CHAPTER V
It was a misty but warm October day, and a pleasant veiled light lay on the pillared front of Chetworth House, designed in the best taste of a fastidious school. The surroundings of the house, too, were as perfect as those of Mannering were slatternly and neglected. All the young men had long since gone from the gardens, but the old labourers and the girls in overalls who had taken their places, under the eye of a white-haired gardener, had been wonderfully efficient so far. Sir Henry supposed he ought to have let the lawns stand for hay, and the hedges go unclipped; but as a matter of fact the lawns had never been smoother, or the creepers and yew hedges more beautifully in order, so that even the greatest patriot fails somewhere.
Beryl Chicksands was walking along a stone-flagged path under a yew hedge, from which she commanded the drive and a bit of the road outside. Every now and then she stopped to peer into the sunlit haze that marked the lower slopes of the park, and the delicate hand that shaded her eyes shook a little.
Aubrey was coming—and she was going seriously to offer to give him up—to try to persuade him indeed to break it off. Since her first agitated letter to him begging him not to think of her, but to decide only what was best for his own future, she had received a few words from him.
'DEAREST BERYL—Nothing has happened to interfere with what we promised each other last summer—nothing at all! My poor father seems to be half out of his mind under the stress of war. If he does what he threatens, it will matter very little to me; but of course you must consider it carefully, for I shall have uncommonly little in the worldly way to offer you. Your father has written very kindly, and your dear little note is just like you. But you must consider.
'I sometimes doubt whether my father will do what he threatens, but we should have to take the risk. Anyway we shall meet directly, and I am always, and unalterably, your devoted
'AUBREY.'
That had been followed by a boyish note from Desmond—dear, jolly fellow!
'My father's clean daft! Don't bother, my dear Beryl. If he tries to leave me this funny old place, instead of Aubrey, well, there are two can play at that game. I wouldn't touch it with a barge-pole. You and A. have only got to stick it a little, and it'll be all right.
'I've given him a bit of my mind about the park and the farm. He stands it from me and only chaffs. That's because he always treats me like a baby.
'Very sorry I can't come on Tuesday with Aubrey, but there's some good-bye calls I must pay. Hope Arthur will be about. I want awfully to see him. Hard luck his being hit like that, after all the rest. Snipers are beasts!
'P.S.—You can't think what a brainy young woman father's got for his new secretary. And she's not half bad either. Pamela's rather silly about her, but she'll come round.'
Beryl paid small attention to the postscript. She had heard a good deal from Pamela about the newcomer, but it did not concern her. As to the business aspect of the Squire's behaviour, Beryl was well aware that she was an heiress. Aubrey would lose nothing financially by giving up the Mannering estate to marry her. Personally she cared nothing about Mannering, and she had enough for both. But still there was the old name and place. How much did he care about it? how much would he regret it? Supposing his extraordinary father really cut him off?
Beryl felt she did not know. And therewith came the recurrent pang—how little she really knew about the man to whom she was engaged! She adored him. Every fibre in her slight sensitive body still remembered the moment when he first kissed her, when she first felt his arm about her. But since—how often there had been moments when she had been conscious of a great distance between them—of something that did not fit—that jarred!
For herself, she could never remember a time since she was seventeen when Aubrey Mannering had not meant more to her than any one else in the world. On his first departure to France, she had said good-bye to him with secret agonies of spirit, which no one guessed but her mother, a colourless, silent woman, who had a way of knowing unexpectedly much of the people about her. Then when he was badly wounded in some fighting near Festubert, in May 1915, and came home for two months' leave, he seemed like a stranger, and Beryl had not known what to be at with him. She was told that he had suffered very much—it had been a severe thigh wound implicating the sciatic nerve—and that he had been once, at least, very near to death. But when she tried to express sympathy with what he had gone through, or timidly to question him about it, her courage fled, her voice died in her throat. There was something unapproachable in her old playfellow, something that held her, and indeed every one else, at bay.
He was always courteous, and mostly cheerful. But his face in repose had an absent, haunted look, the eyes alert but fixed on vacancy, the brow overcast and frowning. In the old days Aubrey's smile had been his best natural gift. To win a smile from him in her childhood, Beryl would have done anything—have gone on her knees up the drive, or offered up the only doll she cared for, or gone without jam for a week. Now when he came home invalided, she had the same craving; but what she craved for came her way very rarely. He would laugh and talk with her as with other people. But that exquisite brightness of eye and lip, which seemed to be for one person only, and, when it came, to lift that person to the seventh heaven, she waited for in vain.
