Chapter XIII: Part 13

"Where's His Nibs?" she asked. For not even the chastening of bereavement could cure Patrine of slanginess.

"Called to B.P.G. Headquarters suddenly." Margot blew rings. "Or doing duty for some pal or other at the Tower. Don't bother about him! Tell me--why can't you stay with me?"

"Aunt Lynette wants me, for one thing. And----"

"And who for the other?"

"A man!" Patrine sent a thin blue spiral of cigarette smoke twirling upwards from her pursed lips. Intently she watched it climbing and spreading. When it faded between her absorbed eyes and the Futurist mouldings of the lapis lazuli-grounded ceiling whereon a silver comet swung in a great elliptical orbit about a golden central Sun, she resumed:

"A man----"

"That makes two men!" said Margot shrewdly,

"No, only one. A man I'm going to marry. Rather soon, too," said Patrine calmly, and put her cigarette into her mouth again.

"PAT!"

Margot was staring at her blankly.

"Well, my dinkie?"

"Isn't this frightfully previous?"

Patrine removed the cigarette to say:

"It depends on how you look at things."

"But--when did you meet?"

"In Paris."

"Do I know him?"

"No, luckily for me!"

Margot's small, amazed face dimpled a little at the compliment.

"Is he nice?"

"I think so!"

"In Our Set?"

"I don't think so! He's a Flying Man by profession. Now you know nearly as much as I do," said Patrine. "And I've to be getting back to Harley Street." She rose from the sofa, towering over her small, indignant friend.

"You're not going out of this room until you tell me the rest of it! What is his name, and when did--it--come off?"

"His name is Alan--and he only asked me on Wednesday, when he came to Harley Street. He has called every day since that horrible 18th of July, but this time he came to bring"--Patrine choked a little--"Bawne's Scout staff and smasher. They had been forgotten in the dressing-shed at the Flying School. Lynette was too ill to go down to receive them. I had to instead--and the sight of them broke me up."

"I--see!"

"And," Patrine went on, "he--Alan--was being sympathetic, when Uncle Owen came in."

"My hat!" Margot sat up, her small face alight and sparkling. "The Doctor-man with the chin and eyebrows! Did he give you unlimited wigging or relent and bless you like the heavy uncle in a proper French Comedy?"

"He saw how things were between us. He wasn't astonished. He was very kind. He is always kind!" said Patrine, swallowing. "If I really believed God were as good as Uncle Owen, I shouldn't be afraid to die."

"He makes me feel like an earwig under a steam-roller," affirmed Margot. "And the charming aunt. Does she cotton to the engagement?"

"Lynette is not, for the present, to be told. I asked that. It seems so cruel to be happy when she is so broken-hearted."

"Umps! Then--Irma and your gay and giddy mater? How do they take it?"

"They haven't been asked to take it any way."

"Oh well! Love is good while it lasts," Kittums said from the summit of a pedestal of experience, "but if I could change back to Margot St. John again----"

"You wouldn't!"

"Wouldn't I, that's all! This horror that November brings--that's coming every day closer! ... Pat--I haven't told Franky yet, that's to be got over! But I've definitely settled to go to that Institute in Berlin where women can have babies without knowing anything about it--under--Bother! I never can remember the name of that drug!"

Patrine sat up. Her face was curiously expressionless. She said, crushing out the last spark of her cigarette-end against the face of a Chinaman on the lacquer ash-tray that occupied a little stand beside the sofa with the silver Sobranie box:

"You told me something--you showed me the pink book with the pretty title, 'WEEP NO MORE MOTHERS'--wasn't that the name? You've made up your mind? Does it cost the earth?"

"Two hundred for patients of the superior class--_wohlgeboren_ clients. Half paid in advance! Stiff!--but to make sure of not suffering I'd plank a thou'! It's a nightmare, and a Day-mare, that haunts me all the clock round. That's why I'd change--and be Margot St. John again! That's why I can't whoop with joy when my friends tell me they're going to be spliced!"

Patrine got up.

"Oh!--well! Perhaps I shall escape. After all--it's a lottery!"

"Not for big, splendid women like you. You were made to be a mother, Pat!"

"_Don't!_"

She kissed Margot hastily and went to the door.

"Stop!" Margot scrambled off the sofa. "You've forgotten the most important thing of all. Hasn't 'Alan' got a surname by any chance?"

Patrine looked back over her shoulder with something of the old smile.

"Rather! What do you think of Sherbrand?"

"What do I think of Sherbrand? How odd! It's Franky's family name!"

"Queer coincidence. But _my_ Sherbrand hasn't any relatives in the Peerage!--or if he has, he hasn't told me! I'll butt you wise when I know him well enough to ask him about them. You see, the whole thing has been beautifully sudden!"

"Bring him to lunch at the Club to-morrow. You're not in mourning, and if you were it wouldn't matter. It's simply a family affair, if he's really Franky's cousin. So, say yes."

"Very well, if he'll come!"

*CHAPTER XLIX*

*THE WAR CLOUD BREAKS*

Patrine kissed her friend again, and went, leaving Kittums in a whirl of astonishment. To Franky, presently returning from the conjectural region known as Headquarters she announced:

"Here's something like news! Pat Saxham--the girl with the Nile sunrise hair that you don't like!--is going to marry a Flying Man. And his name is--the same as yours!"

"By the Great Snipe! you don't say so!"

Franky, slim and dapper in the scarlet Guards' tunic and crimson sash, divested himself of his sword, dropped his immaculate buckskin gloves into his forage-cap, and sighed with undisguised relief as the attentive Jobling, who had been hovering in the background, disappeared with these articles. Then he proceeded carefully to choose a cigarette from the silver box of Sobranies, lighted it up, bundled Fits out of her master's corner of the sofa, and dropped into it with a sigh of relief.

