"I don't like to bother him," she answered.
As she walked to the door, I felt that I had lost a friend. It says much for her magnanimity that I was invited to the house within a week to be told that the War Office—without encouragement from Sir Maurice—had behaved most sensibly, reviewing the junior members of my department en bloc and granting them all certificates of exemption on the grounds of indispensability.
"We seem drifting back to the old life very much," said George, pensively watching the bubbles break on the champagne, when I told him, with some distaste, of my interview. "Here we are eating and drinking as usual, I'm always being invited to dances.... We're getting used to this infernal war, you know, Stornaway, and we shall lose it, if we can't put up as relatively good a show as the fellows who are being killed. I suppose we're too far away from the front even with an occasional air-raid to remind us."
"I was glancing through my diary the other night," I told him. "There's hardly a reference to the war. The political situation, my own work——"
He laughed a little sadly.
"If I kept a diary, I'm afraid I should find a good deal of it devoted to Raney and his wife."
"I did," I told him.
He looked up quickly and then lowered his head until his chin rested on his fists.
"God! that has been a tragedy!" he groaned. "It's the biggest tragedy of my life, bigger than when Jim Loring was knocked out. Presumably it was all over with him in a few minutes or hours or days at most.... But that poor devil Raney—he's some years younger than I am."