Then he went back to France, and in due course came the Somme. Aubrey Mannering went through the whole five months without a scratch. He came back with a D.S.O. and a Staff appointment for a short Christmas leave, everybody, except his father, turning out to welcome him as the local hero. Then, for a time, he went to Aldershot as the head of an Officers' School there, and was able to come down occasionally to Chetworth or Mannering.
During that first Christmas leave he paid several visits to Chetworth, and evidently felt at home there. To Lady Chicksands, whom most people regarded as a tiresome nonentity, he was particularly kind and courteous. It seemed to give him positive pleasure to listen to her garrulous housekeeping talk, or to hold her wool for her while she wound it. And as she, poor lady, was not accustomed to such attention from brilliant young men, his three days' visit was to her a red-letter time. With Sir Henry also he was on excellent terms, and made just as good a listener to the details of country business as to Lady Chicksands' domestic tales.
And yet to Beryl he was in some ways more of a riddle than ever. He talked curiously little about the war—at least to her. He had a way of finding out, both at Chicksands and Mannering, men who had lost sons in France, and when he and Beryl took a walk, it seemed to Beryl as though they were constantly followed by friendly furtive looks from old labourers who passed them on the road, and nodded as they went by. But when the daily war news was being discussed he had a way of sitting quite silent, unless his opinion was definitely asked. When it was, he would answer, generally in a rather pessimistic spirit, and escape the conversation as soon as he could. And the one thing that roused him and put him out of temper was the easy complacent talk of people who were sure of speedy victory and talked of 'knock-out' blows.
Then six months later, after the capture of the Messines Ridge, in which he took part, he reappeared, and finding his father, apparently, almost intolerable, and Pamela and Desmond away, he migrated to Chetworth. And there he and Beryl were constantly thrown together. He never talked to her with much intimacy; he certainly never made love to her. But suddenly she became aware that she had grown very necessary to him, that he missed her when she was away, that his eyes lit up when she came back. A special relation was growing up between them. Her father perceived it; so did her brother Arthur; and they had both done their best to help it on. They were both very fond of Aubrey; and nothing could be more natural than that she should marry one who had been her neighbour and playmate from childhood.
The thing drifted on, and one day, in the depths of a summer beechwood, some look in the girl's eyes, some note of tremulous and passionate sweetness, beyond her control, in her deep quiet voice, touched something irrepressible in him, and he turned to her with a face of intense, almost hungry yearning, and caught her hands—'Dear—dearest Beryl, could you—?'
The words broke off, but her eyes spoke in reply to his, and her sudden whiteness. He drew her to him, and folded her close.
'I don't think I ought'—the faltering, broken voice startled her—'I don't know whether I can make you happy. Dear, dear little Beryl!'
At that she put up her mouth instinctively, only to shrink back under the energy of his kiss. Then they had walked on together, hand in hand; but she remembered that, even before they left the wood, something seemed to have dimmed the extraordinary bliss of the first moment—some restlessness in him—some touch of absent-mindedness, as though he grudged himself his own happiness.
And so it had been ever since. He had resumed his work at Aldershot, and owing to certain consequences of the wound in 1915 was not likely, in spite of desperate efforts on his own part, to be sent back to the front. His letters varied just as his presence did. Something always seemed to be kept back from her—was always beyond her reach. Sometimes she supposed she was not clever enough, that he found her inadequate and irresponsive. Sometimes, with a sudden, half-guilty sense of disloyalty to him, she vaguely wondered whether there was some secret in his life—some past of which she knew nothing. How could there be? A man of stainless and brilliant reputation—modest, able, foolhardily brave, of whom all men spoke warmly; of a sensitive refinement too, which made it impossible to think of any ordinary vulgar skeleton in the background of his life.
Yet her misgivings had grown and grown upon her, till now they were morbidly strong. She did not satisfy him; she was not making him happy; it would be better for her to set him free. This action of his father's offered the opportunity. But as she thought of doing it—how she would do it, and how he might possibly accept it—she was torn with misery.
