ery keenly
Mordaunt's eyes surveyed him, but they were not without a hint of
kindness notwithstanding. "I mustn't call you a young fool, I suppose,"
he said, "but really you are not overwise. Now, what about these affairs
of yours? Shall we go into them now or after tea?"

Rupert shrugged his shoulders sullenly. "I don't know that I care to go
into them at all."

The kindliness went out of Mordaunt's eyes and a certain steeliness took
its place. "As you like," he said. "Only let it be clearly understood
that I will have no borrowing from Chris. I have forbidden her to lend
money to any one of you. If you want it, you must come direct to me."

Rupert shifted his position, and looked out of the window. Down in the
garden Chris was dispensing tea to three of his brother-subalterns,
assisted by Noel. Bertrand was seated by her side, alert and watchful,
ready at a moment's notice to come to her aid. It was his customary
attitude, and it had been so more than ever since the death of Cinders.
There was a protecting brotherliness about him that Chris found
infinitely comforting: He understood her so perfectly.

She had not wanted to emerge from her seclusion to entertain her
brother's friends on that sunny Sunday afternoon, but he had gently
persuaded her. A change had come over Chris during the past four days.
The violence of her grief had spent itself on the night that she and Noel
had mingled their tears over the loss of their favourite, and she had not
alluded to it since. She accepted her husband's sympathy with gratitude,
but she shrank so visibly from the smallest allusion to her trouble that
he found no opportunity for expressing it. He would not intrude it upon
her. It was not his way, and she made him aware that for this also she
was grateful.

But it was plainly from Bertrand that she drew her chief comfort. His
very presence seemed to soothe her. He was just the friend she needed to
help her through her dark hour.

That she fretted secretly Mordaunt could not doubt, but she was so
zealous to hide all traces of it from him that he never detected them. He
only missed her gay wilfulness and the sunshine of her smile. She
responded to his tenderness even more readily than usual, but she did not
open her heart to him. There seemed to be a barrier intervening that she
could not bring herself to pass.

In his own mind he set this fact down to a certain feminine
unreasonableness, imagining that she could not forget