She had talked so rapidly Joan felt as if her hat were being blown away. She had difficulty in recognizing Flossie. All the cocksure pertness had departed. She seemed just a kid. Mrs. Denton had died. She had left Joan her library, together with her wonderful collection of note books. She had brought them all up-to-date and indexed them. They would be invaluable to Francis when he started the new paper upon which they had determined. He was still in the hospital at Breganze, near to where his machine had been shot down. She had tried to get to him; but it would have meant endless delays; and she had been anxious about her father. The Italian surgeons were very proud of him, he wrote. They had had him X-rayed before and after; and beyond a slight lameness which gave him, he thought, a touch of distinction, there was no flaw that the most careful scrutiny would be likely to detect. Any day, now, he expected to be discharged. Mary had married an old sweetheart. She had grown restless in the country with nothing to do, and, at the suggestion of some friends, had gone to Bristol to help in a children’s hospital; and there they had met once more.!

A servant brought the coffee and went out again. Her father lighted a cigar and handed her the cigarettes. “Don’t be so silly,” she cried. “There’s nothing going to happen. You’re going to get fat and well again; and live to see him Prime Minister.”

She thought it ended. But yet she sat there motionless. “Couldn’t you get enough money together to start something quickly,” she continued, the idea suddenly coming to her. “I think I could help you. It wouldn’t matter its being something small to begin with. So long as it was entirely your own, and couldn’t be taken away from you. You’d soon work it up.” “Thought you looked a bit like it,” said the girl. “I’m in the chorus. It’s better than being in service or in a shop: that’s all you can say for it.”