hich he had just been engaged. His promotion had lately been rapid,
and his work of extraordinary interest. He had been travelling a
great deal, backwards and forwards between London and Versailles,
charged with several special enquiries in which he had shown both
steadiness and _flair_. Things were known to him that he could not
share even with a friend so old and 'safe' as Aubrey Mannering. The
grip of the coming crisis was upon him, and he seemed 'to carry the
world in his breast'

'Next year--next February--where shall we all be?' The question was
automatically suggested to him by the sight of the green buds of the
lilac trees In front of Whitehall Terrace.

'Oh, my dear Susan!--do look at those trees!'

Chicksands, startled from his own meditations, looked up to see two
old ladies gazing with an eager interest at a couple of plane trees,
which had just shed a profusion of bark and stood white and almost
naked in the grey London air. They were dear old ladies from some
distant country-side, with bonnets and fronts, and reticules, as
though they had just walked out of _Cranford_, and after gazing with
close attention at the plane trees near them they turned and looked
at all the other plane trees in Whitehall, which presented an
equally plucked and peeled appearance.

Then the one addressed as Susan laughed out--a happy, chuckling
laugh.

'Oh, I see! My dear Ellen, how clever people are now! They're
_camouflaged_--that's what it is--can't you see?--all the way down,
because of the raids!'

The admiring fervour of the voice was too much for Chicksands. He
hurried past them, head down, and ran up the steps of the Ministry
of Munitions. From that point of vantage he turned, shaken with
amusement, to see the pair advancing slowly towards Westminster,
their old-fashioned skirts floating round them, still pointing
eagerly at the barkless trees. Had they come from some piny region
where the plane is not? Anyway the tension of the day was less.

He repeated the tale to Aubrey Mannering a few minutes later, when
they had turned together into Birdcage Walk. But Aubrey scarcely
gave it the ghost of a smile. As to his old friend's enquiries about
his own work and plans, he answered them quite readily, but shortly,
without any expansion; with the manner, indeed, of one for whom
talk about himself had no sort of attraction. And as they passed
along the front of the barracks, where a few men were drilling,
Chicksands, str