CHAPTER XVI

"NOT TO BE FORWARDED"

Miss Urquhart's secretary was not the only person at Urquhart's Court who thought of "that Hostel-letter."

For presently the young man to whom it had been written, the young man who had been forced into posting it to himself in that French pillar-box at the crossroads, yes, Mr. Ted Urquhart himself, remembered that last letter that was to come.

And he'd realised that there was something odder than all the rest of it about the posting of that letter.

Hadn't it been handed to him to post, by Eleanor's secretary, through the window of Eleanor's Hostel? But Eleanor herself had been at that moment in Paris. Now what was the meaning of that? thought Urquhart.

Why hadn't his fiancée written direct from Paris, where she had put in a whole week?

Why, in the name of all that was mysterious, had she left that letter behind her?

Was Eleanor in the habit of writing letters and addressing envelopes for him at odd times, and then deputing them to be posted, one by one, at the right time—or what?

Young Ted Urquhart, brooding over these questions in that second inner life of his, had a presentiment that perhaps that Hostel-letter might prove the key to a situation.

Once before he had reckoned up how long it would be before that letter reached him. This had been as he stood on the dusty, white French road, weighing in his hand the letter which he then imagined had been written to him by that goddess-built, golden blonde whom his thoughts had called "Nell"——

Never mind that now. Here he was walking along an English road that wound between English hop-fields, and reckoning up how long it would be before he received the last of Eleanor's letters that she had ever written before she met him in the flesh.

He remembered—and he laid his plans accordingly.

These were his plans.

He determined to say nothing to Eleanor on the subject of letters. To wait at The Court until that last letter arrived. Then—well, there was an open invitation to the house of an old schoolfellow in Wales, for some fishing. He'd fit that in. He'd go away, first making Eleanor promise to write to him. Then he'd have letters to compare. With luck he'd have some definite excuse to speak out his mind to Eleanor upon his return.

It was a little thing that nipped Ted Urquhart's plans in the bud.

The old schoolfellow wrote to him from Wales begging him to try and fit in his week at once if he possibly could.

Ted Urquhart was obliged to go two days before he intended. Before the arrival of that Hostel-letter.

It is not necessary to describe in detail that Welsh visit, or how young Urquhart fished without very much luck.

Wales, with its jagged skylines and rich crazy-work colours should have been a change to him after those flat miles of dove-coloured weald about The Court; but the fact is that Ted Urquhart didn't seem to care what sort of country he was in just then. For the first time in his whole life he was more interested in things that were going on inside his own mind. He had moods, like a girl....

Also he found the people amazingly dull....

He never knew how dull the people found him, or what strictures the girls of the house passed upon the stodginess and the apathy of engaged young men.

Only, he overheard a remark of his hostess's that set him wondering again.

—"hope they'll be happy! But I am afraid the man who marries Eleanor Urquhart will find that he's let himself in for marrying S. Ursula's eleven thousand——"

Here a door had shut.

What could his hostess mean?

Did she mean that his Eleanor was such a many-sided little creature that the man who got her found eleven thousand different types of wife rolled into one? He wished he could have catechised his hostess....

Every day he received a note from Eleanor. An absolutely deadly one. Dutiful, short, and in the style of all her first letters from The Court.

But the Hostel-letter wasn't forwarded on.

Yet he'd thought he'd made sure of the date when that Hostel-letter ought to have arrived.

It didn't come.

Odd!

Now that Hostel-letter, with the French stamp and postmark under the South American scrawl had arrived at The Court.

Weeks ago that unbetraying grey envelope had been stared at resentfully, in a passion of curiosity, by some one who, standing on a road in France, longed to open the letter, but knew that he mustn't. And now it was being eyed as if it were a bomb timed to go off at a given hour, by two girls standing in the hall of an English country-house.

Young Urquhart had held the letter, weighing it in his hand. Eleanor Urquhart and Rosamond Fayre gazed at it as it lay on the oaken hall-table, on the top of a boot-maker's catalogue, and an advertisement for fishing-rods addressed to E. Urquhart, Esq.

"Here's this letter of mine—of ours to Ted. And goodness knows if there may not be something in it that'll give us away worse than the others did, if we could only go over it and see," exclaimed Ted's fiancée to her secretary in low, dismayed tones. "Oh! To think that it's practically mine—and yet I can't touch it, Rosamond!"

Rosamond knowing all too well that this particular letter was not Eleanor's, returned, "Well! I can't touch it, either!"

In Eleanor's dark eyes she read the unuttered longing that it were possible to suppress that possibly tell-tale letter; to burn it without saying a word. The engaged girl heaved a big sigh, turning away from the hall-table almost as if from a temptation. She murmured ruefully, "Well, it will have to be forwarded on to him in Wales. Re-address it with the other two, Rosamond, please."

"I?" remonstrated Rosamond.

"Of course! My dear! We c-c-can't have both our handwritings on the same envelope. That really might show something. You've the Welsh address, haven't you? With all those double Ls——"

"Yes, but—it does seem such an irony to have to forward it with one's own hand. Sort of signing one's own dismissal! And to tell you the truth," broke from the secretary-girl, "I hate thinking of his getting it behind our backs, so to speak, and of our not knowing what he may be planning against us until he comes!"

