The girls at his billet

CHAPTER XVI

SOMETHING QUITE UNEXPECTED

Really, our family is the rummest ever! Always breaking out in some new place, it seems to me.

I should have thought that Nancy's runaway marriage with Captain Masters would have been quite enough excitement for, say, the next two years, and that we need not have expected anything further to flutter this dovecot of a Moated Grange. I should have thought that we could now settle down to the anticipation of at least a peaceful and uneventful winter, summer and spring.

But no.

It is too much to expect. Before Nancy is so much as come back from her five days' honeymoon, before I have left off feeling absolutely thrilled about it once every five minutes of the day, before I have left off talking about "Miss" Nancy to the servants, a fresh piece of unexpectedness is burst upon me.

And who do you think it is this time?

Evelyn, if you please! Evelyn, the eldest of the family, the best-behaved, the one who is, as Aunt Victoria says, the most balanced, and the one who has always talked the least nonsense of all three of us girls. Let it be a lesson to all girls who think they're "sensible." I know Evelyn always thought she was that. Now listen to what's happened to her.

It was two days after the long talk we had had over Nancy's newly-married letter.

I think I told you that Evelyn seemed to me to be rather snappy over that or at any rate unsympathetic, making remarks about how girls seem to have softening of the brain as soon as they were in love, and how idiotic it was that a girl should think that it was her duty to become a door-mat under the young man's pontooning boots!

All this, you know, was not quite like Evelyn, the Evelyn we had always known: but then, of course, as I think we said, we had noticed she had been getting very much more prim and easily shocked ever since that first quite giddy party at the Moated Grange here, when Aunt Victoria actually had out champagne for dinner and Mr. Curtis kissed Nancy afterwards by the staircase window. Yes, I think that was when we began to realise that Evelyn was what is considered a "much nicer" girl than Nancy and me.

However, to get on with it. Ever since then Evelyn has been getting more and more difficult; she has never been jolly or laughed with us in the way she used to do: she has given up playing the piano in the Lair—that is to say, she has given up trying over the saucy revue tunes that we are all so fond of.

She can't bear any of those nowadays except what I call a droopy waltz like "Destiny" or one of those clinging nocturnes that really get you into the mood of making you wish you had never been born!

Or else it's one of the songs from one of those antediluvian old song-books with the red leather covers that we have inherited from goodness knows who, called

"Love not, love not, ye Hapless Sons of Clay."

But most of the time now she is wrapped up in her bandaging class or the linen fund for soldiers' babies.

Really, she began to behave like the girl in those old-fashioned books who is sick of life and worldly frivolities and who is thinking of taking the veil. She was coming in from the bandaging class this afternoon, when I put my foot into it apparently by making the most harmless remark you can imagine: at least, I thought it was harmless. You see, she was very late, at least half an hour later than the bandaging class usually bursts—I mean breaks up—and I said, "Hurry up, Evelyn, you had better look in at the kitchen on the way up and ask them to make you the little brown tea-pot full of fresh tea: we have nearly finished in the dining-room."

(I forgot to mention that we always have tea in the dining-room now, instead of the drawing-room, all on account of Mr. Lascelles, who says that he likes to spread himself and not to sit down in fear and trembling lest he should be spoiling the carpet every time he drops a crumb, which is, after all, only natural; and why shouldn't he be allowed to feel at home after a bothering afternoon of messing about with "men's applications for leave," and sick reports, and evening passes, and half-fare railway vouchers, and all those things that I think it's very clever of him to know how to manage, so there! But to get on about Evelyn, when she was late for tea.)

I went on light-heartedly, "There is only what you might describe as 'husband's tea' left in the dining-room teapot, and I know that you disapprove just now of everything to do with husbands."

Of course, I only meant to tease her a little about the attitude she has taken up with regard to Nancy and her new husband. Nothing was further from my thoughts than to wish to upset Evelyn in any way.

Yet, to my horror, this is what I seemed to do.

For Evelyn, if you please, glared at me for a moment as if I were a hair in the butter, and then broke out, positively violently, "Oh! Rattle, you talk too much nonsense! You do, indeed, and you say horrid things, and it is very unkind of you, it's hateful!"

What in the world could be the meaning of that, I asked myself. Wasn't it funny?

I stood there in the hall under the hanging-lamp, being absolutely flummoxed and flabbergasted, and Evelyn went on, still violently: "You are always horrid to me now, both of you! Have been for the last I don't know how long! You don't think anything of what I say: you only make fun of me, and laugh at me. I know you do! You and Nancy! I don't seem to have even any sisters left——"

And then she turned and dashed up the stairs and I heard her own door banging behind her.

What, indeed, could be the matter?

I went back into the dining-room with the fourth plate of muffins for Mr. Lascelles, and the little brown teapot of nice, fresh, hot tea for that extraordinary Evelyn. Somehow I had a kind of idea that she didn't mean to come down and drink it.

So in a minute or two I got a little tray, and arranged a really tempting tea for one on it.

I told Aunt Victoria and Mr. Lascelles that I thought poor Evelyn had got rather a headache.

Always a nice, safe thing to say: it commits you to nothing.

Then I went up to Evelyn's room and tapped at the door.

As I expected, there was no answer, so I went calmly in.

Evelyn was lying on her bed with her face buried in the pillow, just as Nancy had been last week when she was pretending to have such violent toothache!

