“Don’t fret, Cora,” her friend said at last. “I know you were fond of him, and that he was fond of you, but——”
“Oh, don’t, don’t speak like that,” Mrs. Hartsilver exclaimed hastily, pressing her fingers to her eyes. “It is all too terrible, I can’t bear to think of it; and yet I can’t help thinking about it and wondering—wondering——”
Yootha Hagerston encircled her friend with her arm, and kissed her warmly.
“I know—I know,” she said in a tone of deep sympathy. “No, we won’t talk about it. Did Henry refer to it at all?”
“Henry!”
The tone betrayed utter contempt, almost hatred.
“Oh, yes, Henry referred to it all right. At least I drew his attention to the report in last night’s paper, and—oh, you should have heard him! I felt I wanted to scream. I longed to strike him. He has no heart, Yootha, no sympathy for anything or any one. I wonder sometimes why I go on living with him. He said he felt only contempt for any man who took his life, no matter in what circumstances!”
Like many another, Henry Hartsilver had succeeded in supplying himself with petrol during the war, and as his limousine sped slowly down Bond Street a little later that morning with his wife and Yootha Hagerston in it, officers home on leave who noticed it wondered if people at home actually realized what was happening on the Western front.
“More profiteers’ belongings!” a captain in the Devons, limping painfully out of Clifford Street, observed grimly. “I sometimes wish the Boches could land a few thousand troops here to give our folk a taste of the real thing. Who’s that they are talking to? I seem to know his face.”
For the car, after slowing down, had stopped owing to the traffic congestion, and a tall, good looking, well-groomed man who could not have been more than seven-and-twenty, had raised his hat to its occupants and now stood on the curb, talking to them.