"I haven't heard a word from him for five weeks," said Marjorie in a low voice. "I'm most awfully unhappy, Liss."
Liss forgot all about herself at once, and put both arms round her protector.
"Think what a lot of letters must be lying waiting for you somewhere," she said. "You'll get a whole bunch one morning. Now I'm going to get up, and we'll go on that bus ride."
They lunched frugally at an A.B.C. shop, and having boarded a Number Nine bus sped westward along Piccadilly. A communicative man with a broken nose, wearing the silver badge of a discharged soldier, leaned over their shoulders from the seat behind them.
"Sir Dougliss 'as done it again, ladies!" he announced importantly, thrusting an evening paper before them. "Look! Fifteen-mile front—twelve villages—five thousand prisoners! That's the stuff to give 'em!"
The girls read the report eagerly. It described the opening British attack of the Third Battle of Ypres. (In the first two, the attack had come from the other side.) Woods and villages, long familiar in daily bulletins as German strongholds, were at last in British hands—Hollebeke, Sanctuary Wood, Saint Julien, Hooge—and the advance was still continuing. Marjorie's heart quickened—then faltered. Great victories mean big casualties—and she did not even know where Roy was. When last heard of she had gathered that he was in a rest-area somewhere behind Amiens. But that had been five weeks ago.
"Do you know that district?" Liss was asking.
"Know it? I should think I did, miss—like the back of me 'and! I copped a sweet one there in 'fifteen—near Cambray."
"But Cambrai is not in the Salient," observed Marjorie.
The communicative man conceded the point immediately.