She and her girl-friend Pamela were very different. She was the elder by a couple of years, and much more mature. But Pamela's undeveloped powers, the flashes of daring, of romance, in the awkward reserved girl, the suggestion in her of a big and splendid flowering, fascinated Beryl, and in her humility she never dreamt that she, with her delicate pensiveness, the mingled subtlety and purity of her nature, was no less exceptional. She had been brought up very much alone. Her mother was no companion for her, and the brother nearest her own age and nearest her heart had been killed at the opening of the war. Arthur and she were very good friends, but not altogether congenial. She was rather afraid of him—of his critical temper, and his abrupt intolerant way, with people or opinions he disliked. Beryl was quite aware of his effect on Pamela Mannering, and it made her anxious. For she saw little chance for Pamela. Before the war, Arthur in London had been very much sought after, in a world where women are generally good-looking, and skilled besides in all the arts of pursuit. His standards were ridiculously high. His women friends were many and of the best. Why should he be attracted by anything so young and immature as Pamela?
At last! A pony-cart coming up from the lodge, with two figures in it—Aubrey and Pamela. So poor Pam had at last got hold of something in the nature of an animal!
Beryl gripped the balustrading which bordered one side of the path, and stood watching intently—a slender creature, in a broad purple hat, shading her small, distinguished face.
Presently, as the visitors approached the house, she waved to them, and they to her. They disappeared from view for a minute. Then a man's figure emerged alone from a garden door opening on the flagged path.
He came towards her with outstretched hands, looked round him smiling to see that no one was in sight, and then kissed her. Beryl knew she ought to have resisted the kiss; she had meant to do it; but all the same she submitted.
'Your father met us at the door. Arthur has carried Pamela off somewhere. Very sporting of them, wasn't it? So I've got you alone! How nice you look! And what a jolly place this is!'
He first looked her up and down with admiring eyes, and then made a gesture towards the beautiful modern house, and the equally beautiful and modern gardens in which it stood, with their still unspoilt autumn flowers, their cunning devices in steps and fountains and pergolas.
'How on earth do you keep it so trim?' He put a hand through her arm, and drew her on towards the wood-walk which opened beyond the formal garden and the lawn.
'With two or three old men, and two girls from the village,' said Beryl. 'Father doesn't mind what he gives up so long as it isn't the garden.'
'It's his pet vice!' laughed Aubrey—'his public-house, like my father's Greek pots. I say—you've heard of the secretary?'
It seemed to Beryl that he was fencing with her—delaying their real talk. But she accepted his lead.
'Yes, Desmond seems to like her. I don't gather that Pamela cares very much about her.'
'Oh, Pamela takes time. But what do you think the secretary did last night?'
'What?' They had paused under a group of limes clad in a glory of yellow leaf, and she was looking up in surprise at the unusual animation playing over the features of the man beside her.
'She refused to sign a codicil to my father's will, disinheriting me, and came to tell me so this morning! You should have heard her! Very formal and ceremonious—very much on her dignity! But such a brick!'
Mannering's deep-set eyes under his lined thinker's brow shone with amusement. Beryl, with the instinctive jealousy of a girl in love, was conscious of a sudden annoyance that Miss Bremerton should have been mixed up in Aubrey's personal affairs.
'What do you mean?'
Aubrey put an arm round her shoulder. She knew she ought to shake it off, but the pressure of it was too welcome. They strolled on.
'I had my talk with father last night. I told him he was absurd, and I was my own master. That you were perfectly free to give me up—that I had begged you to consider it—but I didn't think you would,' he smiled down upon her, but more gravely; 'and failing dismissal from you, we should be married as soon as it was reasonably possible. Was that right, darling?'
She evaded the question.
'Well—and then?'
'Then he broke out. Sir Henry of course was the bête noire. You can imagine the kind of things he said, I needn't repeat them. He is in a mood of perfectly mad opposition to all this war legislation, and it is not the least good arguing with him. Finally he told me that my allowance would be stopped, and Mannering would be left to Desmond, if we married. "All right!" I said, "I daresay, if he and I survive you, Desmond will let me look round sometimes." Not very respectful, perhaps, but by that time I was fed up. So then I wished him good-night, and went back to the drawing-room. In a few minutes he sent for Miss Bremerton—nobody knew why. I was dog-tired, and went to bed, and didn't I sleep!—nine good hours. Then this morning, just after breakfast, when I was strolling in the garden with a cigarette waiting for Pamela, who should come out but Miss Bremerton! Have you seen her?'
'Only in the distance.'
