y own,' she thought
bitterly, 'but he never gives me the chance! I suppose he despises
girls.'

As the hall clock struck half-past five, however, Elizabeth rose
from her seat, gathering up the papers she had brought in from the
office, and disappeared.

Arthur Chicksands looked at his watch. Beryl exclaimed:

'Oh, no, Arthur, not yet! Let's wait for Desmond!'

Pamela said perfunctorily--'No, please don't go! He'll be here
directly.'

But as they gathered round the fire, expecting the young gunner, she
hardly opened her lips again. Arthur Chicksands was quite conscious
that he had wounded her. She appeared to him, as she sat there in
the firelight, in all the first fairness and freshness of her youth,
as an embodied temptation. Again he said to himself that other men
might love and marry on the threshold of battle; he could not bring
himself to think it justifiable--whether for the woman or the man.
In a few weeks' time he would be back in France and in the very
thick, perhaps, of the final struggle--of its preparatory stages, at
any rate. Could one make love to a beautiful creature like that at
such a moment, and then leave her, with a whole mind?--the mind and
the nerve that were the country's due?

All the same he had never been so aware of her before. And
simultaneously his mind was invaded by the mute, haunting certainty
that her life was reaching out towards his, and that he was
repelling and hurting her.

Suddenly--into the midst of them, while Mrs. Gaddesden was talking
endlessly in her small plaintive voice about rations and
queues--there dropped the sound of a car passing the windows, and a
boy's clear voice.

'Desmond!' cried Pamela, with almost a sob of relief, and like one
escaping from a nightmare she sprang up and ran to greet her
brother.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Elizabeth had found the Squire waiting for her, and, as
she saw at once, in a state of tension.

'What was that you were saying to me about timber last week?' he
demanded imperiously as she entered, without giving her time to
speak. 'I hear this intolerable Government are behaving like
madmen, cutting down everything they can lay hands on. They shan't
have my trees--I would burn them first!'

Elizabeth paused in some dismay.

'You remember--' she began.

'Remember what?' It was long since she had heard so snappish a tone.

'That you authorized me--'

'Oh, I daresay, I gave myself away--I'm alway