"Wait till he comes then, if you think it's better," suggested Eleanor Urquhart, turning a flurried, irritable little face. "He'll be back in four days. Don't send the letter on. Only, if it stays down here, Beeton has such a c-c-c-conscientious way of re-addressing letters he thinks we've forgotten." She turned away again towards her office. "It had better be put up on Ted's dressing-table, Rosamond."

Rosamond took a step after her, speaking in the conspiratorial murmur which now seemed to be growing upon both girls.

"Eleanor, the servants know your fiancé isn't coming home till Monday. Mightn't they think it odd if they were told to keep the letter for him——"

"Yes, I suppose they might. Oh, dear, what a lot of things there are to be careful about now," complained Eleanor. "I suppose you'd better p-p-put the letter into Mr. Ted Urquhart's room."

Rosamond straightened her back.

She felt like using the phraseology of a rebellious housemaid, and saying, "That's not my place." Eleanor was growing more impossible nowadays; her salary certainly had to be worked for, thought Rosamond. She said aloud, rather shortly, "It wouldn't 'show,' on the envelope, which of us put the letter into his room."

"No," said Eleanor, also shortly. "But I hate going into other people's rooms."

Rosamond suppressed a Pansy-like inclination to think, "Well, it'll be your room soon; that is if we're lucky, and if your engagement isn't broken off."

She took that letter, written by herself on an impulse now bitterly regretted. She went upstairs with it; and then, stepping almost as softly as if she were a thief who might be stopped by an enquiry of "What business have you in here?" she entered the young man's deserted room.

How that faint pleasant smell of leather-mixed-with-cigarettes seemed to pervade the place!

The tall fair girl stood for a second hesitating with the letter in her hand. She sent the swiftest glance about her, then gave one touch to her burnished hair before the glass on Mr. Ted Urquhart's dressing-table.... Then, a sudden quick sound made her start violently, flushed to the brow.... Oh! It was only a starling, whirring out of the ivy that framed the window outside. This dressing-table—here—was the conventional place to put a note. Rosamond put it down and dashed out of the room.

On the stairs again she thought, "I'd like to see his face when he reads that! Well, he'll get it the minute he comes back."

Ted Urquhart came back late on Monday afternoon to find his uncle, his fiancée and Miss Fayre, the secretary, grouped in the bay about the tea-table listening to the conversation of an elderly man, some friend of his Uncle's. Young Urquhart dropped into a chair beside Eleanor, who bestowed upon him a cup of tea and a half-deprecating, half-absent-minded little smile.

"Just when the only thing to do in the circumstances would be to keep her hold on her fiancé by being nicer and more on-coming than usual to him," thought Rosamond from the other side of the tea-table. As tactics, she bitterly resented Eleanor's manner to young Mr. Urquhart. "Of course a girl should make herself so indispensable to the man that he'd think, 'Oh, be hanged to letters! They're only stop-gaps anyhow. I don't care how many other people she got to write to me for her, provided I keep her within speaking distance of me now, until the finish!' But Eleanor hasn't a notion of that sort in her head!"

And Rosamond turned her own golden head away from the unrewarding view of that engaged couple and began again idly to listen to what the elderly Professor-person had to say to old Mr. Urquhart.

It was a haze of words and phrases that Rosamond's acquisitive feminine mind "let through," as her shallow wicker-work basket, made to hold rose-leaves, would let through heavier grain. It seemed to be all about "literary criticism" and "style"—things that had far less interest for Miss Fayre than the slope on the shoulders of a blouse she'd been cutting out before tea.

Suddenly, however, her mind leapt to attention.

The old Dryasdust-man was violently tapping his palm with his forefinger and almost shouting at Mr. Urquhart, who looked intensely irritated, "but, my dear sir, the personal elements of style can never be eliminated! The plagiarist may imitate the writing, the general trend of argument may arrive at the same conclusions, but the unconscious elements of style remain." This Rosamond thought she grasped.

"Unconscious elements"—Those were not rose-leaves, or the little "plus" signs that stood for kisses, but the give-away tone as of a voice speaking between the lines, the things in writing that the writer can't help!

Good Heavens!

And men recognised the fact? These literary people called Bently, and Boyle, and—was it Faleris?—had had arguments about it all before Rosamond was born! There might be some pitfall here that she and Eleanor had never dreamt of; and they didn't know enough about it to avoid it; how dreadful!

Desperately the secretary-girl turned to the expounding Professor. "That's very interesting," she said, as old Mr. Urquhart was silent; his gray elf-locks seemed almost to bristle with annoyance at being worsted in whatever this argument was. "But please do explain it a little more; does it mean that if you had two letters, typewritten say, by different people, and unsigned, that you could be certain to find out which of them was written by the——"

Here her pretty, interested voice trailed suddenly off into an appalled silence.

She'd met the eyes of Mr. Ted Urquhart full and square upon her. And he was listening, intently. He was looking as if this subject of the identification of a style of writing held some arresting interest for himself!

Instantly she looked away again, but not before the blush that rose so easily to her soft cheeks had flooded them with the deepest, most betraying pink.

"He saw that. Oh, why must I turn colour like a mid-Victorian missy always? He'll put two and two together now," Rosamond raged at herself as that scorching, lovely blush faded slowly. "As soon as he reads my letter that's in his room he'll guess why I turned so idiotically red and why Eleanor's letters had the wrong sort of 'unconscious elements' and everything! There! He's going!" she thought in an added flurry as the young man set down his cup and rose. "In two minutes he'll find that fatal, fatal Hostel-letter on his dressing-table. And he's bound to say whatever he means to say directly! This evening, for certain——"

But that evening passed without event.

