unison as Katharine went
forward to a lofty doorway, framing brightness, where waited to receive
her the master of the hive....

"The light beings behind him may have exaggerated his proportions, but he
seemed to Trixie the biggest man she had ever seen, and nearly the
ugliest. Close-curling coarse black hair capped his high-domed skull, and
his stern, powerful, swarthy face, big-nosed and long-chinned, with a
humorous quirk at the corners of the heavy-lipped mouth, that redeemed its
sensuousness, was lighted by eyes of the intensest black, burning under
heavy beetle-brows. His khaki uniform, though of fine material and
admirable cut, was that of a common ranker, and a narrow strip of colours
over the heart, and the fact of his left arm being bandaged and slung,
intimated to Lady Wastwood that Katharine's Jewish friend had already
served with some degree of distinction, and had been wounded in the War.
And drawing back with her characteristic inconquerable shyness, as he
advanced to Miss Forbis, plainly unconscious of any presence save hers,
Trixie's observant green eyes saw him bend his towering head, and sweep
his right arm out and down with slow Oriental stateliness, bringing back
the supple hand to touch breast, lips and brow. Whether or not he had
raised the hem of Katharine's skirt to his lips and kissed it, Lady
Wastwood could not definitely determine. She was left with the impression
that he had done this thing."

=iv=

I should have liked to have given, rather than purely descriptive
passages, a slice of the complicated and tense action with which the story
brims over, but there is the difficulty that such a scene might not be
intelligible to one not having read the story from the beginning. I must
resist the tendency to quote any more, having indulged it already to
excess, and I am ready to propound my theory of the existence of Richard
Dehan.

If you receive a letter from The Towers, Beeding, it will bear a double
signature, like this:

RICHARD DEHAN
CLOTILDE GRAVES

Clotilde Graves has become a secondary personality.

There was once a time when there was no Richard Dehan. There now are times
when there is no Clotilde Graves.

To a woman in middle age an opportunity presented itself. It was the
chance to write a novel around the subject which, as a girl, she had come
to know a great deal about--the subject of war. To write about it and gain
at