'Well, she's really a very fine creature, not pretty exactly—oh, not pretty at all—but wonderfully well set up, with beautiful hair, and a general look of—what shall I say?—dignity, refinement, knowing her own mind. You feel she would set you down in a moment if you took the smallest liberty. I could not think what she wanted. But she came up to me—of course we had made acquaintance the night before—"May I speak to you, Major Mannering? I wish to say something private. Shall we walk down to the kitchen garden?" So we walked down to the kitchen garden, and then she told me what had happened after dinner, when my father sent for her. She told it very stiffly, rather curtly in fact, as though she were annoyed to have to bother about such unprofessional things, and hated to waste her time. "But I don't wish, I don't intend," she said, "to have the smallest responsibility in the matter. So after thinking it over, I decided to inform you—and Mr. Desmond too, if you will kindly tell him—as to what I had done. That is all I have to say," with her chin very much in the air! "I did it, of course, because I did not care to be mixed up in any private or family affairs. That is not my business." I was taken aback, as you can imagine! But, of course, I thanked her—'
'Why, she couldn't have done anything else!' said Beryl with vivacity.
'I don't know that. Anybody may witness anything. But she seems to have guessed. Of course my father never keeps anything to himself. Anyway she didn't like being thanked at all. She turned back to the house at once. So then I asked her if she knew what had happened to the precious codicil. And she flushed up and said, with the manner of an icicle, "Mr. Mannering sent me to the drawer this morning, where he had put it away. It was lying on the top, and I saw it." "Signed?" I said. "No, not signed." Then she began to hurry, and I thought I had offended her in some way. But it dawned upon me, presently, that she was really torn between her feeling of chivalry towards me—she seems to have a kindness for soldiers! her brother is fighting somewhere—and her professional obligations towards my father. Wasn't it odd? She hated to be indiscreet, to give him away, and yet she could not help it! I believe she had been awake half the night. Her eyes looked like it. I must say I liked her very much. A woman of a great deal of character! I expect she has a rough time of it!'
'But of course,' said Beryl, 'it may be all signed and witnessed by now!'
'Most probably!' The Major laughed. 'But she did her best anyway, and I shan't ask her any more questions. We had better take it for granted. My father is as obstinate as they make 'em. Well now, dear Beryl, have you—have you thought it over?'
He pointed to a seat, and sat down by her. The brightness of his look had passed away. The thin, intellectual face and lined brow had resumed the expression that was familiar to Beryl. It was an expression of fatigue—not physical now, for he had clearly recovered his health, but moral; as though the man behind it were worn out by some hidden debate with his own mind, into which he fell perpetually, when left to himself. It was the look which divided him from her.
'Yes,' she said slowly, 'I've been thinking a great deal.' She stopped; then lifting her eyes, which were grey and fringed with dark lashes—beautiful eyes, timid yet passionately honest—she said, 'You'd better give me up, Aubrey!'
He made a restless movement, then took her hands and raised them to his lips.
'I don't feel like it!' he said, smiling. 'Tell me what you mean.'
She looked down, plucking at the fringed belt of her sports coat. Her lips trembled a little.
'I don't think, Aubrey, I can make you happy! I've been feeling often—that I don't seem to make much difference to you. And now this is very serious—giving up Mannering. You may mind it much more than you think. And if—'
'If what? Go on!'
She raised her eyes again and looked at him straight.
'If I can't make up?'
The colour flooded into his face, as though, far within, something stirred 'like a guilty thing surprised.' But he said tenderly:
'I don't care that, Beryl'—he snapped his fingers—'for Mannering in comparison with you.'
Her breath fluttered a little, but she went on resolutely. 'But I must say it—I must tell you what I feel. It seems the right opportunity. So often, Aubrey, I don't seem to understand you! I say the wrong thing. I'm not clever. I haven't any deep thoughts—like you or Arthur. It would be terrible if you married me, and then—I felt you were disappointed.'
He moved a little away from her and, propping his chin on his hands, looked gravely through the thinning branches of the wood.
'I wonder why you say that—I wonder what I've done!'
'Oh, you've done nothing!' cried Beryl. 'It's only I feel—sometimes—that—that you don't let me know things—share things. You seem sometimes so sad—and I can't be any help—you won't let me! That's what I mind so much—so dreadfully!'
He was silent a moment. Then without any attempt at caresses, he said, 'I wonder, Beryl, whether you—whether you—ever realize—what we soldiers have seen? No!—thank God!—you don't—you can't.'
She pressed her hands to her eyes, and shuddered.
'No, of course I can't—of course I can't!' she said passionately.
Then, while her eyes were still hidden, there passed through his worn features a sharp spasm, as of some uncontrollable anguish—passed and was gone.
