on his knee."

"There he is," choked Connie. Hysteria was sweeping down upon her. She began to laugh, very softly.

"I can't, I can't," said Mrs. Hammond.

The door opened.

"Hullo, hullo, hullo, not to bed yet? Why, hullo, what's wrong?"

The room was perfectly quiet. Through the open window from the moonlit garden came the dreary call of an owl. Far off in the valley a train whistled, leaving Marshington station.

The four in the room stayed quite still.

"Now then, Connie," asked Mr. Hammond, grown suddenly serious, "what's the meaning of all this?"