re to refuse to see Francis Breton did it solve the
question? Did it help her--and that was the great need of her present
life--to love Roddy any better?

And if she went to his rooms and saw him, would not the truth emerge
from that meeting and the miserable doubts and temptations that had
shadowed her since her marriage be cleared away for ever?

She liked Roddy and did not love him--nothing could alter that.

Breton and she belonged to a world that was hostile to this world that
she was now in--nothing could alter that.

Yes, she would go and see Breton. She got up, smiled at Lady Darrant and
went across the room to talk to Uncle John.

On this afternoon she had a great overpowering longing for someone to
love her, to care for her, to pity her, to take her into their arms and
whisper comfort to her. It was so long--oh! so long, since Dr. Chris and
Uncle John had done that.

And yet--the irony of it--there was Roddy eager to do it all: and from
him, the fates had decreed that it should mean nothing to her.

"Why can't he touch me? Why can't he give me what I want? Is it my
fault? Whose fault is it?"

And when she came to Uncle John she was almost afraid to look at him
lest he should see the unhappiness in her eyes.

But, in spite of her unhappiness, she could be satirically observant.
Her grandmother, up there on the wall, controlled, like the moon, this
tide of human beings. They flowed forward, they retreated. About them,
around them, behind and in front of them hovered this War....

Rachel knew that it was the Beaminster doctrine that anything that
occurred to the nation was to be attributed, in the main, to Beaminster
principles. She could tell at once that they had seized upon this war as
an example of Beaminster government. Had diplomacy prevented it, behold
the triumph of Beaminster diplomacy; now, as it had not been prevented,
a swift and total triumph would assert the genius of Beaminster
militancy.

"A week out there ought to be enough.... It's tiresome, of course, but
they'll soon have had enough of it...."

Even Rachel, looking up at the portrait, might, not too fantastically,
imagine that this war presented the last great manifestation of power on
the part of that old woman.

Everyone in the room, perhaps, felt the same.

II

Many eyes were upon her as she moved across to Lord John. This girl,
with the foreign colour and bearing, having, apparently, so little of
the Beaminster about h