He turned towards her, and she looked up. If ever love, all-giving, self-forgetting, was written on a girl's face, it was written on Beryl's then. Her wild-rose colour came and went; her eyes were full of tears. She had honestly made her attempt, but she could not carry it through, and he saw it. Some vague hope—of which he was ashamed—died away. Profoundly touched, he put out his arms, and making nothing of her slight resistance, gathered her close to him.
'Did you ever read Sintram, Beryl?'
'Yes, years ago.'
'Do you remember his black fits—how they came upon him unexpectedly—and only Verena could help him? It's like that with me sometimes. Things I've seen—horrible sufferings and death—come back on me. I can't get over it—at least not yet. But I'll never let it come really between us. And perhaps—some day'—he hesitated and his voice dropped—'you shall help me—like Verena!'
She clung to him, not knowing what he meant, but fascinated by his deep voice, and the warm shelter of his arms. He bent down to kiss her, in the most passionate embrace he had ever given her.
Then he released her, and they both looked at each other with a new shyness.
'So that's all right!' he said, smiling. 'You see you can't drop me as easily as you think. I stick! Well, now, you take me as a pauper—not exactly a pauper—but still—I've got to settle things with your father, though!'
Beryl proposed that they should go and look for the others.
They went hand in hand.
Sir Henry meanwhile was engaged in the congenial occupation of inspecting and showing his kitchen gardens. His son Arthur and Pamela Mannering were following him round the greenhouses, finding more amusement in the perplexities of Sir Henry's conscience than interest in the show itself.
'You see they've brought in the chrysanthemums. Just in time! There was a frost last night,' said Sir Henry, throwing open a door, and disclosing a greenhouse packed with chrysanthemums in bud.
'My hat—what a show!' said his son.
'Not at all, Arthur, not at all,' said his father, annoyed. 'Not a third of what we had last year.'
Arthur raised his eyebrows, and behind his father's back he and Pamela exchanged smiles. The next house showed a couple of elderly men at work pruning roses intended to flower in February and March.
'This is almost my favourite house,' exclaimed Sir Henry. 'Such a wonderful result for so little labour!' He strolled on complacently.
'How long does this take you, Grimes?' Arthur inquired discreetly of one of the gardeners.
'Oh, a good while, Mr. Arthur—what with the pruning, and the syringing, and the manuring,' said the man addressed, stopping to wipe his brow, for the day was mild.
Arthur's look darkened a little. He fell into a reverie, while Pamela was conscious at every step of his tall commanding presence, of the Military Cross on his khaki breast, and the pleasant, penetrating eyes under his staff cap. Arthur, she thought, must be now over thirty. Before his recent wound he had been doing some special artillery work on the Staff of an Army Corps, and was a very rising soldier. He was now chafing hotly against the ruling of his Medical Board, who were insisting that he was not yet fit to go back to France.
Pamela meanwhile was going through moments of disillusion. After these two years she had looked forward to the meeting with such eagerness, such hidden emotion! And now—what was there to have been eager about? They seemed to be talking almost as strangers. The soreness of it bewildered her.
Presently, as they were walking back to the house, leaving Sir Henry in anxious consultation over the mushroom-house with the grey-haired head gardener, her companion turned to her abruptly.
'I suppose that's all right!' He pointed to some distant figures on the fringe of a wood.
'Beryl and Aubrey? Yes—if Aubrey can make her see that she isn't doing him any harm by letting him go on.'
'Good heavens! how could she do him any harm?'
'Well, there's Mannering. As if that mattered!' said the girl scornfully. 'And then—Beryl's too dreadfully humble!'
'Humble! About what? No girl ought to be humble—ever!'
Pamela's eyes recovered their natural brilliance under his peremptory look. And he, who had begun the walk with no particular consciousness at all about his companion, except that she was a nice, good-looking child, whom he had known from a baby, with equal suddenness became aware of her in a new way.
'Why shouldn't we be humble, please?' she said, with a laugh.
'Because it's monstrous that you should. Leave that to us!'
'There wouldn't be much of it about, if we did!' The red danced in her cheek.
'Much humility? Oh, you're quite mistaken. Men are much more humble than you think. But we're human, of course. If you tempt us, you soon put the starch into us.'
'Well, you must starch Beryl!' said Pamela, with emphasis. 'She will think and say that she's not worthy of Aubrey, that she knows she'll disappoint him, that she wouldn't mind his giving up Mannering if only she were sure she could make him happy—and heaps of things like that! I'm sure she's saying them now!'
