ess monotony. It warmed
the thin blood in their veins like comet champagne, and quickened their
faded appetites like some salt breath from the far-distant sea.

The flavour of success upon the palate may, like Imperial Tokay, be sensed
but once in a lifetime, but you can never forget that once. Out of her
gold fountain-pen Lady Hannah had spurted a little ink upon the famished
Gueldersdorpians, and their dry bones moved and lived. She knew a fine
must be paid for this dizzying draught of popularity, even as she tied on
a bibbed apron, and superintended the serving and distribution of the
patients' one-o'clock dinner.

Horse-soup, with a few potato-sprouts, and one or two slivered carrots to
the gallon, formed the menu to-day. There was no more white bread, and a
villainous bannock of crushed oats had to be soaked in your porringer if
you had no strength to chew it. Sweetened bran-jelly followed, and upon
this the now apologetic but smiling porter, with the intelligence that her
ladyship was wanted at the wall-jigger in the Matron's room.

The ring-up came from Hotchkiss Outpost North, where Captain Bingo was
this day on duty, _via_ the Staff Headquarter office in Market Square, and
the voice that filtered to the ear of Lady Hannah was unmistakably that of
her spouse, and tinged with a gruffness as unusual as ominous.

"Hullo. Is that you?"

"Qu'il ne vous en deplaise!"

Bingo growled in a perfectly audible aside:

"And devil a doubt. What other woman would jabber French through a
telephone?"

"A Frenchwoman would, possibly."

"Don't catch what you're saying. Look here, what made you shove such a
whacking bouncer into the _Siege Gazette_?"

"Please put that into English." She underwent a quaking at the heart.

"I say, that announcement about Toby and the Mildare filly is all my eye."

"It isn't all your eye. It's first-hand, fully-authorised fact."

"Rot!"

"Paix et peu! Say rot, if it pleases you!"

"You'll have to withdraw and apologise."

"I can't make out what you're saying."

"It will end in your eating humble-pie. Can you hear that?"

"I can hear that you are in a bearish temper."

"I've reason to be. If a man had written what you have I should punch his
head."

"Say that again!"

"I say, if a stranger of the kickable sex had told such a pack of
infernal----"

_Click!_

Lady Hannah hung up the receiver, blew a contemptuous kiss into the gape
of the celluloid mouthpiece, and turned to g