Several days passed. And still two girls in an English country-house waited anxiously, while a young man in whose sun-burnt and restrained mask of a face the impatient eyes seemed on the look-out for something far away, said absolutely nothing further on the subject of letters.

"There you are, you see, Rosamond! You were wrong, and it is quite all right," Eleanor reassured her secretary in the trite little voice to which all the self-assurance had returned. "Ted hasn't said a word, in spite of getting another letter that you'd written!"

"It's almost enough to make one think he hasn't got the wretched letter," thought Rosamond. "Yet I left it staring him in the face on his dressing-table! If he insisted on 'having it out' with me about the odious letter it would be horrid enough of him. But if he isn't going to have anything out, ever, it's—it's—unpardonable!"

The fact was that Miss Rosamond Fayre's first surmise had been right. Ted Urquhart had not found the letter that she had left on his dressing-table. It was lying hidden where he would not readily see it.

For as Rosamond was closing the door behind her that morning, a chance breeze from the open window, stirred into a strong draught, had lifted the light, foreign-papered letter as it lay and had swept it off the table and down towards that serried row of young Urquhart's so varied footwear; brown brogues, black boots, soft moccasins, shooting-, fishing-, and riding-boots....

It was at the bottom of one of Ted's tall riding-boots that Rosamond's Hostel-letter had found a hiding-place!

And the days went by—days fraught with fate for England, nodding over her sheathed sword.

PART II

IN TIME OF WAR

CHAPTER I

THE CALL TO ARMS

There came a time when Rosamond Fayre began to think that the Fates had doomed her to spend far too much of her existence with a pen in her hand!

Paper and ink, and the complications to which paper and ink had led—these futile, barren things seemed to have made up the whole of her life ever since that afternoon at the beginning of the summer when she'd sat down to write another girl's courtship-letter.

Well, her pen, of course, was Miss Fayre's profession. Clerical work was what she seemed fitted for. And she sighed to think so.

By the middle of August, Nineteen Fourteen, she felt she had good reason to sigh impatiently, not only over her work, but over her sex; things that barred her from the life of glorious Action and stir and comradeship that seemed so much better worth living!

For a fully feminine young woman of Rosamond's type considers, and will always consider, that the Sword is mightier than the Pen....

How suddenly that glint of the drawn sword had flashed over England, even into such rose-garlanded, chintz-hung haunts of Peace as Urquhart's Court!

Yes: suddenly one day in its mellow oak-panelled dining-room, under the placidly-smiling Romney portrait, there appeared pinned up a brightly-coloured War-map, bristling with tiny flags of the European nations. In the pot-pourri-scented drawing-room bales of grey Army flannel were heaped knee-deep about Eleanor Urquhart, who would give them out to wives of Reservists in the village for sewing into shirts for the troops. And up in her own pretty room sat Rosamond Fayre the secretary-girl writing (on her own account) a Good-bye to a young man who would shortly be off to the Front.

She wrote:—

"My dear Cecil,

"Thank you for your letter, which I was so very glad to get. It's splendid that you Territorials will, as you say, be allowed a look-in at the present show, and I do congratulate you with all my heart.

"For the first time in my life I would change places with a man, just so as to be a soldier. It's in War-time that you score. I suppose that if he were alive now my dear old boy would be going out, with luck, with your Draft."

Then she paused. This was not the way she really wished to write. She would have liked to send a really warm, affectionate letter to her brother's gentle and plucky chum. Gladly she would have told him that she was proud of him; proud to think that one young soldier who was fighting for his country had offered himself to her, and that her thoughts and prayers would follow him.... But it would be fatal, even now, to write that sort of letter to Cecil Bray. He would take it for more than mere sisterly encouragement, she knew. He would be back again with his innocent, persistent wooing, as soon as the War was over. Or even before. Poor dear Cecil, she thought whimsically, was just the sort of youth who might be expected to slip on the gang-plank of the troopship as he was embarking, to break a leg or a collar-bone, and to be left behind, cursing his luck that would not hold either in War or Love. Yes; Rosamond must keep her farewells coolly friendly if she wished to avoid another of those urgent boyish proposals, and another rueful "Oh, Cecil, I am so sorry," later on.

She must write on "outside" subjects only. Rather a pity that she couldn't employ Eleanor to write some of her letters, even as Eleanor employed Rosamond. Miss Urquhart's triteness would be useful here!

And Rosamond wrote on:

"Even in this Sleepy Hollow of a house we are managing to raise three men. Beeton the butler went first. He is an old Naval Reserve man, and it seems he was all ready to rejoin before his orders came.

"Then Mr. Marrow the gardener here went off with the Yeomanry; and the chauffeur has given notice and is going to enlist."

Here Rosamond put down that everlasting pen of hers and gazed out of the open casement-window above the writing-table thoughtfully.... She didn't think, at first, that she was thinking of anything in particular.... But she was.

She was wondering why the men raised for the Army at Urquhart's Court were only three?

And Cecil's letter was interrupted while she wondered about it.

There ought to have been four men from the Court.

There was Mr. Ted Urquhart! why, why on earth was he not going too? Why wasn't he volunteering—putting in for some sort of a commission—enlisting—getting out somehow to the War?

