When Elizabeth entered, the hall was crowded. It was the principal sitting-room of the house, now that for reasons of economy fires were seldom lit in the drawing-rooms. Before Elizabeth's advent it had been a dingy, uncomfortable place, but she and Pamela had entirely transformed it. As in the estate so in the house, the Squire did not know what he possessed. In all old houses with a continuous life, there are accumulations of furniture and stores, discarded by the generation of one day, and brought back by the fashion of the next. A little routing in attics and forgotten cupboards and chests had produced astonishing results. Chippendale chairs and settees had been brought down from the servants' bedrooms; two fine Dutch cabinets had been discovered amid a mass of lumber in an outhouse; a tall Japanese screen, dating from the end of the eighteenth century, and many pairs of linen curtains embroidered about the same time in branching oriental patterns by the hands of Mannering ladies, had been unearthed, and Pamela—for Elizabeth having started the search had interfered very little with its results—had spent some of her now scanty leisure in making the best of the finds. The hall was now a charming place, scented, moreover, on this January evening by the freesias and narcissus that Elizabeth had managed to rear in the house itself, and Pamela, who had always been ashamed of her own ill-kept and out-at-elbows home, as compared with the perfections of Chetworth, had been showing Arthur and Beryl Chicksands what had been done to renovate the old house since they were last in it—'and all without spending a penny!'—with a girlish pleasure which in the Captain's opinion became her greatly. Pamela needed indeed a good deal of animation to be as handsome as she deserved to be! A very critical observer took note that her stock of it was rapidly rising. It was the same with the letters, too, which for a month or so past, she had condescended to write him, after treating him most uncivilly in the autumn, and never answering a long screed—'and a jolly good one!'—which he had written her from Paris in November.
As Elizabeth came in, Pamela was reading aloud a telegram just received, and Miss Bremerton was greeted with the news—'Desmond's coming to-night, instead of to-morrow! They've given him forty-eight hours' leave, and he goes to France on Thursday.'
'That's very short!' said Elizabeth, as she took her place beside Pamela, who was making tea. 'Does your father know?'
Forest, it appeared, had gone to tell him. Meanwhile Captain Chicksands was watching with a keen eye the relation between Miss Bremerton and Pamela. He saw that the Squire's secretary was scrupulously careful to give Pamela her place as daughter of the house; but Pamela's manner hardly showed any real intimacy between them. And it was easy to see where the real authority lay. As for himself he had lately begun to ask himself seriously how much he was interested in Pamela. For in truth, though he was no coxcomb, he could not help seeing—all the more because of Pamela's variable moods towards him—that she was at least incipiently interested in him. If so, was it fair to her that they should correspond?—and that he should come to Mannering whenever he was asked and military duty allowed, now that the Squire's embargo was at least partially removed?
He confessed to himself that he was glad to come, that Pamela attracted him. At the same time there was in him a stern sense that the time was no time for love-making. The German hosts were gathering; the vast breakdown in Russia was freeing more and more of them for the Western assault. He himself was for the moment doing some important intelligence work, in close contact with the High Command. No one outside a very small circle knew better than he what lay in front of England—the fierce death-struggle over a thousand miles of front. And were men and women to be kissing and marrying while these storm-clouds of war—this rain of blood—were gathering overhead?
Involuntarily he moved further from Pamela. His fine face with the rather high cheek-bones, strong mouth, and lined brow, seemed to put softness away. He approached Elizabeth.
'What is the Squire doing about his wood, Miss Bremerton? The Government's desperately in want of ash!'
He spoke almost as one official might speak to another—comrade to comrade. What he had heard about her doings from his father had filled his soldier's mind with an eager admiration for her. That was how women should bear themselves in this war—as the practical helpers of men.
He fell into the chair beside her, and Elizabeth was soon deep in conversation with him, a conversation that any one might overhear who would. It turned partly on the armies abroad—partly on the effort at home. There was warmth—even passion—in it, studiously restrained. But it was the passion of two patriots, conscious through every pulse of their country's strait.