keep it from him, and impossible to
tell him! Oh George! I never knew what family pride was till now. It's
incredible. That wretched boy!"

"'De mortuis.' Come, Gracie! In the midst of death we are in life!
Nollie was a plumb little idiot. But it's the war--the war! Your father
must get used to it; it's a rare chance for his Christianity."

"Dad will be as sweet as anything--that's what makes it so horrible!"

George Laird redoubled his squeeze. "Quite right! The old-fashioned
father could let himself go. But need he know? We can get her away from
London, and later on, we must manage somehow. If he does hear, we must
make him feel that Nollie was 'doing her bit.'"

Gratian withdrew her hand. "Don't!" she said in a muffled voice.

George Laird turned and looked at her. He was greatly upset himself,
realising perhaps more truly than his young wife the violence of this
disaster; he was quite capable, too, of feeling how deeply she was
stirred and hurt; but, a born pragmatist, confronting life always in the
experimental spirit, he was impatient of the: "How awful!" attitude.
And this streak of her father's ascetic traditionalism in Gratian always
roused in him a wish to break it up. If she had not been his wife he
would have admitted at once that he might just as well try and alter the
bone-formation of her head, as break down such a fundamental trait of
character, but, being his wife, he naturally considered alteration as
possible as putting a new staircase in a house, or throwing two rooms
into one. And, taking her in his arms, he said: "I know; but it'll all
come right, if we put a good face on it. Shall I talk to Nollie?"

Gratian assented, from the desire to be able to say to her father:
"George is seeing her!" and so stay the need for a discussion. But the
whole thing seemed to her more and more a calamity which nothing could
lessen or smooth away.

George Laird had plenty of cool courage, invaluable in men who have to
inflict as well as to alleviate pain, but he did not like his mission
"a little bit" as he would have said; and he proposed a walk because he
dreaded a scene. Noel accepted for the same reason. She liked George,
and with the disinterested detachment of a sister-in-law, and the
shrewdness of extreme youth, knew him perhaps better than did his wife.
She was sure, at all events, of being neither condemned nor sympathised
with.

They might have gone, of course, in any direction, but chose to make fo