the dash and courage shown by Lieutenant Chichele,
who, in one of those feats which it has lately been the fashion to
criticize, carried the mortally wounded body of his Colonel out of range
at conspicuous risk of depriving the Queen of another officer. I helped
Judy with her silent packing; she had forgiven me long before that; and
she settled almost at once into the flat in Chelsea which has since been
credited with so delightful an atmosphere, went back straight into her
own world. I have always kept her first letters about it, always shall.
For months after, while the expedition still raged after snipers and
rifle-thieves, I discussed with Lady Chichele the probable outcome of it
all. I have sometimes felt ashamed of leaping as straight as I did with
Anna to what we thought the inevitable. I based no calculation on all
Mrs. Harbottle had gone back to, just as I had based no calculation
on her ten years' companionship in arms when I kept her from the three
o'clock train. This last was a retrospection in which Anna naturally
could not join me; she never knew, poor dear, how fortunate as to its
moment was the campaign she deplored, and nothing to this day can have
disturbed her conviction that the bond she was at such magnificent pains
to strengthen, held against the strain, as long, happily, as the supreme
need existed. 'How right you were!' she often said. 'She did, after
all, love me best, dear, wonderful Judy!' Her distress about poor
Robert Harbottle was genuine enough, but one could not be surprised at
a certain ambiguity; one tear for Robert, so to speak, and two for her
boy. It could hardly be, for him, a marriage after his mother's heart.
And she laid down with some emphasis that Somers was brilliantly
entitled to all he was likely to get--which was natural, too...

I had been from the beginning so much 'in it' that Anna showed me, a
year later, though I don't believe she liked doing it, the letter in
part of which Mrs. Harbottle shall finally excuse herself.

'Somers will give you this,' I read, 'and with it take back your son.
You will not find, I know, anything grotesque in the charming enthusiasm
with which he has offered his life to me; you understand too well, you
are too kind. And if you wonder that I can so render up a dear thing
which I might keep and would once have taken, think how sweet in the
desert is the pool, and how barren was the prospect from Balclutha.'

It was like her to abandon in pride