"Sherbrand.... Must be the aviator-fellow we met in Paris. The chap whose hoverer was bein' tested by the swells of the French S. Ae! Saved your life and snubbed me for askin' him to dine with us! Well, that's what I call a cannon off the cush for the Saxham girl!" His dislike of her betrayed itself in his tone. "Must be the same man! supposin' him short of a father! Hilton of Ours showed me an advertisement in the B.M.D. column of _The Banner_ this afternoon briefly announcin' my Uncle Sherbrand's death. Never read _The Banner_--that's how I missed it. Can't say I feel much like puttin' crape on my sleeve in any quantity," went on Franky. "My Uncle Noel has been the Family Skeleton, poor old chap! since that affair in 1900. No doubt his son's cut up--wouldn't be decent of him not to! But at any rate it brings him nearer these--" Franky stuck out a beautifully-cut pair of red-striped auxiliaries ending in dazzling patent-leather Number Eights, and craning over Fits, who had jumped upon his knees, regarded them critically, ending after a pause--"By one life out of the three that stand between. Don't be so gushin', old girl!" The rebuke was for Fits, who had taken advantage of her master's attitude to lick him on the chin.

Margot crinkled her slender eyebrows and moved restlessly among her big bright, muslin-covered cushions as she asked:

"Is this Volapuk or Esperanto? For mercy's sake don't be obscure! Why is this Flying Sherbrand nearer your shoes by one life out of three? What has he got to do with your shoes at all?"

"Don't you switch on?" He lifted his sleek brown head and turned his neck in the setting of the gold-encrusted collar badged with the Scottish Thistle, and stared at Margot with the brown eyes that had seemed so beautiful under the awnings of the Nile _dahabeyah_, and were only stupid now.

"Have you forgotten? Don't you twig, best child? Suppose--for the joke of it--there's War, and I get wiped out tryin' to keep up the fightin' traditions of my family and get a bit of gun-metal to hang on a ribbon here." He glanced down at the left breast of the red coat, guiltless of anything in the decoration line. "Then--unless the child"--his tone grew gentle--"our kiddy that's coming, happens to be a boy--my Cousin Sherbrand steps into my billet. He's the next heir to the Norwater Viscounty. Look in Burke or Whittaker if you don't believe me! Get down, old lady, you're coverin' me with white hairs!" He bundled Fits off his knees, got up and rang. "A man ought to be here from Armer's," he told the servant who responded. "Armer and Co., Pall Mall, Military Tailors. Send him up to my room and tell Jobling to help him with all those cases and things. No! don't send Jobling!--send Dowd!"

The said Dowd being Franky's soldier servant, between whom and the civilian Jobling reigned a profound mutual contempt.

"What is Dowd going to do?"

"Oh! only goin' to help overhaul my Service kit and so on," Franky responded lightly. "What with gettin' leave and bein' married I've hardly sported kharks since last Autumn Slogs. Wouldn't do to find myself too potty to get into the regulation tea-leaves in case my country called."

"What rot! ..."

But Franky had swung out of the room and clattered upstairs with Fits close upon his heels. Fits, who, ordinarily unwilling to be out of sight and sound of her master, now adhered to him like a leech, or his shadow; whining and fidgeting in his absence, as though her feminine mind were beset by haunting apprehensions of some sudden parting, or impending loss.... Long afterwards Margot wondered: "If I had loved him as Fits loves him--should I not also have felt that foreshadowing dread?"

But she was conscious only of her own physical discomfort and the increasing weariness that movement brought her. Sharp discontent peaked and pinched the tiny features. She caught a reflection of them in a screen-mirror and shuddered. With every day that dawned now, their wild-rose prettiness faded. By-and-by--

"If I were as good to look at as I used to be in June--or even a month ago!" she wondered--"would _he_ leave me as he is leaving me to-night--to go down to the House? Don't I know that the House means the Club, or the music-hall, or a card-party! Why do men get the best of everything and never have to pay the bill?"

She dined in a tea-gown, and when Franky, still in that strange mood of suppressed excitement, attired to four pins in the magpie evening garb of civilized life, had kissed her and said: "So-long, Kittums, little woman! I'm going down to the Big Talk Shop for a bit. Expect me back on the doormat when the Mouthpieces of the Nation have done swoppin' hot air!" she tucked up her feet on the big sofa in her charming drawing-room and read "WEEP NO MORE, MOTHERS," until the pink pamphlet with the gilt sunrise stamped upon it grew heavy in the tiny hand. Then she rang for Pauline and betook herself to bed.

The bedroom was blue-green as a starling's egg, its painted walls adorned with delicate lines of black and silver. Perhaps you can see Kittums, under her Brittany lace coverlet amongst the big frilled pillows in one of the narrow black oak bedsteads standing side by side on a carpet of deep rose. A silver night-lamp burned under a dome of sapphire glass on her night-table, and an electric clock noiselessly marked the hours. Lying thus, wrapped about with all the swaddlings of Civilisation, this dainty daughter of the Twentieth Century strove in blind revolt against Nature, the huge relentless Force that was slowly grinding her down. The ant that gets fed into the mill-hopper with the grain might resent the millstone after the same fashion. Ridiculous, but infinitely pathetic, the tragedy of an infinitesimal thing.

What did Franky comprehend of her terrors, her forebodings? Even Saxham's counsels were a man's counsels, his advice a man's advice. "_Face your ordeal! do not flee it, lest you encounter something even more terrible!_" Not more terrible for oneself, mind you! but for that unknown, conjectural being, referred to by Franky with such foolish tenderness.

The child always! Never Margot! She set her little teeth, staring out into the blue-green dusk from among her pillows. What if it were to be always so? "My boy," "My son," for ever, instead of "My wife."

It was a breathless night. A hush of suspense brooded over the huge, hot city, such as prevails before the breaking of a storm. Sentences from the Secretary's letter came back to her as she tossed under the cool light coverings:

"_Wiser not to delay, lest travelling should become difficult. It will be advisable indeed for the gracious lady to start as soon as may be. English bank-notes are negotiable here to some extent. A sum in gold is most convenient to bring._"

Why hang back? Why hesitate because one expected opposition from Franky? Why not slip off on the quiet without a hint to him? What a perfectly tophole idea! One could pack secretly, get funds from one's Bank, and skip with Pauline via Ostend to-morrow! Berlin was a dull place, but anyhow one had got to be dull for some months yet. The thing could be arranged while Franky was absent on duty at the Tower, or on one of his mysterious errands to Headquarters. One could cable to him afterwards from the _Fraueenklinik_ at Berlin.

