what you've said."

He released her, mounted his motor bicycle, and rode away. Phyllis
watched him disappear up the avenue; then she walked rather blindly
back to the bench and sat down among the ruins of a black and
abominable world. After a while the friendly robin, seeing her so
still, perched first on the back of the bench and then hopped on the
seat by her side, and cocking his head, looked at her enquiringly out
of his little hard eye, as though he would say:

"My dear child, what are you making all this fuss about? Isn't it early
June? Isn't the sun shining? Aren't the chestnuts in flower? Don't you
see that bank of dark blue cloud over there which means a nice
softening rain in the night and a jolly good breakfast of worms in the
morning? What's wrong with this exquisitely perfect universe?"

And Phyllis--on her own confession--with an angry gesture sent him
scattering up among the cool broad leaves and cried:

"Get away, you hateful little beast!"

And having no use for robins and trees and spring and sunshine and such
like intolerable ironies, a white little wisp of a nurse left them all
to their complacent riot and went back to the hospital.

CHAPTER XII

A few days after this, Mrs. Holmes sent me under cover a telegram which
she had received from her son. It was dispatched from Aberdeen and ran:
"Perfectly well. Don't worry about me. Love. Randall." And that was all
I heard of him for some considerable time. What he was doing in
Aberdeen, a city remote from his sphere of intellectual, political, and
social activities, Heaven and himself alone knew. I must confess that I
cared very little. He was alive, he was well, and his mother had no
cause for anxiety. Phyllis had definitely sent him packing. There was
no reason for me to allow speculation concerning him to keep me awake
of nights.

I had plenty to think about besides Randall. They made me Honorary
Treasurer of the local Volunteer Training Corps which had just been
formed. The members not in uniform wore a red brassard with "G.R." in
black. The facetious all over the country called them "Gorgeous
Wrecks." I must confess that on their first few parades they did not
look very military. Their composite paunchiness, beardedness,
scragginess, spectacledness, impressed me unfavourably when, from my
Hosea-carriage, I first beheld them. Marigold, who was one of the first
to join and to leap into the grey uniform, tried to swagger about as an
ins