“Ivanoff’s,” explained the Human Document. “He was our only child.” “What on earth induced Helen to bring that poor old Dutch doll along with her?” demanded Flossie. “The woman never opened her mouth all the time. Did she tell you?”!

Joan promised, and the child went out. She looked pretty when she smiled. She closed the door behind her noiselessly. “It would be rather interesting, a fight between them,” said Joan. “Myself I should back Phillips.”

“It is breakfast time,” he explained, as they emerged into the air. “We leave each other alone for half an hour—even the snipers. But we must be careful.” She followed in his footsteps, stooping so low that her hands could have touched the ground. They had to be sure that they did not step off the narrow track marked with white stones, lest they should be drowned in the mud. They passed the head of a dead horse. It looked as if it had been cut off and laid there; the body was below it in the mud. “Oh, it isn’t that,” he answered. “But she’s frightened. You know. Says life with me is going to be a bit too uncertain for her. Perhaps she’s right.” One of Joan’s earliest recollections was the picture of herself standing before the high cheval glass in her mother’s dressing-room. Her clothes lay scattered far and wide, falling where she had flung them; not a shred of any kind of covering was left to her. She must have been very small, for she could remember looking up and seeing high above her head the two brass knobs by which the glass was fastened to its frame. Suddenly, out of the upper portion of the glass, there looked a scared red face. It hovered there a moment, and over it in swift succession there passed the expressions, first of petrified amazement, secondly of shocked indignation, and thirdly of righteous wrath. And then it swooped down upon her, and the image in the glass became a confusion of small naked arms and legs mingled with green cotton gloves and purple bonnet strings.