my, his fame had spread, and it was freely prophesied that his
rise would be rapid. So that his growing conviction that his active
military career was over had been the recent cause in him of much
bitterness of soul. It was a bitter realisation, and a recent one. He
had been wounded at Neuve Chapelle in March, and up to July he had been
confident of complete and rapid recovery.

Well, there was of course some compensation. A post in the War
Office--in the Intelligence Department--would, he understood, be offered
him; and by October he meant to be at work. Meanwhile an old school and
college friendship between himself and 'Bill Farrell,' together with the
special facilities at Carton for the treatment of neuralgia after
wounds, had made him an inmate for several months of the special wing
devoted to such cases in the splendid hospital; though lately by way of
a change of surroundings, he had been lodging with the old Rector of the
village of Carton, whose house was kept--and well kept--by a
sweet-looking and practical granddaughter, herself an orphan.

Marsworth had connections in high quarters, and possessed some
considerable means. He had been a frequenter of the Farrells since the
days when the old aunt was still in command, and Cicely was a young
thing going to her first dances. He and she had sparred and quarrelled
as boy and girl. Now that, after a long interval, they had again been
thrown into close contact, they sparred and quarrelled still. He was a
man of high and rather stern ideals, which had perhaps been
intensified--made a little grimmer and fiercer than before--by the
strain of the war; and the selfish frivolity of certain persons and
classes in face of the national ordeal was not the least atoned for in
his eyes by the heroism of others. The endless dress advertisements in
the daily papers affected him as they might have affected the prophet
Ezekiel, had the daughters of Judah added the purchase of fur coats,
priced from twenty guineas to two hundred to their other enormities. He
had always in his mind the agonies of the war, the sights of the
trenches, the holocaust of young life, the drain on the national
resources, the burden on the national future. So that the Farrell
motor-cars and men servants, the costly simplicity of the 'cottage,'
Cicely's extravagance in dress, her absurd and expensive uniform, her
make-up and her jewels, were so many daily provocations to a man thus
sombrely possessed.

And