An electrical thrill of energy and purpose volted through the humming-bird brain under the silken brown waves. Margot tossed back her coverings and sat up suddenly in bed. Her great eyes gleamed like a lemur's in the light of the night-globe. She would steal that march on Franky, she told herself, to-morrow, or at the latest, the day after. Wouldn't it be A1?

The small face dimpled into mischievous smiles. She caught a glimpse of it in a mirror on the opposite wall and kissed her little hand to Margot with saucy gaiety. If Franky, down at Westminster, could only know what Kittums was planning! She had a vision of the Houses of Parliament under the white-hot August moonlight, outlined in bluish-green and dazzling silver against a background of glittering black. Like a Limoges enamel, she told herself. The long lines of electric arc-lights stretching over the bridge, up Whitehall and down Victoria Street--all along the Thames Embankment--strings of diamonds--crowds and crowds of people ... talking bosh about War when there wouldn't----She was asleep.

Asleep, while packed thousands waited under the blue glare of the arc-lights for the rising of the Curtain on the World Tragedy, of which four yearlong Acts have been played out. For the tag of which Humanity is waiting with held breath, too weary even to cry out: "_How long, O Lord?--how long?_"

Prone to assume strange, angular attitudes when speaking, the Foreign Secretary hung over and clutched at the dispatch-box before him, as though it literally contained that most malignant of all the swarm of Evils that issued from the Box of Pandora, as he told his hearers of the rejection of the German bribe and warned them of the imminence of a Declaration of War. Then, amidst increasing, deepening excitement, the Prime Minister read the appeal of the King of the Belgians, and told of Great Britain's ultimatum to Germany....

No wonder those close-packed crowds of sturdy Britons waited under the blue glare of the arc-lamps to hear Big Ben bell the midnight hour. As the great voice boomed Twelve from the illuminated square of the dial amidst the striking of the countless clocks of London, a tremendous roar of cheers acclaimed the pipping of the egg of Fate and Destiny, echoed by other crowds in distant thoroughfares, spreading in waves to the unseen horizon, whose East was pregnant with the Kaiser's Day.

That Fourth of August; Eve of the Feast of British Oswald, King, soldier and Saint, whose Address to his Northumbrian warriors before the battle of Denisburn, fought against Pagan Cadwalla in 633, the Catholic Church enshrines in Her Chronicles:

"_Let us all kneel and jointly beseech the true and living GOD ALMIGHTY in His Mercy to defend us from the doughty and fierce enemy. For He knoweth that we have undertaken a just War...._"

"Whereupon," says the Venerable Bede, "all did as the King commanded. And advancing towards the enemy with the first dawn of day, they won the victory their Faith deserved."

And before midnight of this pregnant Fourth of August, from the great Wireless Station of Eilvise in Hanover, Germany flung round the world this vital message to all her mercantile Marine:

"War declared on England! Make as quickly as you can for a neutral port!"

On the outbreak of War the British Navy cut the All German cables. One by one the German Colonial Wireless Stations were dismantled. When the great station at Kamina in Togoland fell, the only remaining link in the system was between the Fatherland and the United States.

Dawn outlining the silken blinds, vied with the blue glimmer of the night-lamp as Margot wakened, to hear, in the hush that precedes the Brocken-hunt of Sloane Street motor-traffic, Franky's low, urgent appeal:

"_Kittums_! Kittums, best child!"

"What on earth did you wake me for?" said a sleepy and distinctly cross voice.

"Couldn't help it! I simply had to tell you!" Franky began.

The little hand touched the electric clock-button and on the ceiling wavered a gigantic dial of yellow brightness.

"_Had_ to! At three o'clock in the morning! When I was having such a tophole dream! Thought I was back at the Club in my three dear rooms with the Adams doors and chimney-pieces--and Pauline came in with a huge basket of white flowers--and I asked: '_Who are they for?_' And she said: 'For Mademoiselle!' And I was Margot St. John--and had never been married!" There was infinite wistfulness in the little voice.

"White flowers mean death, don't they, when you dream of 'em? And I'm sorry your dip in the Bran Tub of Matrimony has turned out such a bad investment. What I came to tell you should revive your hopes of making a better one, my child!"

That jarring note of mingled resentment and irony, how new and strange it sounded to Margot! Until this moment Franky's voice had never been anything but gentle. It was gentle now as he said, at his dressing-room door:

"Finish your sleep. I was rather a brute to wake you!" He was going without a backward glance.

"Come back! Come off it! Don't be dignified!" Margot called after the retreating figure. "I'm quite awake now, so you'd better tell. What's on?"

He came back to the bedside, looking tall and shadowy in the blue dimness. Margot put up a little hand and patted his cheek. There were wet drops upon the smooth, warm skin.... Perhaps he had walked home, and it had been raining. Or--

"_Franky_! You're not----"

He captured the little hand and took it in both his own, and squeezed it. He said in a cheerful but rather choky voice:

"Of course not! And--the news could have waited. Only--since midnight England and Germany have been at War. The Big Scrap is three hours old. First battalion of Ours is under orders for the Front--I've exchanged out of the Second with Ackroyd--too sick a man for fightin' just now, luckily for me. You know Ackroyd. Used to flirt with him frightfully--to give me beans when I'd vexed you when we were first engaged. When do we go, did you ask? Liable to be off at any old minute. By-bye, little woman. Too late to go to bed--heaps of things to attend to. God bless you! See you at brekker--or lunch, if I've luck."

*CHAPTER L*

*THE EVE OF ARMAGEDDON*

Kittums, upon that fateful morning, coming down to breakfast and finding no Franky, was annoyed. One might just as well have had breakfast in bed. She didn't want any, but Cook would be hurt if the chowder and eggs, and croquettes of chicken weren't eaten. Therefore Margot ate--to avoid wounding the cook. The daily papers she left untouched, knowing that War would leap out from the huge capitals heading the columns and strike her in the eyes.