For Rosamond Fayre, like a million other gently-nurtured girls, who could not have endured one of War's details, could yet contemplate War as a whole with a glad stir of the pulses and the deep-rooted conviction that "Two things greater than All things are—One is Love and the other is War"—Man's Big Job. Even so kindly men (while wincing from any hint of a woman's suffering) will think with a shake of the head of the woman who shirks the Big Job of womankind, and will say "A pity she doesn't have any babies."

Rosamond, the Army doctor's daughter, thought it not only a pity, but absolutely inexplicable that young Mr. Urquhart hadn't answered the call to arms.

Wouldn't they take him?

But they took slow, middle-aged men like Beeton? They took mere boys like the chauffeur? They took weeds like Mr. Marrow the gardener, thought the disdainful Rosamond, who, with all women, judged a man's usefulness entirely by his shoulders and limbs. Surely they'd jump at the sort of man who could carry castings and boilers and things up the Andes? Why, look at him! His clean "fit"-ness; his whole impression of lithe strength! Even Eleanor's girls had thought he "looked as if he might be a soldier" that time in France, so long ago, when they hadn't known who he was! Wasn't he going to turn soldier, now? His hand was probably as well used to a gun as Rosamond's own fingers were to the silver handle of her mirror.

Of course it had nothing to do with Rosamond. It wasn't her business to feel pleased with him, or the reverse.

But she couldn't help thinking that if she were in Eleanor's place she would be bitterly disappointed in Mr. Ted Urquhart. Even poor dear Cecil Bray, who was so much younger and who wasn't even a soldier's son, who had never been further away from Oxford than Florence, even he was showing himself to be after all more of a man than the other!

The thought of Cecil brought her back to his letter. The ink upon the paper was black and dry at the last sentence.

Slowly Cecil's letter was resumed.

"The Urquharts themselves have the intellectual, 'enlightened' Angell-ic sort of way of looking at the War, I think. Old Mr. Urquhart is one of those people who have always declared that War is now impossible, and that it has no part in our modern civilisation, our modern culture. And now he quite calmly says he's like Archimedes, poring over his documents, while the armies rage outside his tent. Miss Urquhart thinks that 'All War is so Wrong?" The only side she can see of it is that the husbands of so many of her old Club-girls are Reservists and that the pay their wives are allowed is so scandalously small. I am sure it will be supplemented by Miss Urquhart's last half-penny.

"Will you please remember me to your Mother when you write to her"——

Rosamond thought with a lump in her throat of gentle, grey-haired Mrs. Bray. She wished she might add another message. She envied her; she thought it must be wonderful to be the mother of a fighting son.... This she concluded to leave out. So she ended up—

—"and wishing you the best of luck, and plenty to do, and a safe return,

    "I remain, my dear Cecil,
            "Your old friend,
                    "Rosamond Fayre."

As she fastened the envelope she heard the sound of a quick footstep go past her door. Mr. Ted Urquhart's. How light-heartedly he was whistling as he turned into his own room!

And yet he was turning his back on what other young men of his kind were eager to meet!

Here, however, Rosamond Fayre's conclusions about the young master of The Court were quite wrong.

She did not know that long, long ago Ted Urquhart, who had trained as a Civil Engineer, had passed specially well in some technically military examination, had been recommended for a commission in the R.E. Special Reserve, and had put in the requisite drills at Aldershot before he went out to that work in South America....

And at this moment he was fuming that some detail of red tape prevented him from joining upon the instant. Still, waiting was discipline to which he must accustom himself.

And letters were not the only things upon which this young man could keep his mouth shut; he had not mentioned a word of his plans for joining, either to his uncle or to his fiancée.

Eleanor! She was the girl he was to marry, but there was not a girl or woman in the land to whom he would not presently stand in a direct relation—that of protector—the man behind the gun.

Up in his room he moved about, whistling, pacing up and down, trying to kill the time that dragged so before the authorities should find all in order; making himself ready as if he might hope to embark next day.

There was another copy of a birth-certificate to be turned up, too....

Also he might decide which of his smaller personal possessions could travel with him as part of his Service-kit.... His flask; he must get a lighter concern than that. A housewife he had. "Wire-nippers, mustn't forget," he interrupted the whistle to mutter. Then he went on whistling as he sorted receipted bills—("Hand over to Uncle Henry") and took out his worn letter-case ("Might get a smaller one"). On the Elizabethan bed was spread out that business-like invention of a soldier's wife, the newly-patented Manœuvre-rug ("Godsend, that, presently"). Some of these boots might be cleared away.... He lifted one of his riding-boots, turned it upside down to examine some slight sign of wear on the heel.

Once more, and very suddenly, he stopped that whistle.

He did not go on whistling.

There had dropped from its hiding-place in his boot, a letter.

He picked it up from the green carpet; gave it one glance, recognised the French stamp and the writing. Ah!

Yes; here it was. Delayed, long-looked-for, mislaid, and come back to him at last.

"The Hostel-letter!"

That white Hostel was deserted now; its green shutters barred, and all that friendly coast was to-day a waste for the Enemy....

And here, a written relic of those days of English holiday-making on French soil, was this letter.

Hurriedly young Urquhart tore it open. Quickly he read through the one sentence that it contained.

Then his brown hand, holding the letter, dropped.

"What?" he said curtly, aloud.

Again he held up the grey sheet, fastening his eyes upon the curly clear writing of it as if he would learn it off by heart.

