the street and made a blind
course to the hospital; feeling, in dumb misery, that she had committed
the unforgivable sin of casting off her father and, at the same time,
that she had made stalwart proclamation of her faith. If ever a good,
loyal little heart was torn into piteous shreds, that little heart was
Phyllis's.

In the bare X-ray room of the hospital, which happened to be vacant,
Betty sat on the one straight-backed wooden chair, while a weeping
damsel on the uncarpeted floor sobbed in her lap and confessed her sins
and sought absolution.

Of course Gedge was a fool. If I, or any wise, diplomatic, tactful
person like myself, had found it necessary to tackle a young woman on
the subject of a matrimonial alliance, we should have gone about the
business in quite a different way. But what could you expect from an
anarchical Turk like Gedge?

Phyllis, not knowing whether she were outcast and disinherited or not,
found, of course, a champion in Betty, who, in her spacious manner,
guaranteed her freedom from pecuniary worries for the rest of her life.
But Phyllis was none the less profoundly unhappy, and it took a whole
convoy of wounded to restore her to cheerfulness. You can't attend to a
poor brave devil grinning with pain, while a surgeon pokes a six-inch
probe down a sinus in search of bits of bone or shrapnel, and be
acutely conscious of your own two-penny-half-penny little miseries.
Many a heartache, in this wise, has been cured in the Houses of Pain.

Now, nothing much would have happened, I suppose, if Phyllis, driven
from the hospital by superior decree that she should take fresh air and
exercise, had not been walking some days afterwards across the common
by the canal. Bordering the latter, Wellingsford has an avenue of
secular chestnuts of which it is inordinately proud. Dispersed here and
there are wooden benches sanctified by generations of lovers. Carven
thereon are the presentments, often interlaced, of hearts that have
long since ceased to beat; lonely hearts transfixed by arrows, which in
all probability survived the wound and inspired the owner to the
parentage of a dozen children; initials once, individually, the record
of many a romance, but now, collectively, merely an alphabet run mad.

Phyllis entered the avenue, practically deserted at midday, and rested,
a pathetically lonely little grey-uniformed figure on one of the
benches. On the common, some distance behind her, stretched the lines