ck--coming back into her life, and
into all their lives. Though everything seemed just the same as when he
had left Old Place, everything was different, both in a spiritual and
material sense. The War had made a deep wound, nay, far more than one
wound, in the spiritual body politic of Old Place. And it was of a very
material thing that Betty Tosswill thought first, and most painfully,
this morning. This was the fact that from having been in easy
circumstances they were now very poor.

When Godfrey Radmore had gone out of their lives there had been a great,
perhaps even then a false, air of prosperity over them all. John Tosswill
was a man who had always made bad investments; but in that far-off time,
"before the War," living was so cheap, wages were so low, the children
were all still so young, that he and Janet had managed very well.

Only Betty knew the scrimping and the saving Jack, at Oxford, and Tom, at
Winchester, now entailed on the part of those who lived at Old Place.
Why, she herself counted every penny with anxious care, and the stupid,
kindly folk who asked, just a trifle censoriously, why she wasn't "doing
something," now that "every career is open to a girl, especially to one
who did so well in the War," would perhaps have felt a little ashamed had
they discovered that she was housemaid, parlourmaid, often cook, to a
large and not always easily pleased family. They never had a visitor to
stay now--they simply couldn't afford it--and she hated the thought of
Godfrey, himself now so unnaturally prosperous, coming back to such an
altered state of things.

Besides, that was not all. Betty covered her face with her hands, and
slow, bitter, reluctant tears began to ooze through her fingers. She had
tried not to think of Godfrey and of his coming, these last two or three
days. She had put the knowledge of what was going to happen from her,
with a kind of hard, defiant determination. But now she was sorry--sorry,
that she had not taken her step-mother's advice, and gone away for a long
week-end. Betty Tosswill felt like a man who, having suffered intolerably
from a wound which has at last healed, learns with sick apprehension that
his wound is to be torn open.

Although not even Janet, her one real close friend and confidant, was
aware of it, Godfrey had not been the only man in Betty's life. There had
been two men, out in France, who had loved her, and lost no time in
telling her so. One had been killed; the