But Evelyn was not pretending.

When I came in she stopped all of a sudden, but I knew that she had been sobbing as if her heart would break.

"I have brought you some tea," I said.

"I don't want any tea, thank you, Rattle," said Evelyn, in a muffled voice with all the violence gone out of it.

"Oh, you do. Just a nice cup of tea! You needn't eat anything with it if you aren't feeling very hungry," I said.

And I sat down on the bed beside her and put my arm round her and persuaded her to drink some nice hot tea, which was very sugary and milky, with a long tea-leaf floating about on the top, which meant a stranger to see her very shortly.

And a very tall stranger.

However, I didn't say any more about that sort of thing, not wishing to annoy her any more than I could help.

I just whispered to her: "Awfully sorry, old girl, if I upset you."

Evelyn gulped, and said: "It's all right, Rattle, it wasn't a bit your fault. I was a cross pig: but——"

Here she began to gulp again, and then felt for her handkerchief, which was a little, grey, sopping ball of linen by this time.

I stuffed my own quite nice dry one into her hand.

(It wasn't my own, really, being a very large white silk one with "F.L." embroidered in the corner. You know how people's wash gets mixed up when there are a lot of you in the same house, and I knew Mr. Lascelles wouldn't mind my using his hankie for just one week.)

I went on to say earnestly to Evelyn: "You know you are quite, quite wrong in thinking that Nancy and I don't think enough of you. Why, we are frightfully fond of you, if you only knew. When we begin to laugh at you for being prim——"

"Oh, Rattle, don't! 'Prim!'" mourned Evelyn. "Anybody who knew what I felt like inside would know I couldn't be called prim!"

"Well, primmer than we are," I said. "But if we do laugh at it, it means that we are so fond of you, and so pleased that there is at least one of us who makes some attempt to behave like a lady!"

I made her drink a little more tea, then eat a piece of muffin, which seemed to make her feel better, and presently she seemed well enough to confide to me: "Oh, Rattle! I am so fearfully miserable! the most miserable girl in Mud Flats!" she said.

"My dear old thing, why?" I asked, taking the tray out of her way and sitting down beside her on the bed. "Can't you tell me?"

In a choked voice poor old Evelyn said something about having to tell somebody or burst.

"Tell me, then," I encouraged her. "Was it really because you thought Nancy and I weren't as fond of you as we used to be?"

Evelyn shook her head. "It's not that. It's nothing to do with that."

"Have you had a row," I asked, "with the Bandaging Class?" For I knew what a cat in mittens the doctor's sister is; she adores the curate, I think, and she was frightfully annoyed once when she heard the doctor say that the curate had said that the eldest Miss Verdeley was the sort of girl who would be a parish priest's right hand.

She's never been anything but hideously polite to Evelyn ever since, and as she is secretary to that Bandaging Class, I thought she had been getting even with the curate's idea of a right hand that way. But no. Evelyn said it was nothing to do with that either.

"Is it anything," I suggested, "that I could help you with?"

"Nobody can ever help me," mourned Evelyn. And she added in a sort of gulp something that surprised me so much that I bounced on the bed and nearly kicked over the tea-things on their tray at my feet.

"Somebody," Evelyn moaned, "somebody wants to marry me!"

"What!" I exclaimed so loudly that I wonder they didn't hear me downstairs in the dining-room. Really, with all these love affairs going on in the house, I shall have to learn to modulate my voice a little more. "To marry you?"

The fact is, I nearly said "Why?" For I've never thought Evelyn, though she's so nice-looking and such a dear in many ways, is a bit the kind of girl you'd fall in love with! Nancy, yes. But Evelyn, who's out of sympathy with men! I should have thought they tumbled to that and avoided that sort of girl, at least, as a wife!

Then I pulled myself together and uttered my second thoughts. "Well, I suppose I know who it is. I suppose it's the curate?"

"It's nothing of the kind," said Evelyn, quite indignantly. "It's a young man."

(You see, the curate is at least thirty-two to begin with.)

"Oh," I said, with a long breath, for that made it quite different. "Two wantings-to-marry in our family in one week! How frightfully thrilling! What'll be the next, I wonder? But, Evelyn! for goodness' sake tell me who the young man is? And why, why are you crying about him?"

Poor Evelyn began to sob again so bitterly that she couldn't speak.

"It's a funny way to take a proposal," I said. "Does it—I say, does it mean that you've refused him?"

"Hurp—yes!" wept Evelyn.

I felt even more thrilled. You see, it was a change from Nancy's affair. Now we'd had both kinds in the house, a Yes and a No! What a lot of experience I'm getting!

"It must be very painful to have to cause a lot of unhappiness to a man, even if you don't like him well enough to marry," I said, understandingly. "Still, Evelyn, you must look on the bright side of it, you know. You'll have to remember that though he may seem to be upset just for the moment, you haven't really broken his heart for ever. Of course, he says you have, I expect? But don't you believe him, my dear girl," said I, encouragingly patting her arm. "He will get over it. Look what hundreds of men do. Think of half the novels we've read about that very thing. Think of that Somersetshire folk-song:

"'The grass that once has been trampled underfoot,
Give it time, it will rise up again: give it time, it will
                rise up again!'"

