twick which is easily reached from
here. Do come if you can and bring your friend with you, if
he is in London and has nothing better to do. We have all
been reading about him in the papers, and Chichester is very
proud of belonging to the same mess, and says what a
wonderful thing it must be to be able to get into the papers
like that, without trying to._"

Hillyard could see the smile upon Lady Splay's face as she wrote that
sentence. Hillyard laughed as he read it but it was less in amusement as
from pleasure at the particular information which this sentence
contained. Harry Luttrell had clearly won a special distinction in the
hard fighting at Thiepval. There was not a word in Harry's letter to
suggest it. There would not be. All his pride and joy would be engrossed
by the great fact that his battalion had increased its good name.

There was a closing sentence in Millie Splay's letter which brought
another smile to his lips.

"_Linda Spavinsky is, alas, going as strong as ever. She was
married last meek, in violet, as you will remember, to the
Funeral March of a Marionette and already she is in the
throes of domestic unhappiness. Her husband, fleshy, of
course, red in the face, and accustomed to sleep after
dinner, simply_ WON'T _understand her._"

Here again Hillyard was able to see the smile on Millicent Splay's face,
but it was a smile rather rueful and it ended, no doubt, in a sigh of
annoyance. Hillyard himself was caught away to quite another scene. He
was once more in the small motor-car on the top of Duncton Hill, and
looked out over the Weald of Sussex to the Blackdown and Hindhead, and
the slopes of Leith Hill, imagined rather than seen, in the summer haze.
He saw Joan Whitworth's rapt face, and heard her eager cry.

"Look out over the Weald of Sussex, so that you can carry it away with
you in your breast. Isn't it worth everything--banishment,
suffering--everything? Not the people so much, but the earth itself and
the jolly homes upon it!"

A passage followed which disturbed him:

"_There are other things too. My magnolia is still in bud. I
dread a blight before the flower opens._"

It was a cry of distress--nothing less than that--uttered in some moment
of intense depression. Else it would never have been allowed to escape
at all.

Hillyard folded up the letter. He would be going home in any case. There
were those tubes. Th