A voice behind him said:

"Oh! There you are, Edward! Would you like to see the other ward, or
shall I show you our kitchen?"

Pierson took her hand impulsively. "You're doing a noble work, Leila. I
wanted to ask you: Could you arrange for Noel to come and get trained
here? She wants to begin at once. The fact is, a boy she is attracted
to has just gone out to the Front."

"Ah!" murmured Leila, and her eyes looked very soft. "Poor child! We
shall be wanting an extra hand next week. I'll see if she could come
now. I'll speak to our Matron, and let you know to-night." She squeezed
his hand hard.

"Dear Edward, I'm so glad to see you again. You're the first of our
family I've seen for sixteen years. I wonder if you'd bring Noel to have
supper at my flat to-night--Just nothing to eat, you know! It's a tiny
place. There's a Captain Fort coming; a nice man."

Pierson accepted, and as he walked away he thought: 'Dear Leila! I
believe it was Providence. She wants sympathy. She wants to feel the
past is the past. How good women are!'

And the sun, blazing suddenly out of a cloud, shone on his black figure
and the little gold cross, in the middle of Portland Place.

X

Men, even if they are not artistic, who have been in strange places and
known many nooks of the world, get the scenic habit, become open to
pictorial sensation. It was as a picture or series of pictures that
Jimmy Fort ever afterwards remembered his first supper at Leila's. He
happened to have been all day in the open, motoring about to horse farms
under a hot sun; and Leila's hock cup possessed a bland and subtle
strength. The scenic sense derived therefrom had a certain poignancy,
the more so because the tall child whom he met there did not drink it,
and her father seemed but to wet his lips, so that Leila and he had all
the rest. Rather a wonderful little scene it made in his mind, very
warm, glowing, yet with a strange dark sharpness to it, which came
perhaps from the black walls.

The flat had belonged to an artist who was at the war. It was but a
pocket dwelling on the third floor. The two windows of the little square
sitting-room looked out on some trees and a church. But Leila, who hated
dining by daylight, had soon drawn curtains of a deep blue over them.
The picture which Fort remembered was this: A little four-square table of
dark wood, with a Chinese mat of vivid blue in the centre, whereon stood
a silver l