I couldn't help feeling rather pleased over this quotation: it was so apt. Then I went on comforting poor Evelyn, whose head was buried in the pillow, showing only one hot little pink ear. I whispered into it: "Do you know, I was reading a book only the other day which says that hardly any man gets just the girl he has asked: most of them have been turned down by one or two before they find the woman who is meant to be their affinity. This proposer of yours would probably be quite grateful to your refusing him," I said, "in a year or two's time." She didn't answer, but I know she heard.

"For, you see, there is no scarcity of girls," I said judiciously. "Plenty of those to pick and choose from for any young man, especially after this war, when young men are going to be more of a rarity than ever! So, cheer up, Evelyn. He is bound to forget quite soon."

At this Evelyn suddenly reared her golden head up from her pillows and turned her flushed and tear-stained face to me. Then she hurled another bomb of surprise at me.

"Oh, Rattle! don't, don't!" she besought me wildly. "My dear! you think you are consoling me, don't you? But if you only knew, every word of yours about those other girls hurts. Do you suppose I want him to marry anybody else at once? I, who like him so frightfully badly myself."

Here was a facer! I said, "You like him frightfully badly and yet you aren't going to marry him?"

"I can't," wailed Evelyn.

"Why?" I asked, absolutely thrilled. This was the most unusual bit of the whole affair. "Is he married already?"

This terrible thought did seem to startle Evelyn—the only one in this family with any sense of propriety—into some sort of calm. She sat up against her pillows and sobbed again with her pretty face struggling into its normal prim expression. "Married, Rattle! Of course not! As if I should ever have spoken on such a subject if he had been married! Oh! dear no! There is nothing of that sort in it at all!"

"Then what is there?" I asked eagerly. "And, to begin with, Evelyn—tell me, do tell me, I really think you might tell me, if I promise not to say a word—I do so awfully want to know who he is?"

Buried in the pillow again, Evelyn murmured something about, "I thought you might have guessed. Do you mean you really haven't any idea, Rattle?"

I really hadn't, not the slightest. Since it wasn't the curate. Was it one of the soldier-men? She gave a tiny nod.

I then began to repeat the names of some of the officers we have got to know since the troops have been at Mud Flats. I thought first, of course, of the one we have in the house here.

I said, "It isn't Mr. Lascelles, is it?"

"Oh, Rattle! don't be absurd," said Evelyn, with a trembly laugh. "Mr. Lascelles! Why! He is only a child!"

"He is twenty-four! Three whole years older than you are!" I retorted. I was going on to explain how unexpectedly reliable and grown-up Mr. Lascelles had seemed at that awful moment at the Junction when we couldn't find the bridal party, but Evelyn went on:

"Well, he doesn't look like twenty-four! He looks about fourteen!"

"Yet you all seem so awfully fond of him," I reminded her, "and you all scold me because I couldn't—I mean, I can't—stand him. He was always a favourite of yours."

"Yes, in a kind of way—the sort of nice friendly way you feel towards a younger brother or a nephew, even," said Evelyn. "In that way I quite love his dear little Schoolboy face and his hideous red hair."

"I didn't think his hair was at all so hideous," I said. "At all events, it doesn't look so bad now, since he has taken to parting it at the side."

"Oh! is that what he has done? I thought I noticed it looked rather worse-looking, but I didn't know exactly what he had been doing with it. But, nice as he is, if he was the only man I ever see I shouldn't want to fall in love with the Lascelles boy. Oh, no, Rattle. It is somebody really grown-up; really clever."

"And really good-looking?" I asked. For the quotation on the calendar in the Lair to-day had been:

"Now, though we always know that looks deceive
And always have done, somehow these good looks
Make more impression than the best of books."
                                                                            (BYRON.)

Rather true, I thought it. And Evelyn was saying earnestly, "Oh! He's very good-looking. Handsome."

"The handsomest man who's ever been here is Captain Masters (that we must get into the way of calling Harry)," I said. "But, of course, Nancy got him."

"I should never have looked at Captain Masters. He's much too novelette-y. A barber's block, I should call him," declared Evelyn, quite excitedly. The last trace of sobs had gone from her voice as she spoke. "My—I mean the man I am speaking of, is worth ten of Nancy's husband for looks or anything else. Can't you guess who it is?"

Conscientiously I began to go over the names of all the good-looking men I've seen about this place.

The adjutant? No. That young officer of the Super-Filberts? No. One of the sailor-men off the cruiser in the Bay? (nearly all sailors are nice-looking. Going into the Navy seems to give them such nice blue eyes!) Commander Smith? Mr. Brown? Mr. Robinson? No; it was none of these. Much handsomer than any of them.

"Then I can't have seen him," said I.

"Oh, yes, you have, Rattle. Often."

"Can't have. Some one I've often seen about this place? Why, there is only old Penny the gardener that I haven't guessed. It isn't him, by any chance, is it, Evelyn?"

This, thank goodness, made Evelyn laugh. "Don't be so absolutely idiotic, Rattle! If you really are too stupid to guess I suppose I shall have to tell you myself."

And she told me.

She blurted it out in these three electrifying words:

"It's Mr. Curtis!"

Have you got that, dear readers? I didn't, for about three seconds after she'd said it. Then——

Well, thank goodness! I didn't lose my head and exclaim, "Mr. Curtis!" with a long-drawn shriek of idiot mirth! The shock was quite enough to make me. However, one seems to get very quickly acclimatised to shocks. After the first two or three. There are only three of us girls, but I should think in really large families, such as sevens and eights, you would have to make them think the end of the world had come before they turned a hair.

