onths. He was laughing, so she heard, when he met his
death. So would she, in honour of him, go on laughing till she met hers.

"And that silly little fool, Phyllis, is still crying her eyes out over
Randall," she said. "Don't I think she was wrong in sending him away?
If she had married him she might have influenced him, made him get a
commission in the army. I've threatened to beat her if she talks such
nonsense. Why can't people take a line and stick to it?"

"This isn't a world of Bettys, my dear," said I.

"Rubbish! The outrageous Mrs. Tufton's doing it."

Apparently she was. She followed Betty about as the lamb followed Mary.
Tufton, after a week or two at Wellington Barracks, had been given
sergeant's stripes and sent off with a draft to the front. Betty's
dramatic announcement of her widowhood seemed to have put the fear of
death into the woman's soul. As soon as her husband landed in France
she went scrupulously through the closely printed casualty lists of
non-commissioned officers and men in The Daily Mail, in awful dread
lest she should see her husband's name. Betty vainly assured her that,
in the first place, she would hear from the War Office weeks before
anything could appear in the papers, and that, in the second, his name
would occur under the heading "Grenadier Guards," and not under "Royal
Field Artillery," "Royal Engineers," "Duke of Cornwall's Light
Infantry," "R.A.M.C.," or Australian and Canadian contingents. Mrs.
Tufton went through the lot from start to finish. Once, indeed, she
came across the name, in big print, and made a bee-line through the
wards for Betty--an offence for which the Matron nearly threw her,
there and then, into the street. It was that of the gallant Colonel of
a New Zealand Regiment at Gallipoli. Betty had to point to the brief
biographical note to prove to the distracted woman that the late
Colonel Tufton of New Zealand could not be identical with Sergeant
Tufton of the Grenadiers. She regarded Mrs. Tufton as a brand she had
plucked from the burning and took a great deal of trouble with her. On
the other hand, I imagine Mrs. Tufton looked upon herself as a very
important person, a sergeant's wife, and the confidential intimate of a
leading sister at the Wellingsford Hospital. In fact, Marigold
mentioned her notorious vanity.

"What does it matter," cried Betty, when I put this view before her,
"how swelled her head may be, so long as it isn't swollen with drink?"

And