ride to-morrow morning, Lady Cranston?" he
asked, with a wistfulness which seemed somehow stifled in his rather
unpleasant voice. She shook her head.

"Perhaps one morning later," she replied, a little vaguely. "I haven't
any heart for anything just now."

He took a sombre but agitated leave of his hostess, and went out into
the twilight, cursing his lack of ease, remembering the things which
he had meant to say, and hating himself for having forgotten them.
Philippa, to whom his departure had been, as it always was, a relief,
was already leaning forward in her chair with her arm around Helen's
neck.

"I thought that extraordinary man would never go," she exclaimed, "and
I was longing to send for you, Helen. London has been such a dreary
chapter of disappointments."

"What a sickening time you must have had, dear!"

"It was horrid," Philippa assented sadly, "but you know Henry is no use
at all, and I should have felt miserable unless I had gone. I have been
to every friend at the War Office, and every friend who has friends
there. I have made every sort of enquiry, and I know just as much now
as I did when I left here--that Richard was a prisoner at Wittenberg
the last time they heard, and that they have received no notification
whatever concerning him for the last two months."

Helen glanced at the calendar.

"It is just two months to-day," she said mournfully, "since we heard."

"And then," Philippa sighed, "he hadn't received a single one of our
parcels."

Helen rose suddenly to her feet. She was a tall, fair girl of the best
Saxon type, slim but not in the least angular, with every promise,
indeed, of a fuller and more gracious development in the years to come.
She was barely twenty-two years old, and, as is common with girls of her
complexion, seemed younger. Her bright, intelligent face was, above
all, good-humoured. Just at that moment, however, there was a flush of
passionate anger in her cheeks.

"It makes me feel almost beside myself," she exclaimed, "this hideous
incapacity for doing anything! Here we are living in luxury, without a
single privation, whilst Dick, the dearest thing on earth to both of us,
is being starved and goaded to death in a foul German prison!"

"We mustn't believe that it's quite so bad as that, dear," Philippa
remonstrated. "What is it, Mills?"

The elderly man-servant who had entered with a tray in his band, bowed
as he arranged it upon a side table.

"I have taken t