See how hardened I was getting! I didn't even begin to explain to Evelyn that I didn't think of guessing Mr. Curtis for the simple reason that that young schoolmaster who was now a soldier hadn't made the faintest impression on me. I looked upon him, when I did look upon him, as a sort of pale, washed-out, long-legged shadow, who just sat there blinking through his eyeglasses and taking up the highest chair, so that there would be room for his legs. Once or twice after that celebrated party I had wondered if he was still going on writing his articles about "Pontoon Bridging for Girls," or something of that sort, or whether he had ever soared to composing verses about "The First Kiss," or anything of that sort. Then when the Nancy-Masters romance came on I hadn't thought of anything else to do with Mr. Curtis. If I had thought I should never have dreamt of connecting him with anything like a love affair!

Yet here was Evelyn, if you please, the most particular as well as the most proper of us girls, fairly crying her eyes out because of some reason or other for wanting to marry him, and yet she wasn't going to!

I gazed upon her in astonishment. "Handsome," she'd said! Wasn't it funny? I realised that the Mr. Curtis she saw must be an entirely different person from the Mr. Curtis I saw.

Perhaps that is the same way with everybody's young man or girl as the case may be? Perhaps the greatest shock that anybody ever could get would be for half an hour to borrow somebody else's eyes, just like Mr. Lascelles borrowed Mr. Curtis's eyeglasses once to see how he looked in them? And to see those other people's impression of their best friends? My word! there would be some astonishment!

The poem about seeing yourself as others see you would not be in it with seeing the other ones!

Just think of girls, for instance, that one had always considered hopeless freaks and frumps. Fancy catching sight of them transformed into a cross between Lily Elsie and Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland!

And then just think of the young men that you have always considered "It," and imagine seeing them dwindle down to the miserable nonentities that some other girls might see them as!

(I do wish a machine had been made to enable us to do it. However, I suppose it is one of those inventions that don't seem ever to be going to come off in our time, like hairpins that will stick in and silk stockings that never go into ladders.)

However, to go on with this absolutely unaccountable love affair of Evelyn and Mr. Curtis.

"You—I know you won't tell anybody," she said. "Nobody knows."

"Does he know?" I asked. "That you care for him, I mean?"

"Oh, no! Oh, NO!" cried my sister. "Because of course I told him that I didn't."

Now, that struck me as a silly sort of thing to do. Such a waste! Except, of course, in those old-fashioned novels on the top shelf in the Lair when sometimes the girl looks down (why?) and trembles (what at?) and refuses the man just so that he will ask her again.

I wondered if it was this kind of thing. I asked Evelyn.

"Ask me again? Oh, no. I made it quite clear to him that it would be absolutely no good if he did," went on that mysterious Evelyn.

"Why on earth not?" I asked.

It was quite a time before I could get that absurd Sphinx of an Evelyn to condescend to tell me the reason that stood between her and the man of her (no-accounting-for-tastes ) choice.

At last it came out. An absolutely footling reason, of course. Simply this:

Because Evelyn felt that she couldn't possibly marry a man who had been attracted to her own sister before he had proposed to her!

"It's no use! I should be too jealous," she said, sitting up and staring away blankly above the framed photograph of us three as little girls with curls over our sailor-blouses. "You don't understand, Rattle, how I should feel. Every time he kissed me I should"—here she buried her face in the pillow—"I should be reminded of that time at the staircase window when he kissed Nancy."

"My dear, good child!" I said to her, feeling quite like a maiden aunt. "Don't you remember how Mr. Curtis was a st——" Here I nearly said "standing joke," but I stopped myself, because I thought that Evelyn wouldn't like it. I said instead, "Don't you remember how Mr. Curtis was such a surprise to all those other young men just because he hadn't kissed anybody at all before? They seemed to think he was a regular white elephant—I mean, very unusual.

"So I expect that more than half the men who get engaged must have kissed other people before: or at least one other person."

"Yes, but not the girl's own sister."

"I don't see what difference that makes," I said.

"All the difference in the world," said Evelyn, obstinately. "Rattle, you don't understand how I feel about a thing like that. How could you? You're too young."

"I call that the unfairest argument in the world to use to a sister who just happens to have been born four years later than you have," I told her, reproachfully. "I'm sure I'm older than you are, in my mind."

"I'm glad," said Evelyn, looking up gloomily at me, "that you're not so miserable."

"You needn't be miserable, if you had the sense to accept the man you care for, Evelyn!"

"Yes, I need," argued Evelyn, huskily. "I should be desperately unhappy if I were going to marry Mr. Curtis, knowing that he had—oh, dear!"—down went the head into the pillow again—"knowing that he had cared for my sister first."

"But you seem to be going to be pretty unhappy as it is," I pointed out, gazing sympathetically at the rumpled back of her hair. "So I should have thought it was better to be unhappy with the people you liked, than just marooned, all by yourself!"

She only repeated that I was too young to understand.

"Mr. Curtis is years older than either of us, and you won't let him understand either," said I. "He thinks you won't marry him just because you don't like him enough?"

"Yes, that's it," said Evelyn, hopelessly.