She had herself dressed and 'phoned for the car. The house did not seem a place to stay in, somehow. Dowd was busy in his master's room, ordering Jobling about in loud authoritative tones and being waited upon by the maids. Even Pauline, ordinarily scornful, referred to him as "Monsieur Dowd" instead of "_zat man Dow!_"

Once in Sloane Street, the War rushed at you. Groups of men, young, old or middle-aged, stood talking at every street-corner, newspapers rustled in every hand. You couldn't escape the papers. Huge flaring headlines shrieked from the broad-sheets in the gutters and on the railings: "WAR DECLARED! ULTIMATUM EXPIRED. BRITISH FLEET READY FOR BATTLE. INVASION OF BELGIUM BY GERMAN ARMY CORPS!" The drapery salesman who was to win the Victoria Cross, called from the top of a Knightsbridge motor-bus to the grocer's assistant who was to receive the Medaille Militaire at the doughty hands of Joffre.... The budding airman who was to bring down a Zeppelin single-handed chuffed past on a motor-cycle--the girls who were to make shells for British guns, or pack made ones with T.N.T. and kindred explosives, tripped along in their transparent hobble-skirts, to meet Alf and Ted at the Tube. And neither Alf, who subsequently took five Huns prisoner by the single hand, shepherding them back to the British lines with dunts of the gun-butt and sarcasms more pointed, nor Ted, who threw himself down over the exploding bomb, dying that his comrades in the trench might live, dreamed what kind of chick would pip Fate's egg for him or her presently. Yet the dullest face wore a new expression, in the tamest eyes burned the light of battle! Unquenched it burns in them still, after four dreadful years of War.

The Club, already deserted by August holiday-makers, would be utterly abandoned to chimney-sweeps, charwomen and window-cleaners, and yet Margot told the chauffeur to drive to the Club.

Turning out of Piccadilly she discovered Short Street to be blocked by taxi-cabs. An endless procession of telegraph-boys plunged in and out between the thudding swing-doors of the vestibule. The vestibule was congested with battered, dusty ladies, ladies' maids even dustier and more battered, and travelling bags battered and dusty to the _nth_ degree.

Some of the bags were bursting, not a few of the maids were hysterical. All the returned travellers were telling their adventures at once. The air was thick with exclamations, explanations, cries and ejaculations. Unfed, unslept, baggageless and penniless in many instances, the members of the Ladies' Social--seeking health, or novelty, in half the pleasure-resorts upon the map of Europe--had come hurtling back to Short Street like leaves driven before the furious blast of War.

"Has anything happened?"

Lady Norwater addressed this query to the Club hall-porter, a bald person of habitually slow movements and singularly bland address. The man gnashed his teeth at her, uttering a sound between a groan and a snarl--made as though to tear non-existent hair,--leaped with astonishing nimbleness over a pile of luggage, and vanished. Margot would have made a note of his conduct in the Complaints register, but that the hall-table was obliterated by heaps of rugs, dust-cloaks and waterproofs. Wondering, she made her way into the big General Room on the ground-floor.

Here travel-creased, dust-smeared members sat in voluble rows on the comfortable sofas, or reclined speechless in the capacious armchairs. Medical men, hastily summoned by 'phone, moved noiselessly from patient to patient. Husbands and male friends listened not unmoved, to piteous recitals of adverse experiences undergone on enemy ground.

Kittums, snatched into the whirl, moved from friend to friend, gathering experiences. Mrs. Charterhouse, with her Pekinese pug and her maid, had just arrived at Homburg to undergo treatment for a twenty-two-inch waist when the War Cloud gathered monstrous on the horizon. Had not her Swiss doctor written a warning instead of a prescription the white and golden Cynthia, Mademoiselle Mariette and Chin-Chin, would at this moment have been languishing on rye bread and bean coffee in a Teutonic jail.

"As it is, we've spent a whole week, and every sou we had on us making the journey!" said Cynthia, in her plaintive tones. "They held us up at Frankfurt, Basel, and Geneva! What inquisitions, what scowling suspicious looks! To be hunted and suspect makes you wicked, I've found out! When we got to Paris at four yesterday morning and took a rickety _fiacre_ to the Palais--all the taxis have vanished!--I could have _prayed_ for a cup of tea and a roll! But at the Palais all was confusion. The hotel was shutting up--every male servant called to the Reserve. We got to the 'Spitz'--the same experience there! Exhausted, I sat on something in the vestibule--it moved, groaned, and I found it to be the wreck of Sir Thomas Brayham. He and Lady Wathe, his man and her maid, who have been all through July at Franzenbad in the Egerland,--reaching Paris after awful adventures, had all four been hurled out in the same way. One of those jiggety motor-omnibuses took all of us to the Couronne. They were full to the roofs and cellars, but they wedged us in, somehow! Then, for two days Sir Thomas tore round Paris trying to get _laissez-passers_." She turned her lovely eyes upon a large, stertorously-breathing but otherwise inert object reclining with closed eyes and folded hands in the biggest of the Club armchairs. "Didn't you, Sir Thomas?"

"Beparr?"

Brayham, waking with a bewildered stare, regarded the charming Cynthia uncomprehendingly until the Goblin, sitting opposite, centre of a knot of bosom friends, repeated the query:

"Didn't you run about Paris for passes for two days?"

"No!" bounced out Brayham, now aroused, and purpling under the coal-dust that begrimed his large, judicial visage. He added, with a vestige of his King's Bench manner, as the Goblin stared at him in concern for his mental state: "I retain the use of my reason, dear friend! But I WILL NOT consent that the varied tortures of the abominable ordeal I have undergone could possibly be packed within the nutshell limits of forty-eight hours! Mph!"

