his since
she came of her own free will and told me of the scene in the chill
boarding house _salon_ at Soissons. I used to think her as secret as the
grave--and deeper. She used to make me "creep" as if a mouse ran over
_mine_, by the way her eyes watched me: still as a cat's looking into
the fire. If we had to shake hands, she used to present me with a limp
little bunch of cold fingers, which made me long to ask what the deuce
she wanted me to do with them? Now, because I'm Brian's sister, and
because I'm human enough to love her love of him, the flower-part of her
nature sheds perfume and distils honey for me: the cat-part purrs; the
girl-part warms. The creature actually deigns to like me! It could not
now conceal its anxiety for Brian and Brian's kith and kin, if it knew
what Julian knows.

I waited until our last day at Amiens, and Father Beckett, Brian, and
Sirius are back from the British front. Perhaps I forgot to tell you
that Sirius went. He wasn't on the programme, but he knew somehow that
his master was planning a separation, and refused to fall in with the
scheme. He was discovered in the motor-car when it was ready to start,
looking his best, his dear face parted in the middle with an
irresistible, ingratiating smile. When Brian tried to put him out he
flattened himself, and clung like a limpet. By Father Beckett's
intercession, he was eventually taken, trusting to luck for toleration
by the British Army. Of course he continued to smile upon all possible
arbiters of his fate; and the drama of his history, combined with the
pathos of his blind master who fought on these battlefields of Flanders,
which now he cannot see, made Brian's Sirius and Sirius's Brian _personae
gratae_ everywhere.

"I should have been nobody and nothing without them!" modestly insisted
the millionaire philanthropist for whom all the privileges of the trip
had been granted.

To me, with the one thought, the one word "Jim--Jim--_Jim_!" repeating
in my head it was strange, even irrelevant to hear Jim's unsuspecting
father and my blind brother discoursing of their adventures.

We all assembled in Mother Beckett's sitting room to listen to the
recital, she on a sofa, a rug over her feet, and on her transparent face
an utterly absorbed, tense expression rather like a French spaniel
trying to learn an English trick.

Father Beckett appointed Brian as spokesman, and then in his excitement
broke in every instant with: "Don't forget thi