. For liars I have the Apocryphal condemnation. Yet
I lied without the faintest rippling qualm of conscience.

"My dear fellow," said I, stoutly, "there's not the remotest speck of
truth in it. You haven't a second's occasion to worry."

"That's all right," he said.

The Sister approached again. Instinctively I stretched out my hand. He
laughed.

"No good. You must take it as gripped. Goodbye, old chap."

I bade him good-bye and Marigold wheeled me away.

A few days afterwards they told me that this gay, gallant, honourable,
sensitive gentleman was dead. Although I had known him so little, it
seemed that I knew him very intimately, and I deeply mourned his loss.

I think this episode was the most striking of what I may term personal
events during those autumn months.

Of Randall Holmes we continued to hear in the same mysterious manner.
His mother visited the firm of solicitors in London through whom his
correspondence passed. They pleaded ignorance of his doings and
professional secrecy as to the disclosure of his whereabouts. In
December he ceased writing altogether, and twice a week Mrs. Holmes
received a formal communication from the lawyers to the effect that
they had been instructed by her son to inform her that he was in
perfect health and sent her his affectionate greetings. Such news of
this kind as I received I gave to Betty, who passed it on to Phyllis
Gedge.

Of course my intimacy with my dear Betty continued unbroken. If the
unmarried Betty had a fault, it was a certain sweet truculence, a
pretty self-assertiveness which sometimes betrayed intolerance of human
foibles. Her widowhood had, in a subtle way, softened these little
angularities of her spiritual contour. And bodily, the curves of her
slim figure had become more rounded. She was no longer the young Diana
of a year ago. The change into the gracious woman who had passed
through the joy and the sorrow of life was obvious even to me, to whom
it had been all but imperceptibly gradual. After a while she rarely
spoke of her husband. The name of Leonard Boyce was never mentioned
between us. With her as with me, the weeks ate up the uneventful days
and the months the uneventful weeks. In her humdrum life the falling
away of Mrs. Tufton loomed catastrophic.

For four months Mrs. Tufton shone splendid as the wife of the British
warrior. The Wellingsford Hospital rang with her praises and glistened
with her scrubbing brush. She was the Admirable Cr