"When the Powers that be offer me a Commission in the Royal Flying Corps."
"I see." She breathed freely. "And so—we are not to be married until then?"
"Would you—to-morrow, if I——"
"You know I would!" Her voice broke over him in a wave of tenderness. "You've made me love you—so dreadfully, Alan. Now if the little tin gods hear us—the spiteful little gods who spoil people's lives—something will happen to part us, soon."
His arm went round her and gathered her against him. He said with a great thrill of triumph:
"If the Great God is for us we can defy the little tin devils! It was He who made us for each other, brought us together—will bring us closer still!"
He added, as a handsome boy of nineteen or twenty, dressed at the zenith of the fashion, and already showing the worn lines of habitual dissipation, flashed by driven in a silver-grey Lanchester, with a notorious Cyprian enthroned at his side:
"How can I thank Him enough for what He has done for me? How many temptations He has helped me resist, that I might come to you clean to-day!"
"Were any of the temptations like Mrs. Mallison?" She had freed her hand from his, and now leaned forwards, hiding her clouded face from Sherbrand under the pretext of following the grey car with her eyes. "That was little Wyvenhoe with her.... How young he is! And how old she must be! Why, I've seen her portrait in a Book of Beauty dated forty years back—with a chignon and waterfall. They called her the Marble Marvel in those days, didn't they? Before she pitched her cap over the windmill, and made hay of the Prunes and Prisms. Now she acts in Music Hall sketches—has a voice like a raven's, paints a quarter-of-an-inch thick, and exploits Eton boys. Is anything the matter?"
Sherbrand had suddenly started and pulled his watch out. Now he rapped on the glass at the back of the chauffeur, leaned out of the window and spoke to the man, and resumed his seat, answering: