Mrs. Denton had risen. Joan laughed. She thought she would be a fit candidate.!

“Don’t be so harsh with me,” pleaded Joan meekly. “I’m trying to think. Yes,” she continued, “decidedly he’s got brains.” The small, hot hand clasped Joan’s convulsively.

Men sitting by the roadside in the mud, gnawing at unsavoury food; men squatting by the ditches, examining their sores, washing their bleeding feet in the muddy water, replacing the muddy rags about their wounds. “Quite likely,” thought Flossie; “just the type that sort of man does marry. A barmaid, I expect.” She had gone down to Liverpool, intending to persuade her father to leave the control of the works to Arthur, and to come and live with her in London; but had left without broaching the subject. There were nights when she would trapse the streets till she would almost fall exhausted, rather than face the solitude awaiting her in her own rooms. But so also there were moods when, like some stricken animal, her instinct was to shun all living things. At such times his presence, for all his loving patience, would have been as a knife in her wound. Besides, he would always be there, when escape from herself for a while became an absolute necessity. More and more she had come to regard him as her comforter. Not from anything he ever said or did. Rather, it seemed to her, because that with him she felt no need of words.