Joan’s present lay on the table near to her, as if she had just folded it and placed it there: the little cap and the fine robe of lawn: as if for a king’s child. “Of course you know best, dear,” she admitted. “Perhaps I am a bit too fond of bright things.”!

“I shall be going away soon, for a little while,” she said. The talk had helped her to decision. “When I come back I will come and see you all. And you must all come and see me, now and then. I expect I shall have a flat of my own. My father may be coming to live with me. Good-bye. Do all you can to help him.” Mary Stopperton was afraid he never had, in spite of its being so near. “And yet he was a dear good Christian—in his way,” Mary Stopperton felt sure.

They remained confused in her memory, these talks among the wounded men in the low, dimly lighted hut that had become her world. At times it was but two men speaking to one another in whispers, at others every creaking bed would be drawn into the argument. “You won’t mind Robert not wearing evening dress,” she said. “He never will if he can help it. I shall just slip on a semi-toilette myself.” “I couldn’t face it,” he went on; “the way people would be looking at me in trains and omnibuses; the things people would say of me, the things I should imagine they were saying; what my valet would be thinking of me. Oh, I’m ashamed enough of myself. It’s the artistic temperament, I suppose. We must always be admired, praised. We’re not the stuff that martyrs are made of. We must for ever be kow-towing to the cackling geese around us. We’re so terrified lest they should hiss us.”