Yet there was only one sentence in it, and such a short and simple one. It would not take much committing to memory. And he knew it: his memory would hold it for ever, together with a picture.... The War had almost blotted out that picture; now it returned, almost obliterating all sterner images for a moment.

The picture of a golden-haired girl in white, sitting writing at an open window, then raising her small burnished head on its creamy neck to tell him quietly that she had changed her mind about coming out with him that afternoon, and that he might post the letters for her instead.

This was all that she had written in the Hostel-letter:

"Mr. Urquhart, I Know quite well who you are."

And she'd signed it with her own name,

"ROSAMOND FAYRE."

He thrust the note into his pocket and stood frowning....

Presently he thought he'd better attend to the business in hand, turn up that blessed certificate. Where was the thing? He turned out the case of stationery on his writing-table—nothing there. He went to the small drawer where he kept handkerchiefs, turned it upside down upon the bed, glanced at the folded square of newspaper that had been taken to line the drawer. A headline took his eye: "The Naval Meeting at Kiel. Arrival of the British Squadron." Extraordinarily incongruous that looked to eyes that were now accustomed to such different items in the Morning Post! This was only dated June 24, yet it seemed part of something as remote and futile as his Uncle Henry's documents; an irresponsible echo from the Past.

The letter in his pocket might also stand for something just as remote, just as completely crowded out by weightier happenings....

But young Urquhart, keen as he was on those happenings, could not resign himself philosophically to forgetting the other. Not yet ... not entirely....

So when he had run the missing birth-certificate to earth under his mirror he turned again to the letter, and pondered over it....

Putting detail to detail; Eleanor's preoccupations, the mischievous temperament of that other girl; Eleanor's once more flavourless letters to him in Wales, the things that Professor-Johnnie had been saying the other afternoon about forgeries and plagiarisms, that other girl's sudden blush——

Seeing at last this letter of Miss Fayre's as the key to all those other letters, purporting to come from Eleanor, with that disturbingly unfamiliar note.

He saw it all now. Of course. That was it. She—the secretary-girl—had written those others!

If that proved to be so, thought Ted, absently polishing the bowl of his pipe on his jacket-sleeve, it meant that all his hopes of discovering a new Eleanor were dashed to the ground.

There was no "new" Eleanor.

There remained only the cold-blooded little cousin whom he ought to marry, and the other girl who was going to marry another man.

"Well! Couldn't have a more thoroughly cheerless look-out than that!"

Still! He'd be off soon. Off "somewhere in France." Somewhere, where he hoped it mightn't seem to matter so frightfully much which girl a man is engaged to out of all those that he had left behind him.

And he might make sure about that other; quite sure.

He slipped his pipe into his pocket again and turned quickly out of his room.

At the head of the staircase, as Luck would have it, he encountered that other girl, Eleanor's secretary.

She came out of her room behind him.

He stopped dead and wheeled round to face her.

And she, with the letter to Cecil Bray in her hand, tilted her burnished head slightly to glance up at Ted Urquhart. She was thinking to herself, "M'well! You don't look the kind of young man who would be gun-shy. So perhaps it isn't that? Perhaps you feel you've other responsibilities to attend to? This lovely old Court of yours, and so on? Still! I should have thought you'd have liked to take a hand yourself in defending it from those Blonde Beasts of Huns? To know you had done something at least to stop them from trampling their charges all across its lawns, and from making bonfires of its old carved oak, and from throwing Mrs. Marrow's little children, perhaps, into the flames? For that's the kind of thing they'd be doing in every Englishman's home at the present moment, if every young and fit Englishman had been the sort of slacker that you are!"

Now, these comments, of course, Miss Fayre kept to herself, as far as the letter was concerned. But the whole spirit of them was made clear enough by her manner. It was allowed to inform her (extremely meek) enquiry as to whether Mr. Urquhart would be kind enough to tell her "how you ought to address a Territorial Officer who had volunteered for Active Service; was it just Esquire, or did you, in time of war, put 'Lieutenant'?"

He answered her briefly.

He was perfectly conscious of that unuttered feminine fling at a defaulter so young and so able-bodied; he was also conscious that he could retaliate very completely if he chose.

She didn't deserve to be so beautiful, he thought.

She had the assurance to smile at him, and to say lightly, "Please go on; I mustn't pass you on the stairs. It means a fight—that is, it means that we shall quarrel."

"That would be a pity," said young Urquhart shortly.

He went down a step. Then he paused.

"One moment, Miss Fayre——"

It was in his mind to go on, "D'you mind coming out into the garden while we get something cleared up between us? ... Yes; there is something I wanted to say.... To begin with—You don't look the kind of girl who'd forge. Why did you do it?"

But he thought better of it. After all, this was a thing he had to speak to her employer about first.

Behind him the voice of the secretary said, just a little apprehensively, "Yes?"

"Oh—er—I only wanted to ask," he said, "if you knew where I should find Eleanor?"

"She is in the drawing-room," said Miss Fayre, and in her voice there might have been detected a note of relief mingled with some exasperation.

He went to find Eleanor in the drawing-room.

CHAPTER II

THE WHITE FEATHER

About the Court drawing-room that grey Army flannel still lay in drifts, shrouding the pinks and peaches and creams of the summery chintz, and heaping the soft dead-rose-coloured Aubusson carpet. On every chair were stacked green cardboard boxes, half-unpacked, with parcels of shirts, socks, mufflers, pyjamas, every sort of undergarment that the troops might or might not require; all ordered as patterns by Miss Urquhart.

