A veritable sprite, pale, in pale-hued clothes, Psyche flitted about and took in everyone. Her appreciation of Anne's scones was duly recorded in the kitchen. Her close questioning of the injured Lancelot was listened to by his mother and called impertinent. It was annoying to meet a girl who seemed to know every town in France, every spot where the English held the lines, and discomfiting for the hero to have to shufflingly evade questions impossible for him to answer.
"It is my belief," observed pale Psyche to Gheena, "that he never went beyond Boulogne."
Gheena replied quietly that she had guessed that for weeks, and Lancelot, who played the invalid in his khaki, looked at them narrowly.
All the Freynes' friends appeared, of course accidentally, to see the stranger, Mrs. Brady driving Mrs. Weston, who came to ask for some seeds for her garden, things to sow in a frame, and was distressed to find that January sowings needed great care and a skilled man. Mrs. Brady was depressed because the news was vile and hopeless. Stafford came merely to ask for tea. He yawned once or twice, apologizing with a start.
"It's being up all night," he said; "no sleep."
"Who on earth did you find to play cards with here?" said Gheena icily.
Mr. Stafford said "Er!" and grinned faintly.
Lancelot Freyne absorbed Gheena's attention when he found it possible. She must pour out his tea and put in cream and sugar. She was the only one who could plump up and arrange his cushions. She must show him the pictures in the Daily Sketch. Gheena was patiently pointing out varieties of somewhat indefinite horrors of war, when Doctor Mahaffy, a stout man, who did ten men's work in his big district, burst in to tell them that one of their workmen had broken his leg.
"Nat Leary. He was coming back in the dark last night from the point, and he tripped over something like a wire, he says. Whatever it was, it stunned him and tilted him over the shale cliff, where he was only found at one o'clock, half kilt."
"The steward said that he had not come to work," said Dearest George fussily. "And Nat was an unusually sober man."