eat full moon staring in at us from a cloudless sky. Letters from
the War Office, from brother-officers, from the Colonel, from the
Brigadier General himself, had broken her down. She gave me the letters
to read. Everyone loved him, admired him, trusted him. "As brave as a
lion," wrote one. "Perhaps the most brilliant company officer in my
brigade," wrote the General. And his death--the tragic common story. A
trench; a high-explosive shell; the fate of young Etherington; and no
possible little wooden cross to mark his grave.

And Betty, on the floor by my side, gave way.

The proud will bent. She surrendered herself to a paroxysm of sorrow.

She was not in a fit state to return to the hospital, where, I learned,
she shared a bedroom with Phyllis Gedge. I shrank from sending her home
to the tactless comforting of her aunts. They were excellent,
God-fearing ladies, but they had never understood Betty. All her life
they had worried her with genteel admonitions. They had regarded her
marriage with disfavour, as an act of foolhardiness--I even think they
looked on her attitude as unmaidenly; and now in her frozen widowhood
they fretted her past endurance. On the night when the news came they
sent for the vicar of their parish--not my good friend who christened
Hosea--a very worthy, very serious, very evangelistically religious
fellow, to administer spiritual consolation. If Betty had sat devoutly
under him on Sundays, there might have been some reason in the summons.
But Betty, holding her own religious views, had only once been inside
the church--on the occasion of her wedding--and had but the most formal
acquaintance with the good man.... No, I could not send Betty home,
unexpectedly, to have her wounds mauled about by unskilful fingers.
Nothing remained but to telephone to the hospital and put her in Mrs.
Marigold's charge for the night. So broken was my dear Betty, that she
allowed herself to be carried off without a word.... Once before, years
ago, she had behaved with the same piteous docility; and that was when,
a short-frocked hoiden, she had fallen from an apple tree and badly
hurt herself, and Marigold had carried her into the house and Mrs.
Marigold had put her to bed....

In the morning I found her calm and sedate at the breakfast table.

"You've been and gone and done for both of us, Majy dear," she
remarked, pouring out tea.

"What do you mean?"

"Our reputations. What a scandal in Wellingsford!"

She