The small, grey-gowned brunette herself was sitting in one of the window-seats with her back to the sun-bathed Terrace outside, bending those dark brows of hers over the complexities of a Balaclava helmet that she was going to knit, when her fiancé came quietly in and stood before her.

"Eleanor," he said.

"Twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-SIX," counted the absorbed Eleanor aloud over her knitting. "Wait a minute. Drop five and then go on—Oh, Ted, mind, please! That's the pattern for a soldier's bed-jacket that you've got your foot on."

"Sorry," said the young man, stepping back off one of the perforated plans of tissue-paper that added their litter to the other signs of toil. "If you can spare me one minute——"

"Five, six, seven," murmured Eleanor.

—"I came," he said, rather more abruptly, "to tell you something."

"Oh, yes?" said Eleanor, suddenly flurried, dismayed.

She thought to herself, "Oh dear! Is this what Rosamond said, after all? Is he going to begin about those letters?" And she made a movement as if she would put the work away from her lap. There was a frightened little catch in her voice as she went on, "What is it, Ted? I'll c-come into the office if you like, and get Miss Fayre to finish c-clearing up these b-b-b-bundles of stuff in here."

Young Urquhart reflected a little bitterly that his fiancée seemed able to rely upon Miss Fayre for doing plenty of her odd jobs; from tidying up her sewing to writing letters to the man she (Miss Fayre's employer) had promised to marry. But he only hastened to say, "No; don't trouble. I can tell you in here, it won't take a minute. I might have told you before. It's practically settled now. I've asked them to make what use they can of me for Active Service."

Eleanor looked up at him wide-eyed.

"Active Service?" she echoed blankly. "What? You d-don't mean you're going out too, to this perfectly horrible War?"

"I hope so."

"But, Ted," objected his fiancée, "you aren't in the Army."

"I hope to be," said the young fellow.

He went on to explain to the girl, in as few words as possible, his plans.

He concluded, "I hope this won't upset Uncle Henry or—you very much."

Eleanor shook her dark head with a sigh that was partly of reassurance. After all, that about the letters seemed to be a false alarm. This other was very startling, but it was Ted's affair.

"Well, I am afraid Father will think it such a pity. He considers all this fighting is so unnecessary," said Miss Urquhart, taking up her work again, "and really if you come to think of it, Ted, so it is. (Nine, ten, eleven; drop five again.) Why couldn't everything be settled by Arbitration? It seems so absurd, not. In the Twentieth Century and all, when we ought at least to have outgrown Brute Force, as Octavia Fabian says. She took me to such a splendid lecture about it not so long ago." The memory of that lecture restored the authoritativeness to Eleanor's sedate little voice as she concluded, "I suppose you've never read anything by a man called Normal Angell, Ted?"

"Yes, I have," said Ted.

"Well, then, you see what I think about it all: wasting the wealth of nations on great hulking armies and plunging innocent people into poverty and suffering, all for no reason! I do think (five, six, seven) that it's so wrong——"

"Well, Eleanor, I'm afraid we shan't agree on that if we go on talking about it for ever," put in the young man temperately. "I think I'm going, with luck, whatever happens."

A pause, occupied by Eleanor's half-whispered, "Cast on ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen——"

Then, raising his voice a trifle, young Urquhart began again: "And when I come back—— But that'll be time enough to talk about that then, perhaps. There are a good many things that we shall have to leave standing as they are for the present, Eleanor."

He meant to speak quietly, even casually. But his tone betrayed something of what he was feeling. Eleanor, who was not usually susceptible to "tones," but whose uneasy conscience had left her rather "jumpy," took the point. She laid her work down again, and glanced quickly at him. He was looking away, over her head, across the Terrace and the lawn outside, and the expression on his face betrayed, even to her, more than his tone had done.

Eleanor felt she could not endure any more surprises, any more suspense over this thing.

She rose and stood before him, small and sallow and nervous. With that little scared quaver in her voice again she began: "Ted! What 'things'? D-do you m-m-mean about——"

"Ah, never mind what about just now," the young man said quickly. "As I tell you, it doesn't so much matter——"

"Yes, but it does. B-b-because I've been very unc-c-comfortable about it! And I c-c-can't let you go like this. I must tell you that I think I know what you m-m-m-m-mean," protested his fiancée, in a flurry of stuttering. "Is it about some l-l-letters——?"

"No, no, don't let's worry about anything now."

"Yes, but I must. D-d-do let me exp-explain——" she pleaded.

The authoritativeness was melting away from her; so was that feeling of superiority which it was so easy to acquire in a lecture-hall surrounded by Octavia Fabian and her set. And as there were occasions when Miss Fayre craved for the unabashed fluency of the Principal Boy to back her up, so there were moments when Miss Urquhart longed for the moral support of a College-educated woman. It was not to hand. Helplessly Eleanor rushed upon the dangerous subject which had loomed above her ever since that morning of the conversation with her secretary over the pot-pourri. She made a little surrendering gesture with her hands as she cried:

"It is about those l-last four or five l-letters you got from me, isn't it? I d-did make Rosamond Fayre write them. I am so dreadfully sorry. But, Ted, I was so busy——"

"All right, all right," he said, looking away. "Never mind now."

