ould be meek and
pliable; he would put no sort of obstacles in her way. She would
have no excuse for giving him notice again. He would put up with all
her silly Jingoism--if only she would stay!

But at this point the Squire suddenly pulled up short in his pacing
and excitedly asked himself the question, which half the people
about him were already beginning to ask.

'Why shouldn't I marry her?'

He stood transfixed--the colour rising in his thin cheeks.

Hitherto the notion, if it had ever knocked at the outer door of the
brain, had been chased away with mockery. And he had no sooner
admitted it now than he drove it out again. He was simply afraid of
it--in terror lest any suspicion of it should reach Elizabeth. Her
loyalty, her single-mindedness, her freedom from the smallest taint
of intrigue--he would have answered for them with all he possessed.
If, for a moment, she chose to think that he had misinterpreted her
kindness, her services in any vile and vulgar way, why, he might
lose her on the instant! Let him walk warily--do nothing at least to
destroy the friend in her, before he grasped at anything more.

Besides, how could she put up with him? 'I am the dried husk of a
man!' thought the Squire, with vehemence. 'I couldn't learn her ways
now, nor she mine. No; let us be as we are--only more so!'

But he was shaken through and through; first by that vanishing of
his boy into the furnace of the war, which had brought him at last
within the grip of the common grief, the common fear, and now by
this strange thought which had invaded him.

* * * * *

After dinner, Elizabeth, who was rather pale, but as cheerful and
self-possessed as usual, put Mrs. Gaddesden's knitting to rights at
least three times, and held the wool for that lady to wind till her
arm ached. Then Mrs. Gaddesden retired to bed; the Squire, who with
only occasional mutterings and mumblings had been deep in
Elizabeth's copy of the _Times_, which she had at last ventured to
produce in public, went off to the library, and Elizabeth and Pamela
were left in the hall alone.

Elizabeth lingered over the fire; while Pamela wondered impatiently
why she did not go to her office work as she generally did about
nine o'clock. Pamela's mood was more thorny than ever. Had she not
seen a letter in Elizabeth's handwriting lying that very afternoon
on the hall-table for post--addressed to Captain Chicksands, D.S.O.,
War Office,