Being in love does take people different ways, they say. Hers is the most exasperating I've ever come across in the whole course of my experience!

We can't have it. It must come right. Somebody capable of thinking things out reasonably must do something.

I must do something.

In the meantime, wasn't I right when I told you that my sister Evelyn was an awful warning and object-lesson to all "Sensible" girls?

CHAPTER XVII

AN EVENING OF THRILLS

Things simply will not leave off happening in this house! I should think we had come to the climax of them to-night!

Still! touch wood, you never know! There may be something else waiting to happen just round the corner.

To begin at the beginning. It was the evening after Evelyn had confided to me her love affair.

What a contrast between the beginning of that evening—and the end of it!

To start with the beginning.

We had spent a very quiet time in the drawing-room, Aunt Victoria playing patience on her green-covered table by the fire, and I busily embroidering a chemise top which I had just made out of two very nice hankies, and which I meant to be a belated wedding present for my sister Nancy.

Because, even if she is able to afford to pay for the new trousseau pretties out of his grandfather's reconciled allowance, I should think she would still rather like to have a few little things made for her by her own flesh and blood. So I have been sewing "a kiss and a good wish" into every stitch of this chimmie top, as you always should into the presents that you give to somebody that you are very fond of.

Evelyn, looking more than washed-out, poor child! after her fit of crying and confidence this afternoon, was rather languidly knitting a pair of khaki mittens for one of the men in Mr. Lascelles's company.

Mr. Lascelles himself was stretched out in his own particular armchair, which is the comfiest one in the drawing-room.

And so it ought to be, considering how hard he has to work, poor boy! and how he simply tears about all day. It really is just like that thing he's always humming:

"'I do all the work,' says the Subaltern."

To-day it was trousers, if you'll believe it; hours of his time taken up over four pair of the most awful khaki bags that looked just as if they were made of the old felt that we've got underneath the stair-carpet. "Please, sir, do you think these are worth mending?" and all that. Combined with some complication with a person who is called the Officer-in-charge-of-stores, who is always complaining that the precious stores have been misused, and getting people strafed when they don't deserve it one bit. Mr. Lascelles said he was quite looking forward to settling down to a little peace and quiet in the trenches, after all this.

However, he was settled down in his chair for the present, smoking a cigarette—oh, yes! cigarettes in Aunt Victoria's drawing-room are nothing, nowadays. I fully expect to see her light up herself one of these evenings! Well! He was smoking a cigarette and chuckling over a copy of The Natal Newsletter, that ship's newspaper that was written and printed and everything on board ship. It had been lent to him by the Commander, who had pinched it off one of the men on a trawler.

"You might read aloud to us," I said, stitching away.

And he, Mr. Lascelles, said he'd read a poem that was supposed to be about H.M.S. Queen Elizabeth.

"It isn't unlike you, yourself," he said, rather mischievously. "It begins:

"'She's quite a modern-to-the-minute flapper——'"

"I do hate being called a flapper!" I put in, but he frowned me down. It wasn't a real frown, you know: we were quite friends, now.

"'And older folk have called her rather fast——'"

("H'm, that's not so appropriate") put in Mr. Lascelles, reading on:

"'She's a girl of very vigorous opinions.'"

("That's all in order, isn't it?")

"'Though young, already has a vivid Past.'"

("That's the joy-ride to the Junction, Miss Elizabeth, the day of your sister's wedding.")

"'When she goes a-walking out there's consternation
Among the baggy-trousered Eastern swells.
        For she's slinging Cupid's arrows
        In the region of their narrows
Is our bu-sy little Lizzie in the dizzy Dardanelles!'"

Here Aunt Victoria looked up from her patience and asked mildly: "What are you reading, Mr. Lascelles? Aren't you going on?"

I should have liked him to, but he didn't. He got up, looked at Aunt Victoria's patience for a minute, then said that as he had had a rather hefty day's work he thought he would turn in early.

"Good-night, Mrs. Verdeley," he said. "Good-night, Miss Evelyn."

Then he turned to me on his way to the door, and caught my eyes and said in a lower tone that I don't think the others could possibly have caught, "Good-night, Miss Betty."

To show there was no ill-will I smiled up at him from my seat on the pouffe and said, "Good-night, Lonely Subaltern!"

Then I went on embroidering that white silk true-lovers' knot on young Mrs. Masters' chemise-top, and thinking how funny it was that I'd ever really disliked him. Evelyn was knitting away, mooning away at the same time, I expect, over her extremely uninteresting (except to her) young lover. Aunt Victoria continued to murmur to her cards, "Ah! that, and that, and that. Is it going to come out now? I believe I shall get it to come out after all." And the fire-flames "talked" softly in the grate, and everything under the pink lamplight of the cosy, old-fashioned room was Peace, perfect Peace.

I suppose that peace must have lasted for about five or seven minutes after Mr. Lascelles had gone upstairs. Then, as suddenly as thunder in the dark, the peace was shattered by the sound of the quickest, sharpest "Crack—Crack!"

An explosion? Another raid?

"The Zeppelins! Oh, my goodness, those horrible Zeppelins again!" shrieked Aunt Victoria, starting up and scattering all her cards, while the sewing dropped from my hands and the knitting from Evelyn's.

