, very
sorry to have been proved right. And I fear that you must feel it very
much, as you have so many German friends."

"I haven't many German friends now," she said quickly. "I had as a girl,
and of course I've kept up with two or three of them, as you know. But
it's true that the whole thing is a great shock and--and a great pain to
me. Unlike you, I've always thought very well of Germans."

He said quietly, "So have I."

"Ah, but not in my sense!" She could not help smiling a little ruefully.
"You know I never thought of them in your sense at all--I mean not as
soldiers."

There was a pause, a long and rather painful pause, between them.

CHAPTER IX

Major Guthrie looked at Mrs. Otway meditatively.

Apart from his instinctive attraction for her--an attraction which had
sprung into being the very first time they had met, at a dinner party at
the Deanery--he had always regarded her as an exceptionally clever
woman. She was able to do so much more than most of the ladies he had
known. To his simple soldier mind there was something interesting and,
well, yes, rather extraordinary, in a woman who sat on committees, who
could hold her own so well in argument, and who yet remained very
feminine, sometimes--so he secretly thought--quite delightfully absurd
and inconsequent, with it all.

Major Guthrie had always been sorry that Mrs. Otway and his mother
didn't exactly hit it off. His mother had once been a beauty, and was
now a rather shrewish, sharp-tongued old lady, who had outlived most of
the people and most of the things she had cared for in life. Mrs. Otway
irritated Mrs. Guthrie. The old lady despised the still pretty widow's
eager, interested, enthusiastic outlook on life.

Suddenly Major Guthrie took a large pocket-book out of his right breast
pocket. He opened it, and Mrs. Otway saw that it contained a packet of
bank-notes held together by an india-rubber band. There was also an
empty white envelope in the pocket-book. Slipping off the band, he began
counting the notes. When he had counted four, she called out, "Stop!
Stop! I am only giving you a twenty-pound cheque." And then she saw that
they were not five-pound notes, as she had supposed, but ten-pound
notes.

He went on counting, and mechanically, hardly knowing that she was doing
so, she counted with him up to ten. He then took the envelope he had
brought with him, put the ten notes inside, and getting up from his
chair he laid the envel