So dust-covered was the ex-Justice that the very act of shaking his head rebukingly at the Goblin, raised a cloud that made him sneeze. He uttered the curious composite sound that heralds sternutation, drew out a voluminous, coal-dusty handkerchief, stared at it indignantly, and in the very act of returning it to his pocket--fell asleep again.

"A perfect wreck, as I said just now!" whispered Mrs. Charterhouse to Kittums.

"_How_ I congratulate you, dear Lady Wastwood," said the Goblin, "on not having gone abroad!"

"Was it so horrid?" asked Trixie, sympathetically, arching the eyebrows that resembled musical slurs.

"Was it so--" Lady Wathe shrugged her thin shoulders and gave the ghost of one of her rattling laughs. "If to fight your way back, stage by stage, amidst inconceivable difficulties, obstacles and insults, is horrid!--if to travel for two long days and nights in trains crowded to suffocating excess merits the term--" She loosened the quadruple string of superb Oriental pearls that tightly clipped her stalk-like throat and went on: "If it comes under the heading to find yourself and your friends--in tatters after a suffocating struggle!--packed with sixty other squalid wretches in a luggage-van _en route_ for Dieppe! If to sit for three hours on your jewel-case, waiting, in a crush of congested humanity, for the arrival of the Newhaven boat--if to fight as with beasts at Ephesus to gain its gangway--if to fall in a heap on the sodden deck--to lie there lost to everything but the fact that the waves that drench you are British waves, and the British coast is slowly crawling nearer!--if all this and how much more, can be lumped under the term of horrid, it has been, dear Lady Wastwood, horrid in the extreme!"

Lady Wastwood's small, triangular, white face with the V-shaped scarlet mouth, looked enigmatical. She arched the thick black slurs that were her eyebrows again, and said not without intent, to her crony Cynthia Charterhouse:

"_Who_ would have _dreamed_ only three weeks ago, when that excessively long-legged and extremely good-looking Count von Herrnung sat here and talked to us about German women and German Supermen--that we should be at War to-day with Germany?"

"Poor Count Tido!" Something rattled in the Goblin's meagre throat as though she had accidentally swallowed some of her pearls. "That dreadful report in _The Wire_ made the Franzenbad treatment disagree with me horribly! To be drowned in that commonplace North Sea crossing, upon the very eve of realising the one ambition of his life! For he hated us so thoroughly! His Anglophobia was a perfect obsession. Poor dear Tido! One might call it a wasted career!" The speaker dried a tear and continued: "His family will be frantic. You know he was to have been married in October! Baroness Kriemhilde von Wolfensbragen-Hirschenbuttel. Immensely rich! Her father has large interests in the pearl-fisheries of German New Guinea. Her betrothal gift, a superb black and white pearl, the Count always wore as a mascot. Poor Baroness! She will be inconsolable. Marriage means the first draught of real freedom to young German girls!"

Mrs. Charterhouse said in her sweetly venomous way:

"Miss Saxham bears up--under the circumstances!"

"Under what circumstances, might one presume to ask?" Then, reading aright the ambiguous smile of Mrs. Charterhouse, the Goblin rattled out her characteristic laugh:

"What absurdity! You refer to a mere dinner-table flirtation in Paris. The mere _rapprochement_ of _atomes crochus_! Miss Saxham and Lady Beauvayse dined with us on the night of the Grand Prix. Poor Tido was certainly struck with her. I remember he talked about her eyes and figure afterwards. But her hair being so black and growing so heavily--did not please him. He found the effect--I think his term was--'too crepuscular.'"

"Ah! You throw a ray," said Mrs. Charterhouse in that sugared way of hers, "on a mystery that has intrigued me. Now I know why Miss Saxham went to the Atelier Wiber in the Rue de la Paix and got her crepuscular tresses changed to terra-cotta!"

"_Not_ saffron? Now," said Lady Wastwood, pensively tilting her own green-gold head and elevating her arched black eyebrows, "I should have called that shade saffron or tumeric. Who do you suppose footed the bill for the process? The wretch Wiber simply won't look at you under four hundred and fifty francs!"

"Perhaps Vivie Beauvayse--" suggested Mrs. Charterhouse.

"I think not. Vivie preferred the crepuscular effect. It contrasted capitally with her own style of colouring. You must have noticed, they are seldom seen going about together as they used. Dear Lady Wathe, do you feel faint? Can I get you anything?"

For something had clicked behind the Goblin's pearls, and she had suddenly stiffened in her seat. The superb figure of Patrine Saxham had entered by the swing-doors leading from the vestibule followed by a tall, broad-shouldered young man in loose grey tweeds, whose left sleeve displayed a band of black significantly new.

"Can that be Miss Saxham? It must be!--her type is so unusual! Not having seen her since the night of the dinner I referred to I did not quite grasp the meaning of your references to ingredients common in Indian curries. Of course, I understand now!" The Goblin surveyed the tall, pliant figure with the dead beech-leaf hair through her lorgnette before she leaned forwards and roused the sleeping Brayham by a brisk application of the instrument. "Look, Sir Thomas! Would you have known Miss Saxham?"

"Beparr! ... Wharr? ... God bless my soul, no!"

Brayham, turning in the armchair as the Zoo walrus turns in his concrete pond, surveyed Patrine with a bloodshot stare.

"Silly girl! Spoilt her looks!" he snorted. "Handsome as the dooce with her gipsy-black tresses. Won her bet. Won't get her ring now though, unless von Herrnung paid before he flew!"

"Was there a bet between them? How is it you never told me? Have I deserved this from you?" demanded Lady Wathe indignantly, as Mrs. Charterhouse and Lady Wastwood exchanged glances and smiles.

"Sorry! ... Forgot! ..." Brayham gobbled apologetically. "Man I know happened to be close to 'em leaving Spitz's Restaurant that Sunday night in Paris. Told me he heard von Herrnung lay Miss Saxham his magpie pearl solitaire against a bit o' Palais Royal paste she was wearing--that she wouldn't change the colour of her hair! Made the appointment for her, with Wiber--'_Pastiches Artistiques_,' and so on, _Rue de la Paix_. He bragged of it afterwards at the _Cercle Moderne_! Dam Germans! no idea of decency! Why do Englishwomen intrigue with 'em? Bounders that kiss and tell!"