Before we had got up to put out all the lights (as we have been warned to do by the posters) there followed, quick upon the sound of those two shots, loud screaming—a shout—(there seemed to come from the top of our house) and then a hammering and violent ringing at our front door! I rushed to it, and opened it. There were Mr. Curtis and four of the sappers from the nearest house to us, all very breathless and excited-looking, all chorusing, "What's up? what's up?" Mr. Curtis, rather white, added, "Where's Evelyn?" And then went on, "I heard shots fired: it is in your house! What has happened?"

"I don't know," I began, still bewildered. Then Aunt Victoria came out, still clutching the knave of spades in her hand, and Evelyn looking over her shoulder.

"Shots came from the garret—I'm sure—they did," declared Mr. Curtis quickly. (In fact, you must please remember that all these sayings and doings took place much more quickly than I can possibly write, or you read about them. It was one mad rush, I can tell you.) "Come along, you men," called Mr. Curtis; "we must run up and see."

He dashed up the stairs with the four sappers at his heels, me after them, and Evelyn after me.

Aunt Victoria panted two steps behind Evelyn.

On the first landing we ran into Mary, the housemaid, all ready for bed.

Her face was as white as her nightie and her eyes were nearly out of her head with terror. She seized Mr. Curtis by the arm and exclaimed: "Oh, Lor! I believe I am going to faint."

Here Mr. Curtis shook her—a thing I have often longed to do myself—and she left off flopping and looked indignantly at the sappers and said: "Any one would be ready to faint! Happened? Why, there's that little Mr. Lascelles and old Penny just been and gone and murdered each other in the attic."

"Murdered!" gasped Aunt Victoria from the rear.

And I knew what it meant when it says in books that people's hearts have stopped beating with horror. For a moment I really did feel as if my own heart had stopped.

Mr. Lascelles? Murdered?

Ah, no, no, no! This must be some sort of hideous nightmare! It could only be that. It was so like the sort of things that only happen in dreams.

I saw Mr. Curtis put Mary firmly but not too gently aside and then pelt up the next flight of stairs on to the second landing, then on to the attic, where old Penny sleeps next door to the maids.

And here I found that I had rushed in front of the sappers and the others, and was close beside Mr. Curtis as he flung open the door of old Penny's room. It was dark.

Mr. Curtis struck a match and quickly turned on the gas, of which there is a bracket close to the side of the door.

The flaring light fell on the most extraordinary picture I have ever seen, either on a cinema or anywhere else.

The bed, which had been in the farther corner of the room, had been dragged into the middle of it, close under the skylight. The skylight was uncovered and open. On the bed was the figure of Penny, our gardener, fully dressed in his brown corduroys and his gardening leggings. One hand, hanging over the edge of the bed, was fumbling frantically about for something that lay just out of his reach on the floor. At that awful moment I didn't even take in what it was that he was trying to get at. Mr. Curtis dashed forward and snatched it up. It was a revolver. ("A thing dear old Penny never had!" as Aunt Victoria kept on saying.) A revolver for which he was feeling blindly—yes, thank Heavens, he was blinded!

Covering and muffling his head, which we couldn't see, of course, was the thick curtain of dark green serge which Aunt Victoria had sent up to his room for him to tack over the skylight so that not a vestige of light should get through and get him into disgrace with the military authorities.

He was struggling violently, making what I suppose are the "superhuman" efforts they're always doing in Henry's books, to free himself. For he was pinned down as he kicked and writhed. Half sitting, half lying on his chest, was Mr. Lascelles. Mr. Lascelles had blood trickling from a wound in his head down his cheek and chin, and his right arm was hanging all limp and helpless and dreadful-looking at his side.

"Hullo!" he said, smiling in a crooked way as we came in and Mr. Curtis rushed on him. "I have just collared this beauty signalling through the skylight with his electric torch! How's that for a fair cop, Miss Betty?"

At the last word he just toppled over and fell face downwards on to the still struggling Penny.

He had fainted dead away.

* * * * * * * *

It's now a whole day after that scene in the attic, and I am only just getting clear in my mind about what has happened.

Mr. Lascelles, who had been pretty badly hurt (they find), is in his room with a hospital nurse from the Junction to look after him.

Just as if Aunt Victoria and Evelyn and I couldn't do everything the doctor wanted! It seems to me that all the nurse does is to give herself fearful airs, and to send us running about on various messages for herself all day. Every time I have been to the door to see if there wasn't something I could do myself for Mr. Lascelles I have been held up by a starched blue-and-white figure who hasn't so much as let me put my foot over the threshold. I have only twice been able to catch a glimpse of Mr. Lascelles's bandaged red head lying on the pillow; once he didn't even see me, but the other time he just did. I saw him twist his poor, feverishly flushed little face into the funniest grimace of dislike at the nurse's back, just before she shut the door upon me.

I went down to Mr. Curtis, who was in the drawing-room, having torn over to the Junction and back on his motor-cycle to bring some grapes and everything else that he could think of in the way of comforts for his wounded friend.

Isn't it extraordinary that we, in this peaceful camp-of-instruction place, should have in our house a real, live, wounded officer, wounded on the spot, too, by the enemy—by a German?

For, would you believe it! After all these years old Penny, our gardener—that faithful old man as we have thought him—has turned out to be nothing in the world but a German spy!

Think of that!

