ure of their meetings--though they themselves had not
marked it--had been that they had never talked of the future. It had
been as though there were no future. To live perfectly through the few
hours--even for the one hour or half hour they could snatch--was all
that they could plan and hope for. Could they meet to-morrow in this
place or that? When they met were they quite safe and blissfully alone?
The spectre had always been waiting and they had always been trying to
forget it. Each meeting had seemed so brief and crowded and breathlessly
sweet.

Only a boy and a girl could have so lost sight of all but their hour and
perhaps also only this boy and girl, because their hour had struck at a
time when all futures seemed to hold only chances that at any moment
might come to an end.

"Do you hear my heart beat? There is no time--no time!" these two things
had been the beginning, the middle and the end.

Sometimes Robin went and sat in the Gardens and one day in coming out
she met her mother whom she had not seen for months. Feather had been
exultingly gay and fashionably patriotic and she was walking round the
corner to a meeting to be held at her club. The khaki colouring of her
coat and brief skirt and cap added to their military air with pipings
and cords and a small upright feather of scarlet. She wore a badge and a
jewelled pin or so. She was about to pass Robin unrecognised but took a
second glance at her and stopped.

"I didn't know you," she exclaimed. "What is the matter?"

"Nothing--thank you," Robin answered pausing.

"Something _is_! You are losing your looks. Is your mistress working you
to death?"

"The Duchess is very kind indeed. She is most careful that I don't do
too much. I like my work more every day."

Feather took her in with a sharp scrutinising. She seemed to look her
over from her hat to her shoes before she broke into her queer little
critical laugh.

"Well, I can't congratulate her on the result. You are thin. You've lost
your colour and your mouth is beginning to drag at the corners." And she
nodded and marched away, the high heels of her beautiful small brown
boots striking the pavement with a military click.

As she had dressed in the morning Robin had wondered if she was mistaken
in thinking that the awful nights had made her look different.

If there had been letters to read--even a few lines such as are all a
soldier may write--to read over and over again, to hide in her breas