'I never heard such nonsense in my life!' The masculine face beside her was all impatience. 'One can't exactly boast about one's sister, but you and I know very well what Beryl is worth!'
Pamela agreed fervently. 'Besides, Desmond would give it back.'
'Hm—' her companion demurred. 'Giving back isn't always easy. As to pounds, shillings, and pence, if one must talk of them, it's lucky that Beryl has her "bit." But I shouldn't wonder if your father thought better of it after all.'
Pamela flushed indignantly.
'He all but signed a codicil to his will last night! He's in a tearing hurry about it. He called in Miss Bremerton and wanted her to witness it. And she refused. So father threw it into a drawer, and nobody knows what has happened.'
'Miss Bremerton? The new secretary?' The tone expressed both amusement and curiosity. 'Ah! I hear all sorts of interesting things about her.'
Pamela straightened her shoulders defiantly.
'Of course she's interesting. She's terribly clever and up to date, and all the rest of it. She's beginning to boss father, and very soon she'll boss all the rest of us.'
'Perhaps you wanted it!' said Captain Chicksands, smiling.
'Perhaps we did,' Pamela admitted. 'But one needn't like it all the same. Well, she's rationed us—that's one good thing—and father really doesn't guess! And now she's begun to take an interest in the farms! I believe she's walked over to the Holme Wood farm to-day, to see for herself what state it's in. Father's in town. And she's trying hard to keep father out of a horrible row with the County Committee.'
'About ploughing up the park?'
Pamela nodded.
'Plucky woman!' said Arthur Chicksands heartily. 'I'm sure you help her, Pamela, all you can?'
'I don't like being managed,' said the girl stubbornly, rather resenting his tone.
A slight shade of sternness crossed the soldier's face.
'You know it's no good playing with this war,' he said drily. 'It's as much to be won here as it is over seas. Food!—that'll be the last word for everybody. And it's women's work as much as men's.'
She saw that she had jarred on him. But an odd jealousy—or perhaps her hidden disappointment—drove her on.
'Yes, but one doesn't like strangers interfering,' she said childishly.
The soldier threw her a side-glance, while his lip twitched a little. So this was Pamela—grown-up. She seemed to him rather foolish—and very lovely. There was no doubt about that! She was going to be a beauty, and of a remarkable type. He himself was a strong, high-minded, capable fellow, with an instinctive interest in women, and a natural aptitude for making friends with them. He was inclined, always, to try and set them in the right way; to help them to some of the mental training which men got in a hundred ways, and women, as it seemed to him, were often so deplorably without. But this schoolmaster function only attracted him when there was opposition. He had been quite sincere in denouncing humility in women. It never failed to warn him off.
'Do you think she really wants to interfere?' he asked, smiling. 'I expect it's only that she's got a bit of an organizing gift—like the women who have been doing such fine things in the war.'
'There's no chance for me to do fine things in the war,' said Pamela bitterly.
'Take up the land, and see! Suppose you and Miss Bremerton could pull the estate together!'
Pamela's eyes scoffed.
'Father would never let me. No, I think sometimes I shall run away!'
He lifted his eyebrows, and she was annoyed with him for taking her remark as mere bluff.
'You'll see,' she insisted. 'I shall do something desperate.'
'I wouldn't,' he said, quietly. 'Make friends with Miss Bremerton and help her.'
'I don't like her enough,' she said, drawing quick breath.
He saw now she was in a mood to quarrel with him outright. But he didn't mean to let her. With those eyes—in such a fire—she was really splendid. How she had come on!
'I'm sorry,' he said mildly. 'Because, you know—if you don't mind my saying so—it'll really take the two of you to keep your father out of gaol. The Government's absolutely determined about this thing—they can't afford to be anything else. We're being hammered, and gassed, and blown to pieces over there'—he pointed eastward. 'It's the least the people over here can do—to play up—isn't it?' Then he laughed. 'But I mustn't be setting you against your father. I didn't mean to.'
Pamela shrugged her shoulders, in silence. She really longed to ask him about his wound, his staff work, a thousand things; but they didn't seem, somehow, to be intimate enough, to be hitting it off enough. This meeting, which had been to her a point of romance in the distance, was turning out to be just nothing—only disappointment. She was glad to see how quickly the other pair were coming towards them, and at the same time bitterly vexed that her tête-à-tête with Arthur was at an end.