Faithful, indeed! Do you know that all these ten years that he has been here it has been with only one idea in his mind apparently, and that is to help with the landing party in this place as soon as the war broke out which the Germans have been planning for years and years. He got in bright and early, you see, so that he should be looked upon as the oldest inhabitant, so to speak, and quite one of the landmarks of the place. Nobody having the vaguest suspicion except that he was a dear old hard-working Englishman!

And "old," you know. Would you believe it, he isn't even old! That "pathetic" black wig that we all thought was because he didn't want to go about as bald as a pale pink Easter egg, was all part of the take-in. When I saw him being marched off by the military police who were fetched by the sappers that dreadful night, they tore off his wig, and there he was underneath, if you please, with a thick stubble of hair as fair as our own! As for his walking lame with rheumatism, that was an old sabre-cut on the leg—from one of his superior officers, I suppose.

(Later.)

Mr. Curtis has just told me the latest about our treasure of a gardener. They have found out who old Penny is. His name is Otto Pfennig, and there was enough information in the papers they found in his garret to have given away every fortified place along this bit of coast! That is what he has been up to. That was why I met him that afternoon in the field sniffing round the explosives and saps and things; that was why he had pretended to have "screwmatics" so badly that he should leave his cottage, and be able to come and live in our garret, where there was a nice skylight convenient for signalling from.

That was why Mr. Lascelles had that bust-up with him the night of the Zeppelin raid when he found Penny with the skylight uncovered.

But Mr. Lascelles has had his eye on Penny ever since, Mr. Curtis says. He was absolutely certain that there was something very fishy about him, and so he shadowed him, and watched him, and that night when he went to bed early it was really more to reconnoitre than anything else.

It seems he had got another key cut in the R.E. workshops to fit the door of Penny's attic, which Penny, if you please, always kept locked, pretending that he was frightened of burglars! So Mr. Lascelles was able to steal in softly behind him and to find him with that electric torch which helped the Zeppelin raid over London that same night!

Mr. Lascelles had his revolver, and was just going to cover Penny, but the German, who was a much bigger man, flung himself on to the top of Mr. Lascelles, and wrested it from him.

Then little Mr. Lascelles seized hold of the skylight curtain, which was lying on the bed, and managed just in the very nick of time to get it round Penny's head just as Penny fired.

Those two shots in the dark were what we heard. Of course, they would have killed poor little Mr. Lascelles if the German had been able to see what he was doing: as it was, they shattered his right upper arm and tore his—Mr. Lascelles's—scalp. Thank Heaven he had the pistol knocked out of his hand and couldn't get at it to fire off the other four chambers.

Then, while we all pelted upstairs, there must have been a desperate scuffle between the German gardener and Mr. Lascelles, who still managed to keep that thick serge curtain wound over his head and round his throat, and who sat on his chest, keeping him down, just as a small, very game terrier is sometimes able to hold his own with a much bigger and more powerful mongrel.

"As it was," said Mr. Curtis, "the rescue party only just got up there in the very nick of time. That fellow would have wrested himself free and downed Lascelles in another minute."

"Dear me, oh, dear me!" murmured Aunt Victoria, looking in an absolute daze of not realising anything yet. "I daresay he might have hurt him dreadfully!"

"I should have been sorry for him then. For the German gentleman, I mean, if Lascelles's men had got hold of him," said Mr. Curtis, grimly. I quite liked him at that moment, being so very angry made him look almost nice! Perhaps Evelyn always sees him like that? "They'd have picked that spy to pieces like an old woman feathering a goose."

"That would have been very wrong," said Aunt Victoria, who is one of those people who sometimes forget that we are fighting Germans, and not merely savage tribes and barbarians that you have to remember the rules of war with. I didn't see why Herr Otto Pfennig shouldn't have been given over to Mr. Lascelles's Field Company as it was, to do what they thought fit with. None of the officers in the place need have been passing at the time!

"He was a good gardener while he was a gardener," Aunt Victoria stood up for him. "And he thinks he's right in doing what he can for his country, just as you are, Mr. Curtis." (Poor Mr. Curtis looked as if he wondered why he had ever joined to defend his country, if his countrywomen thought of him in the same breath as a Boche!)

Aunt Victoria wound up by asking anxiously, "What do you think will be done with him?"

Mr. Curtis shrugged his rather bony shoulders and said he supposed Mr. Pfennig would be given the best quarters in the Junction Barracks, turning out several of our officers to make room for him; and that he would be allowed to go over to the nearest concentration-camp and pick out whichever of the German prisoners he fancied to be his batman and wait on him.

"At least, he's certain to be treated with the utmost consideration," he assured Aunt Victoria. "It's only British prisoners who cannot expect to have every comfort and luxury when they fall into alien hands. You needn't worry about him, Mrs. Verdeley. It's Lascelles I'm worrying about. That head-wound of his is jolly nasty. The nurse says his temperature is up again."

CHAPTER XVIII

A DAY OF DESPAIR

Mr. Lascelles is worse. This morning the nurse said, in quite an ordinary sort of voice, something about "If he pulls through——"

"If!——"

Meaning he may not.

If he doesn't, I shall want to murder that nurse. I am sure it is her fault.

No, it isn't; it's the fault of that Miss Gates, the woman we met that lovely time on the road when he took me on his motor-cycle to the Junction.

