ich your husband is a director."

"I am sure that would not have made the slightest difference," she
replied. "As a matter of fact, he had no idea that you were coming this
evening--I had no opportunity of telling him. A servant rang up from the
club, half an hour ago, to say that he would not be home. Come, here is
dinner. Will you sit there?" she invited, indicating the chair which a
trim parlour maid was holding. "I hope you can eat quite simple things.
One scarcely knows what to order, this hot weather."

Wingate took his place, and the conversation merged into those indefinite
channels necessitated by the presence of servants. The dinner, simple
though it was, was perfect,--iced consomme, a lobster mayonnaise, cold
cutlets and asparagus. Presently the little movable sideboard, with its
dainty collection of cold dishes and salads, was wheeled outside by the
solitary maid who waited upon them, and nothing was left upon the table
but a delicately-shaped Venetian decanter of _Chateau Yquem_, liqueurs in
tiny bottles, the coffee served in a jug of beaten copper, and an ivory
box of cigarettes. With the closing of the door, a different atmosphere
seemed immediately created. They smiled into one another's eyes in mutual
appreciation.

"I was dying to send Laura away," she confessed. "Why do servants get on
one's nerves so when one wants to talk? I don't think I ever noticed it
before so much."

"Nor I," he admitted. "Now we are alone there is a sort of luxury in
thinking that one may open any one of those subjects I want so much to
discuss with you, and perhaps a greater luxury still is the lingering,
the feeling that unless one chooses one need say nothing and yet be
understood."

"Sympathetic person!" she sighed. "Tell me, by the by, did you notice an
air of desertion in the lower part of the house?"

"There seemed to be echoes," he admitted. "I noticed it more this
afternoon."

"The whole of the rooms downstairs were fitted up as a small hospital
during the last year of the war," she explained. "It was after I had a
slight breakdown and was sent back from Etaples. Some of our patients
stayed on for months afterwards, and we have never had the place put to
rights yet. One or two rooms are quite sufficient for us in these days."

"It seems to be a wing by itself that remains empty," Wingate ruminated.

"The house might have been built for the purpose we put it to," she said.
"The rooms we turned into a hospital