4

The Minister was having tea too, looking even paler than usual, with his left hand in a sling. Kitty put up her eye-glasses and looked at him with increased interest. As ministers go, he was certainly of an interesting appearance; she had always thought that. She rather liked the paradoxical combination of shrewdness and idealism, sullenness and humour, in his white, black-browed, clever face. He looked patient, but patient perforce, as if he rode natural impatience on a curb. He looked as if he might know a desperate earnestness, but preferred to keep it at arm's length with a joke; his earnestness would be too grim and violent to be an easy and natural companion to him. He looked as if he might get very badly hurt, but would cut out the hurt and throw it away with the cold promptness of the surgeon. He was not yet forty, but looked more, perhaps because he enjoyed bad health. At this moment he was eating a rock bun and talking to Vernon Prideaux. One difference between them was that Prideaux looked an intelligent success, like a civil servant, or a rising barrister or M.P., and Chester looked a brilliant failure, and more like a Sinn Feiner or a Bolshevist. Only not really like either of these, because he didn't look as if he would muff things. He might go under, but his revolutions wouldn't. Kitty, who too greatly despised people who muffed things, recognised the distinction. She had a friend whose revolutions, which were many, always did go under....

There was a queer, violent strength about the Minister.

But when he smiled it was as if someone had flashed a torch on lowering cliffs, and lit them into extraordinary and elf-like beauty. Kitty knew already that he could be witty; she suddenly perceived now that he could be sweet—a bad word, but there seemed no other.

He ate another rock bun, and another. But they were small. His eyes fell on Kitty, eating a jam sandwich. But his thoughts were elsewhere.

"Yes, it was me that had to tie it up for him," Ivy Delmer was saying to another typist. "Luckily I've done First Aid. But I felt like fainting.... The blood.... I don't like him, you know; his manners are so funny and his dictating is so difficult; but I must say I did admire his pluck.... He never thanked me or anything—he wouldn't, of course. Not that I minded a scrap about that...."

5

When Kitty got home to her flat that evening, she found the Boomerang on the floor. (It was on the floor owing to the lack of a letter-box.) The Boomerang was a letter from herself, addressed to Neil Desmond, Esq., and she wrote it and despatched it every few months or so, whenever, in fact, she had, at the moment, nothing better to do. On such days as Bank Holidays, when she spent them at the office but official work did not press, Kitty tidied the drawers of her table and wrote to break off her engagement. The drawers got tidied all right, but it is doubtful whether the engagement could ever be considered to have got broken off, owing to the letter breaking it being a boomerang. It was a boomerang because Neil Desmond, Esq. was a person of no fixed address. He wrote long and thrilling letters to Kitty (which, if her correspondence had been raided by the police, would probably have subjected her to arrest—he had himself for long been liable to almost every species of arrest, so could hardly be further incriminated), but when she wrote to the address he gave he was no longer ever there, and so her letters returned to her like homing pigeons. So the position was that Neil was engaged to Kitty, and Kitty had so far failed to disengage herself from Neil. Neil was that friend who has been already referred to as one whose revolutions always went under. Kitty had met him first in Greece, in April, 1914. She had since decided that he was probably at his best in Greece. In July he had been arming to fight Carson's rebels when the outbreak of the European War disappointed him. The parts played by him in the European War were many and various, and, from the British point of view, mostly regrettable. He followed Sir Roger Casement through many adventures, and only just escaped sharing in the last of all. He partook in the Sinn Fein rising of Easter, 1916 (muffed, as usual, Kitty had commented), and had then disappeared, and had mysteriously emerged again in Petrograd a year later, to help with the Russian revolution. Wherever, in fact, a revolution was, Neil Desmond was sure to be. He had had, as may be imagined, a busy and satisfactory summer and autumn there, and had many interesting, if impermanent, friends, such as Kerensky, Protopopoff (whom, however, he did not greatly care for), Kaledin, Lenin, Trotzky, Mr. Arthur Ransome, and General Korniloff. (It might be thought that the politics of this last-named would not have been regarded by Neil with a favourable eye, but he was, anyhow, making a revolution which did not come off.) In January, 1918, Neil had got tired of Russia (this is liable to occur) and gone off to America, where he had for some time been doing something or other, no doubt discreditable, with an Irish-American league. Then a revolution which seemed to require his assistance broke out in Equador, which kept him occupied for some weeks. After that he had gone to Greece, where Kitty vaguely believed him still to be (unless he was visiting, with seditious intent, the island in the Pacific where the world's great Have-Beens were harmoniously segregated).

"The only thing for it," Kitty observed to the cousin with whom she lived, a willowy and lovely young lily of the field, who had had a job once but had lost it owing to peace, and was now having a long rest, "The only thing for it is to put it in the agony column of the—no, not The Times, of course he wouldn't read it, but the Irish-American Banner or something. 'K. G. to N. D. All over. Regret.'"

"You'll have to marry him, darling. God means you to," sang her cousin, hooking herself into a flame-coloured and silver evening dress.