ammonia came from."

"If you use it every day it makes your skin so nice and soft," remarked
Mrs. Boyce.

He laughed, and made the obvious jest on the use of bath-salts in the
trenches.

"I wonder, mother, whether you have any idea of what trenches and
dug-outs look like."

He told her, very picturesquely, and went on to a general sketch of
life at the front. He entertained me with interesting talk for the rest
of my visit. I have already said that he was a man of great personal
charm.

He accompanied me to the car and saw me comfortably tucked in.

"You won't give me away, will you?" he said, shaking hands.

"How?" I asked.

"By telling any one I'm here."

I promised and drove off. Marigold, full of the tea that is given to a
guest, strove cheerfully to engage me in conversation. I hate to snub
Marigold, excellent and devoted fellow, so I let him talk; but my mind
was occupied with worrying problems.

CHAPTER VI

Leonard Boyce had received me on sufferance. I had come upon him while
he was imprudently exposing himself to view. There had been no way out
of it. But he made it clear that he desired no other Wellingsfordian to
invade his privacy. Secretly he had come to see his mother and secretly
he intended to go. I remembered that before he went to the front he had
not come home, but his mother had met him in London. He had asked me
for no local news. He had inquired after the welfare of none of his old
friends. Never an allusion to poor Oswald Fenimore's gallant death--he
used to run in and out of Wellings Park as if it were his own house.
What had he against the place which for so many years had been his home?

With regard to Betty Fairfax, he had loved and ridden away, it is true,
leaving her disconsolate. But though everyone knew of the engagement,
no one had suspected the defection. Betty was a young woman who could
keep her own counsel and baffle any curiosity-monger or purveyor of
gossip in the country. So when she married Captain Connor, a little
gasp went round the neighbourhood, which for the first time remembered
Leonard Boyce. There were some who blamed her for callous treatment of
Boyce, away and forgotten at the front. The majority, however, took the
matter calmly, as we have had to take far more amazing social
convulsions. The fact remained that Betty was married, and there was no
reason whatever, on the score of the old engagement, for Boyce to
manifest such exaggerated shyness wi