It was she who sent down this nurse from her (Miss Gates's) nursing-home that she has for wounded officers at the Junction. Why didn't she send somebody better? Somebody who knew what ought to be done? Somebody who'd let us in to attend to him? I know he'd rather see one of our familiar faces than that unpleasant-looking feline in the blue-and-white print who thinks she's Everybody! Already she's found fault with the bathroom, and with the soda-water. All she's fit for is to nurse wounded Germans; I can't think why they don't set her to it. That would certainly be her "bit." She's enough to make anybody have a relapse.

You know, he did make a face at her....

But he's too ill even to make faces, now. Isn't it awful? He doesn't know what he's saying. He mutters and mutters in a voice that isn't his a bit I could hear it right from the mat outside, where I was standing. Once he called out quite loudly, "Mother! I want you! Where are you, Mother? Mother!"

And I had to swallow down a lump in my throat as big as an ostrich egg as I stood there on the mat listening to him. For, you know, his mother died when he was eleven-and-a-half.

"Mother!" he called again, and I couldn't bear it.

I dashed downstairs as quietly as I could ... I don't know what to do with myself. I don't want to go out, I'm afraid of meeting people in the village who will ask me how he is, and I should so hate having to hear myself say that I thought he was still in danger.

I've been walking all over the house, from the Lair, where Evelyn sits silently knitting, to the drawing-room, where Aunt Victoria sits silently staring at her patience cards, but doesn't care any longer whether it "comes out" or whether it doesn't come out. All she cares is whether Mr. Lascelles is going to pull through.

I left her and wandered aimlessly out into the kitchen, where cook was baking bread. At least cook would talk, I thought.

Cook did talk. She let loose a flow of it before I could say a word.

"Have you noticed all the signs there's been about, Miss Rattle, that there's going to be a death in the house?" she began, while I stood there petrified. "Yesterday that blessed dog howling outside for no reason that you could see! To-day a single magpie flew over the field in front of the house just as I was hotting the breakfast-plates, and the first thing in the morning if I didn't see a hare run across the garden-path! Always means something, that does. Always!"

"Cook! You sound as if you were hoping it meant——"

Without listening to me, cook went on, shaking her head lugubriously over her kneading-crock, in which her plump, pinky arms were plunging up and down.

"Ah, poor dear young gentleman! I expect he's doomed! You mark my words, Miss Rattle," said cook. "A short life and a merry! After all, he died doing his duty, just the same as if he had gone out to the front and stopped a German bullet there, as he calls it. Well! I suppose they will have a reel military funeral for him, the first there has ever been here!"

And she shook her head again and sighed with a gloom that she seemed—yes! she seemed to enjoy it!

For if there is one thing that cook seems to love it is going to what she calls "a burying"; even his! I was speechless with horrifiedness at her.

"There is always a silver lining to every cloud," she went on with gusto. "There is that good black crêpe toque I had for when my pore sister-in-law was took; now that will come in lovely. Haven't had it on above four times, and I should like to wear it, to show kind of respect, as you might say, to poor dear Mr. Lascelles. For I am sure your auntie, Miss Rattle, would be quite agreeable to letting us have the afternoon off for the ceremony, don't you think so?"

Here I lost my speechlessncss. "You awful woman!" I cried. "You perfect ghoul!" For I also lost my temper. Worse than I had ever lost it before, except that one time before I got to know Mr. Lascelles when I slapped his face in the dining-room. (Oh, how could I!) If I'd had a grenade in my hand then, I should have flung it at cook's capped head.

Fortunately, all that I had in my hand was a bunch of rather passé yellow chrysanthemums and laurustinus branches, which I had taken out of the bowl on the hall table, meaning to burn them in the kitchen fire.

I flung them at cook instead, wet stalks and all! You know how horrid wet chrysanthemum stalks are when they have been in water for some time?

Cook was so taken aback that, for the first second, she didn't realise what had happened.

"Good heavens above!" I heard her gasp out of the middle of that handful of decaying foliage. "Whatever's this?"

"As you are so fond of funerals," I heard myself cry furiously, "there's some flowers to make a wreath!"

Then I tore out of the kitchen again and fled to the Lair.

Evelyn was still there, knitting. I flung myself on the ground at her knee, and buried my face in her lap.

Then I burst into tears. Loud, bitter tears, just like a child of three.

I cried as if my heart would break.

"Oh, Evelyn! Oh, Evelyn!"

I must say dear old Evelyn was perfectly beautiful to me at this juncture. She threw down her knitting and put her arms round me and petted and comforted me as if she understood everything that I was feeling. She didn't even once ask me what I was crying about: she didn't tell me not to cry. She fished my hankie out for me, she gave me the comfortablest part of her shoulder to rest my head on.

For I must say that when anybody's really in trouble my eldest sister is so nice that you wouldn't believe she was in the least good! You know what I mean!

"Oh, Evelyn, if he dies," I sobbed brokenly. "If he dies!—— Beast! Little beast!"

"Rattle, darling! Don't call him names, now——"

"Call him names? Him? I mean me," I almost bellowed. "Little beast that I've been to him ever since he came here, Evelyn! S-s-snubbing him at every tut—turn! And saying such cuck—cruel things about bank-clerks and red hair and how he ought to be in the Bub—Bantam's Battalion and have c-c-corn strewed for him in the trenches because he was so small! Oh, oh! How could I? And then that awful day when I qu—quarrelled with him in the dining-room and——"