There was a significant pause, broken by the Goblin's shrillest peal of laughter. The ex-Justice, whose vitality was low, folded his hands and dozed again. Then----

"Now we _know_ who footed the bill," said Cynthia Charterhouse in dove-like accents. While Trixie murmured in the vexed ear of Margot:

"Kitts, my dinkie, you are a pal of the Saxhams. _How_ far had the affair _really_ gone?"

"There was no affair!" said Margot's sweet little voice, very clearly. "Pat rather hated Count von Herrnung than otherwise!"

"Judging by the mute evidence of her hair--" began Mrs. Charterhouse, languidly. How Margot loathed these women, erstwhile her chosen friends and associates, tearing with greedy beaks and vicious claws at the reputation of an unmarried girl....

"Her hair belongs to her! She can bleach it if she wishes!" The little figure rose to its altitude of four feet seven inches and surveyed the scandalmongers with wrathful eyes. "I have said that there was nothing between Miss Saxham and Count von Herrnung"--the little voice was crystal-cold: "I should be extremely obliged to all of you if you will understand this clearly! Miss Saxham is engaged to my husband's cousin, Alan Sherbrand."--Had Franky heard that stately reference to my husband, he would have been "bowled," to quote himself. "Franky likes him, and so do I, tremendously! We're both keen on their bringing off the match!"

There was another resounding silence. Brayham snored melodiously. Then Trixie Wastwood said with her Pierrot smile:

"Really, Kitts, it was--hardly cricket not to have warned us!"

While Mrs. Charterhouse added in tones of iced velvet:

"Regard me also as prone beneath Miss Saxham's Number Eight shoes. Did you say her _fiance_ was a cousin of Lord Norwater's? Not possibly the son of the uncle who died quite recently? Captain the Hon. Noel Sherbrand, late of the Royal Gunners.... My husband used to know him before--people left off!"

"It is the same. He muddled his career somehow, and--most people cut him! But he is _dead_," said Margot very deliberately, "and his son, if we have no--" the delicate cheeks flushed with sudden vivid crimson--"his son is perfectly tophole and Franky's next heir. We met him in June in Paris, and so did Pat Saxham! How do any of you know she didn't tint her hair to please _him_."

"Possibly she did! But, according to Sir Thomas--it was the other man who paid!"

"Odd, isn't it? In this world," said the Goblin with her crackling laugh, "the other man invariably pays the bill! And so the young gentleman over there--who is quite remarkably good-looking in the blond Norman style--and who is going to marry Miss Saxham--succeeds to Lord Norwater in--a certain eventuality! May one be permitted to hope, dear Lady Norwater, that Fate and yourself will combine fortuitously, to keep the cousin out of the House of Peers!"

"Rude, ill-bred, horrid woman!" thought Margot, clenching her little teeth to keep back these epithets. "How dare she twit me with--_that_! How dare--" Then her hot flush sank away and a mist came before her eyes, and she would have fallen, but that Trixie Wastwood jumped up from the sofa and threw about the little figure a kind, supporting arm.

"I've got you! You're not going to faint, Kittums, are you? Forgive us, my dinkie! What _pigs_ we have been!"

"Heckling the tomtit for defending the saffron-crested blackbird! I rather agree with you," admitted Mrs. Charterhouse as Margot freed herself, saying it was nothing, and proudly moved away. "We women are horribly spiteful," continued Cynthia. "Yes, we are spiteful, Lady Wathe! I am perfectly in earnest. What is the reason? Will anything cure us? Do somebody tell me! Colonel Charterhouse would say it is because we eat too much rich food, walk too little, automobile too much, and want some useful work or other to occupy our minds! He is coming here to lunch with me--he was quite touchingly anxious to be invited!" Her beautiful eyes widened as the swing-doors thudded behind three entering masculine figures, "Why, here he is with Lord Norwater, and your boy, Trixie! All three in khaki! What a day we are having!"

She added, as her handsome middle-aged Colonel made his spurred way through the ever-thickening crush to her:

"I am enlightened! So _this_ was your surprise!"

"Not half as big as mine when I found they were willing to take me. 'Fit as a fiddle,' according to the M. O. Gad!"--he went on, as his wife made room for him on the settle by her side--"as willingly as though he had been somebody else's husband," Lady Wathe said subsequently--"It's to my golf I owe it--these A.M.S. sawbones finding me in the pink! And instead of a back-seat, what do you think they've given me? Command of the Third Reserve Battalion of the blessed old Regiment, the Loyal North Linkshires, _vice_ Crowe-Pinckney, kicked out by a gouty toe! ... How's that for an oldster of fifty-five, ... Eh, what?" His chuckle was that of a Fourth Form athlete picked to supply a gap in the School Eleven. And Cynthia's beautiful eyes, as she slipped her hand into the Colonel's, looked at him as the boy's mother's might have looked upon her son.

Lady Wastwood's Pierrot smile might have played upon the reunited couple mockingly, but that the unexpected apparition of her boy Wastwood in single-starred khaki, adorned with the badge of a crack Hussar Regiment, girt with the Sam Browne and narrow officer's shoulder-strap, and clad as to the legs in spurred brown butcher-boots--dimmed her bright green eyes and brought a choke into her throat. Wastwood the son was so like Wastwood the father--killed at Magersfontein in 1900,--whom Trixie, for no reason apparently, had romantically adored. A burly young man, pink as a baby, with thick fair hair growing down within two inches of his eyebrows, small, fierce blue eyes, and a huge roaring voice, softened down now to a tender bellow as he answered a pale girl's eager question with:

"Well, I can't say exactly when we're going to the Front, but I hope to Christmas it'll be soon!"

Wastwood's engagement to the girl had been announced only the week previously in the Society Columns of the leading dailies. Now, while Wastwood's younger brother Jerry anguished in the throes of a final Exam, at Sandhurst, the said Jerry being set upon getting a Commission in time to go to the Front with one of the First Divisions--his elder sat on a Club sofa and made love to the girl Jerry was subsequently to marry. For not only Wastwood's title, but his vacant Commission as a Lieutenant in the Dapple Greys and his sweetheart went to his junior after Mons.

