e
altogether taken into consideration."

She looked at him fixedly. "Do you mean that you'd--send in your
papers?"

"Only in the sense that if my wife wasn't happy in the Service we could
get out of it."

"Then you're really so much in love that you'd be willing to throw up
everything on account of it?" There was some incredulity in her tone, to
which, however, he offered no objection.

"Willing or unwilling isn't to the point. Surely you see that as far as
public opinion goes I'm dished either way. The more I think of it the
plainer it becomes. If I marry Olivia I let myself in for connection
with a low-down scandal; if I don't, then they'll say I left her in the
lurch. As for the effect on any possible promotion there might be in
store for me, it would be six of one and half a dozen of the other. If I
married her, and there was something good to be had, and old
Bannockburn, let us say, was at the Horse Guards, then Lady Ban wouldn't
have Olivia; and if I didn't marry her, and there was the same situation
with old Englemere in command, then he wouldn't have me. There it is in
a nutshell--simply nothing to choose."

They proceeded to stroll aimlessly up and down the lawn.

"I can quite see how it looks from your point of view--" she began.

"No, you can't," he interrupted, sharply, "because you leave out the
fact that I am--I don't mind saying it--that is, to you--you've been
such a good pal to me!--I shall never forget it!--but I _am_--head over
heels--desperately--in love."

Having already heard this confession in what now seemed the far-off days
in Southsea, she could hear it again with no more than a sense of
oppression about the heart.

"Yes," she smiled, bravely. "I know you are. And between two ills you
choose the one that has some compensation attached to it."

"Between two ills," he corrected, "I'm choosing the only course open to
a man of honor. Isn't that it?"

There was a wistful inflection on the query. It put forth at one and the
same time a request for corroboration and a challenge to a contrary
opinion. If there could be no contrary opinion, he would have been glad
of some sign of approval or applause. He wanted to be modest; and yet it
was a stimulus to doing precisely the right thing to get a little praise
for it, especially from a woman like Drusilla.

In this for once she disappointed him. "Of course you are," she
assented, even too promptly.

"And yet you're advising me," he said, r