But the small dark girl trembling before him would go on faltering out her trite, childish words of explanation:

"I n-never can write letters, any letters! I'd rather do accounts, sew, anything. And I hadn't ever seen you, you know! And I didn't see why Rosamond shouldn't. She said you'd find out. H-how did you?"

"Oh, by putting two and two together in one way and another, I suppose," he said listlessly. Nothing—except the Big Job—seemed worth wasting much interest over just now. Still, he asked, "Would you mind telling me how long the thing went on?"

"I'll l-look up in my notebook," returned Eleanor with a little gulp. "I've k-kept the dates of all letters sent——"

"Never mind the dates. Which was the first letter that she—that Miss Fayre wrote? D'you happen to know what was in it?"

"Yes, I do," returned the engaged girl. "The first that Rosamond wrote was the one with those rose-leaves in it. Perhaps you d-d-didn't notice?"

"I noticed them," said young Urquhart drily. "Miss Fayre send those?"

"No, no. I sent those, Ted," replied conscientious Eleanor, feeling constrained to add, "But she said I ought to! She s-seemed to think that people abroad would like anything that came from an English garden, and so I p-p-p-put in those p-p-p-petals from the rose that she was wearing at the time."

In spite of himself he felt he must take her up here.

He echoed, "'She' was wearing?"

"Yes; b-because I hadn't a flower on, Ted," apologised his fiancée. "I'm afraid it was Rosamond's rose."

"And her letters. She wrote all the letters after that. Well!" he said slowly, "Miss Fayre copies your handwriting, Eleanor, remarkably well."

He was surprised to hear Eleanor reply:

"Oh, no, she doesn't. I copy hers. I m-m-m-mean, I used to when I was at school with her," explained Miss Urquhart, looking at the moment not unlike the prim little monitress of her class who was listening to a scolding for some only just discovered fault. "And I kept it up, and it comes quite naturally to me now to write exactly like Rosamond Fayre, whenever I do write anything. That was long before there were any letters to you to write. The handwriting had n-n-nothing to do with it, except that it gave me the idea that Rosamond might write any letter for me, if I were specially busy!"

"I see," said Ted Urquhart smoothly. "And perhaps you didn't even need to see the letters."

"M-m-m-most of them I did," pleaded his fiancée, her little brown hands working with nervousness. "I read n-n-nearly all of them, Ted——"

He was still looking blankly away from her. He said, apparently to himself, "At least it wasn't deliberate forgery, then."

"Oh, no. P-please don't call it that. She s-s-said you would call it that! Rosamond said you'd be most frightfully angry with her and m-me and both of us," blurted out Eleanor distressfully. She glanced about the stately drawing-room that was so unspeakably useful for her gatherings; she'd meant to hold Guild of Needlework Meetings in this big room all through the Autumn. Was this the end of all those plans? Every trace of colour had left the small strained face as Eleanor said, "I sup-pup-pose it's quite natural that you should feel you couldn't forgive me for this."

"What?" he said, as if jerking himself away from thoughts that had been far enough away from this agitated little dusky-headed creature who stood there almost pathetically at his mercy; his wife-to-be whom he had never loved, could never love.

But he found it no difficulty to speak quite gently to her now.

"It's quite all right, Eleanor," he said soothingly, lightly touching her compact little shoulder. "Please don't look so worried about it. I wish you wouldn't. Really it was nothing. You hadn't seen me. What did it matter? Anyhow it doesn't matter now. Nothing does, particularly—I mean nothing does, honestly," said Ted Urquhart. "The whole secret's out now, such as it is, and—please, please don't let's have any rot about—any talk about forgiveness and so on!

"Let's talk about something else," he went on hurriedly, as Eleanor with a little gasp of relief took out her handkerchief and blew her nose. "By the way, I'm going to tell Uncle Henry now about my having applied to the R.E. Special Reserve. But I want that kept dark for the present. Don't say anything about it, if you don't mind, to—er—anybody else in the house."

"Very well, Ted," said his fiancée gratefully enough, as the young man left her. "I won't say a word."

She had, however, something upon the other subject to say to her secretary.

It was said that evening, after Miss Urquhart had dressed for dinner in a Lady Mayoressy-looking gown of mauve satin, the sight of which upon a brunette afflicted Rosamond almost to remonstrance.

Rosamond herself was stitching up a rent in the over-skirt of her long-suffering old black ninon rag when Miss Urquhart tapped at her door and entered, bearing herself with more than her usual dignity.

"Been having a row with him," Rosamond guessed from the aggressive tilt of Eleanor's chin, the line of her small mouth; but Eleanor soon put her right about the origin of this added stateliness.

It was triumph.

"Rosamond, I must tell you," began her employer, "that I have spoken to my fiancé, and explained to him all about those letters."

She paused for effect, while Rosamond stood, struck motionless in the act of putting in a stitch. Eleanor added: "And you were quite, quite wrong about its making him so angry!"

"What?" In her surprise Rosamond dropped her thimble and her reel of black silk; and she forgot to pick them up. She stared at the other girl and exclaimed, "Wasn't he angry, then?"

"Not in the least," said Miss Urquhart impressively. She might have been less ponderous had she not felt the need of regaining her own place in her self-esteem. She had been rather badly frightened; and she had shown it. "He quite understood. He said it didn't matter at all. So that needn't worry us—you any more."