There was a lot of family and regimental re-shuffling and re-dealing, you will remember, after Mons.

The leaven of the Great Awakening was working in the souls of these worldly-minded, ultra-modern men and women, even as the crowd in the rooms grew denser, as the buzz of talk became almost solid, and khaki mingled with the brilliant toilettes. Hardly a man but wore dead-leaf brown. Wives were entertaining their husbands, mothers were lunching their sons, that day, at the multitudinous little tables in the great and lesser dining-rooms,--there was a revival of old code-words, an interchange of almost forgotten pet-names, a resurrection of ancient jokes, when the atmosphere seemed dangerously charged with emotion. How many Last Sacraments of renewed love were eaten and drunk by husbands and wives who, estranged for years, were to be reunited by the War, and parted by the War until the Day when Wars shall be no more.

That a tall young man in grey tweed with a crape armlet should sit opposite Patrine that day at Margot's special table was one of the thousand miracles already wrought.

Sherbrand had shelved all recollection of that June adventure in the Bois de Boulogne, when a flushed young husband in immaculate top-hat and frock-coat had thanked an angry young man in waterproof overalls and gabardine for not chopping his wife into kedgeree.

Could one be angry any more when this little human dragon-fly was what Patrine called "a frightful pal" of hers. Thank Heaven! Patrine had known nothing of the cousinship when she had answered Sherbrand's plain question, "Will you marry me?" with an assent:

"_Sooner than not!_"

"Then--it is settled?"

"Yes, you poor dear! If you think me worth having!"

_Worth having_! Sherbrand's glorious Patrine. Whom to be near was heaven on earth. Whom to obey was a lover's luxury, even when she had issued the mandate:

"Now, you must come to the Club and lunch with me, and meet my friends. Do be decent to them!"

Perhaps you can see Sherbrand bowing rather stiffly to Margot and accepting with the briefest hesitation the smallest of offered hands.

"I thought it must be the same!--I was certain there couldn't be two Flying Sherbrands. Pat!--Mr. Sherbrand can't deny the relationship, though he disapproves of Franky and me most fearfully. You'll have to teach him," went on the coaxing little voice, "that we're lots and lots nicer than he thinks us! For we've got to be friends," said Kittums, "if you and my dear Pat are going to be married! No time like the present! Can't we begin now?"

What a vivid little face it was, though there were tired marks like faint bruises under the great dark eyes, and the rose-flush in the cheeks was less bright than it had seemed in June. He released the tiny jewelled fingers, and found himself presented to the husband.

"Frightfully glad to meet you--more reasons than one!"

Franky, slim, sleek-headed, and dapper in unblemished Regulation tea-leaf, held out his hand, saying as he looked the other squarely in the eyes:

"If I had known your Home address, I should like to have dropped a line to you, when I--when I saw the newspaper yesterday."

"My mother lives at Bournemouth. My father had been an invalid for years. I go down to-day by the afternoon train."

"Ah! Please remember me to my--Aunt Jeannette."

From what dusty shelf of memories had Franky reached down the name of his uncle's unknown wife? But it sounded pleasantly to Mrs. Sherbrand's son. The cloud upon his forehead cleared away, and his cold sea-blue eyes began to thaw into kindness:

"I'd like a word with you in private. Do you mind comin' out of this clackshop into the vest*i*bulee?" Franky went on, quoting his favourite Jimmy Greggson, and with a word to Margot and a glance on Sherbrand's part at Patrine, the two men passed through the swing-doors. Here Franky wheeled, and said with effort:

"This is a bit subsequent! but--if there's time available and the date of my uncle's funeral doesn't happen to be fixed, I should like to say--" He grew furiously red and began to stammer: "My father ... myself ... Dash! how brutally I bungle! But my uncle has a right to--to lie in the family vault with his ancestors. It's at Whins--the Church is in the Castle grounds. I can guarantee that my father--every facility--sympathy--proper respect--" He broke down. Sherbrand answered, now the cooler of the two:

"You are very kind, Lord Norwater. My mother has already received a telegram from Lord Mitchelborough conveying a message to the same effect."

"I engineered that!" thought Franky complacently. But he was fish-dumb. Sherbrand went on:

"She would thank you, as I do, gratefully. But my father--would have preferred to be buried where he died!"

"Good egg! And now there's another thing to get off my chest," said Franky. "You know you stand in for the Viscounty when I succeed my father, or if I get knocked out in this scrap--supposing I should kick without heirs! That being so, suppose you bury the hatchet and lunch with us? Wouldn't in Paris--perhaps you will now? The War seems to rub up old saws like new somehow. That copy-book tag about Blood bein' thicker than water! that's one of the ones I mean. In case my wife got left--do you tumble?"--the ambiguous term was quite expressive--"I'd like to think that you were--would be kind to her!"

"I should certainly--in that case--try to do what I could." A certain physical and mental resemblance showed between these two long-legged, lightly-built, clean-made Sherbrands, standing together talking of grave matters, with candour and simplicity and British avoidance of sentiment and excess of words.

"But,"--Sherbrand found himself yielding to an impulse of confidence in the owner of the brown eyes that were some inches below his own, "this War is my chance! I'm a certified pilot-aviator and constructor and engineer. Perhaps there'll be a chink in the Royal Flying Corps for me--and many another fellow like me--before long--I hope, not very long! For my father's sake as much as for my own, I'm bound to make good--you understand?"

The brown eyes understood. His kindred blood warmed to the look in them.

"He knew--my father knew that he had failed in life through his own fault. He did not resent his brother's attitude. He bore the consequences more or less patiently, and when he died he left the cleansing of his name to me. Not that he was as badly to blame as people thought. He was born without sufficient of the quality called--objectivity. It's the power that keeps a man slogging, slogging in one groove without getting mechanical or stupid, as long as he attain his ends or can serve his country by keeping on. It's _indispensable_!"--he emphasised the word, his strong blue-grey eyes full on Franky's--"as indispensable as lymph in your inner ear-tubes. Without it you can't keep a level balance--whether you stand, or walk, or fly!"