She gave a little nod and went out, still holding the dusky head in a very straight line with the back of the purple satin waist-belt.

Miss Fayre, left to herself, gasped, "Well! I never heard of such an extraordinary young man as this of Eleanor's in the whole course of my life! Wasn't angry! Said it didn't matter! Oh, how differently he's turned out from what he seemed to be like, that time so long ago, in France. It just shows that one can't put any faith in anything nowadays, not even in one's first impressions of young men! I suppose all this is just of a piece with his not 'minding' staying at home and letting other people do his fighting for him. Why, he's just a——"

She dropped the mended flounce of her frock and primmed her red mouth into its most contemptuous curve. She turned to the door, thinking, "Doesn't seem to occur to him that he ought to volunteer, great, tall, sinewy waster! It's enough to make any one feel angry with him. And he isn't even man enough to be angry with me!"

Here again Rosamond Fayre was quite wrong.

For young Urquhart, who had found it easy enough to be forbearing to the apologetic Eleanor, felt furious beyond words with the girl whom Eleanor had employed. He found no earthly excuse for her; none! He would have liked to tell her so, the minx and hussy, who had been laughing at him all this while, in her sleeve—or so he thought. Of course he wouldn't be able to say a word.... Words, however, can so often be superseded by other forms of self-expression.

The first half-glance at Eleanor's "waster" of a Ted in the dining-room assured Rosamond that he was silently and coldly raging. Not at his fiancée. To Eleanor he talked, during dinner, brightly and casually enough. But at any word put into the conversation by the white-throated blonde who sat opposite to him at table, the young man became silent. And the casual way in which he averted his eyes conveyed more anger than the most furious glance above that group of plump white china-limbed Loves that held up their burden of grapes and nectarines in the centre of the table.

"Frightfully annoyed with me because I'm in the secret of how off-handedly his sweetheart treated him," translated Rosamond to herself.

Then the secretary-girl almost forgot that question of the letters she'd written, over which young Urquhart fumed and smarted at the moment. She was wondering, still wondering over the question of the War and of why this splendid-looking specimen of English manhood was still a civilian at home.

"He doesn't think much of me; but I am sure I think even less of him," reflected the girl. And if Ted Urquhart didn't at that moment realise what is the attitude of the feminine and full-blooded young woman towards the Non-combatant-from-Choice, it was certainly not Rosamond's fault, as she, in turn, averted her own blue eyes.

"Won't he go because of Eleanor?" she thought. "But lots of the men who went out were engaged and got married at the same time as they ordered their Service-kit. Won't Eleanor let him go? Pooh!—has he got other duties at home that are important enough to keep him back? What could they possibly be?"

"... another chauffeur as good, in Ransom's place; oh, yes," Ted Urquhart was saying to his uncle. "Find one easily——"

"Well, that's not enough to stay at home for, then," thought Rosamond Fayre, crumbling her dinner-roll.

"And I've gone all over the bailiff's books for you this afternoon, Uncle Henry——

"That's not so very important either!" pondered Rosamond, and waited, mocking, for the next remark. Perhaps that would be about something more important than the struggle for his country's supremacy?

"They sent over from the village to ask if we'd spare some vegetables and pears and things for Eleanor's Refugees' Convalescent Home," young Urquhart was saying. "As Marrow wasn't there to decide, I said they could come over to-morrow with hampers, and that I'd help 'em to pick——"

"Not as important as fighting to save people from becoming refugees!" commented Rosamond, silently.

But actually she said nothing further until dinner was over.

In the drawing-room Eleanor came to the chair where her secretary sat absorbed in the evening's news from those Belgian battle-fields, and held out a hank of thick, cocoa-coloured knitting-wool.

"Rosamond, I want you to help me with this if you don't mind," she said, with some of that extra dignity still lingering in her manner. "You hold it, please, while I wind."

Rosamond, dropping the Pall Mall Gazette, held out her supple white hands.

"But isn't this a job for Mr. Ted Urquhart?" she suggested, with a twinkle. "Some men seem to like holding wool, don't they?—of course it depends who it's for——"

"Ted is having his coffee with my father," vouchsafed Eleanor, beginning to wind her wool, "in the study."

"They seem to have plenty to talk about," commented Rosamond, mildly, turning first one pretty ringless hand and then the other as the wool slipped round them.

"Yes," agreed Eleanor, winding. "I know he had something particular to tell father."

Her small mouth tightened into its line of disapproval as she thought again of Ted's intention to volunteer for Active Service.

Probably just because all the other young men who'd been at school with him seemed to be doing the same thing! Eleanor was very much afraid that she knew what really intelligent people would call Ted—and the others. Yes, even if he hadn't been a soldier to start with, he had the—the sort of brand of it, born on him. Ted Urquhart was what was always called, "The Usual, Brainless, Army Type."

Really, as Octavia Fabian always said, these men were like sheep in the way they followed one another along conventional lines. It was "the thing" to be "keen" on the War. Instead of thinking things out for himself, and letting Eleanor tell him what those Peace Society people always proposed, advised....

She wondered what her father would say.

"Needless! Needless folly, the whole thing," her father was saying at that moment in that book-lined mausoleum of a study of his, where Ted Urquhart had once sat waiting for his first sight of the girl to whom he was pledged.

The young man sat now in the chair he had occupied then. His impatient eyes were fixed on the polished floor as he listened quietly to his uncle's view of the case.