"Miss Saxham--knows, I suppose?"

A flush crept up through Sherbrand's tanning:

"I have told her. It wasn't pleasant. But she--likes me enough to overlook it. She--seems to think I should never fail in that way! I hope to God I never shall!" The old boyish terror of inherited weakness cropped up in the tone of the man grown. "It would be horrible to suspect the bacillus of slackness lurking in my blood! If there is--the sooner I get scrapped, the better for her and for me!"

"Well, you've chosen the--kind of career that is going to use up a good many men pretty quickly." Franky was warming more and more to this big blond, candid cousin. "Not that I think there's much of the slacker about you. Few chaps more fit and nervy--that is, going by looks, you know! But if the Kaiser's Flying Men can shoot on the wing as well as they brag they can"--his brown eyes were watchful for a change in the other's face--"then----"

"Then I tumble out of my sky, a dead bird!" said Sherbrand, squaring his broad shoulders, "and someone luckier fills my place!"

"Thumbs up! Ten to one you'd come down with a broken wing or so." There was something that touched Franky's latent quality of imagination in the fellow's queer way of saying "my sky." "This cousin of mine is a handsome fellow," he said to himself, "and a plucky one. And--by the Great Brass Hat!--now I come to think of it--the livin' image of old Sir Roger Sherbrand--his and my great-grandfather--goin' by the portrait in the gallery at Whins."

"So you're firm on joinin' the Flying Corps..." he went on, feeling for the moustache which had been reduced to Regulation toothbrush size. "Good egg You! Wish you all the sporting chances----"

"And better luck," said Sherbrand drily, "with Bird of War No. II. than I had with No. I.!"

"You're building a new 'plane?" The brown eyes were alight with interest.

"Rather! Come and have a look at her one day."

"Like a shot, if only I'd time! Did she tot to a hatful of money?"

"Something under L700. L500 of that goes for the new 'Gnome' engine. You see that German--" Sherbrand broke off.

"I remember! Pretty rough on you, that North Sea crossin' business. Must have been an awful loss. Look here!" Franky reddened again and began to flounder. "Could I--couldn't I--help with the boodle? Got L700 lying by idle. Frightfully glad if you'd let me chip in!--just in a cousinly sort o' way!"

"I am much obliged to you, Lord Norwater."

Confound the fellow! how he froze at the least hint of patronage. He went on, holding his head high:

"You are very kind, but I am not poor, unless as poverty is understood by people of your world. Apart from what my profession brings me I have something in the way of income. My mother's brother left me a sum of money that brings in yearly over L200." He went on as Franky regarded with unaffected interest the man who wasn't poor on two hundred _per annum_: "The principal--I suppose it tots up to L6,000--I shall naturally settle on my wife."

He warmed and brightened with the utterance of the word. His cold eyes grew soft and his brows smoothed pleasantly. He said with a glowing pride, and a kind of brave shyness that a woman who loved him would have adored:

"I have said nothing yet to Miss Saxham about my hopes of a Commission--I suppose for fear of not pulling the thing off. But the moment it comes along I shall persuade her to marry me. We'll be man and wife before I fly for the Front."

As cocky as though he had landed the biggest catch in the matrimonial waters, thought Franky, instead of that great, slangy, galumphing young woman without a halfpenny at her back. But he did the amiable, in a way characteristic of Franky, ushering the guest back to the luncheon-room, introducing "my cousin" to people worth knowing, doing the honours with a pleasant cordiality that won upon Sherbrand more and more.

Sherbrand took leave directly after lunch, saying that he had to catch the afternoon express for Bournemouth. He had left his bag and suit-case in the hall-porter's care. Would Patrine?--Patrine read the entreaty in the hiatus and yielded to it, saying Yes, she would drive with him, and see him off from Waterloo.

"It's lovely of you!" Sherbrand said to her gratefully as they rose. She gave him her cordial smile and a soft glance from the long eyes. They took leave of their hosts and passed out together, heads slewing as the tall young figures went by.

Once in a taxi, spinning down Short Street, Sherbrand possessed himself of the hand he coveted. Its warm strong, answering clasp thrilled him to speechlessness. He looked at the long white fingers intertwined with his own, and asked himself whether he were deserving of a happiness too great to be credited. When her shoulder touched his, its warm creamy whiteness gleaming through the dead-white of her thin sleeve, his heart drummed until it seemed as though she could not but hear it. But his was not the only heart that beat....

"Thank you." It was her rich warm voice speaking close by his ear. "Thank you for being so nice to my Kittums! She is the truest little soul going. We have been chums ever since I joined the Club. Never quarrelled once--until she made up her mind to marry Franky----"

"And now you're going to marry Franky's first cousin." Sherbrand laughed rather breathlessly. "'Marry' ... 'Marriage.' Two splendid words with meanings and meanings beyond meanings packed into them. Isn't it wonderful? ..." He gripped the warm white hand in his strong brown one. "Pat, your pulses are playing a tune!"

"So are yours," she answered in a low tone.

"What is it?" He bent his head and set his lips in a swift caress to the back of the white hand. Then he turned it gently over and looked earnestly at the blue wrist-veins. They were full and throbbing tumultuously. Her blood was answering to the call of his. He set a second swift kiss upon them and his voice was unsteady as he said:

"I know the name of the tune, my wonder. Patrine! Love!--it's the _Wedding March_!"

"Whose? Grieg's, or Wagner's in _Lohengrin_, or Haydn's?"

"Neither Wagner's nor Haydn's nor Grieg's. Yours and mine! I told Lord Norwater to-day that I meant to make sure of you before I fly for the Front."

"You're going to the Front? Oh!--why?" Her long eyes looked at him with sharp terror in them. He answered:

"When the Powers that be offer me a Commission in the Royal Flying Corps."