ry and repay a
little the happiest five days I've spent out here.

"Your very faithful servant,

"TIMMY FORT."

She remembered a very brown face, a tall slim figure, and something
gallant about the whole of him. What was he like after ten years?
Grizzled, married, with a large family? An odious thing--Time! And
Cousin Edward's little yellow letter.

Good heavens! Twenty-six years ago--before he was a parson, or married
or anything! Such a good partner, really musical; a queer, dear fellow,
devoted, absentminded, easily shocked, yet with flame burning in him
somewhere.

'DEAR LEILA,

"After our last dance I went straight off'--I couldn't go in. I went
down to the river, and walked along the bank; it was beautiful, all
grey and hazy, and the trees whispered, and the cows looked holy; and I
walked along and thought of you. And a farmer took me for a lunatic, in
my dress clothes. Dear Leila, you were so pretty last night, and I did
love our dances. I hope you are not tired, and that I shall see you soon
again:

"Your affectionate cousin,

"EDWARD PIERSON."

And then he had gone and become a parson, and married, and been a
widower fifteen years. She remembered the death of his wife, just before
she left for South Africa, at that period of disgrace when she had so
shocked her family by her divorce. Poor Edward--quite the nicest of her
cousins! The only one she would care to see again. He would be very old
and terribly good and proper, by now.

Her wheel of Regent's Park was coming full circle, and the sun was up
behind the houses, but still no sound of traffic stirred. She stopped
before a flower-bed where was some heliotrope, and took a long,
luxurious sniff: She could not resist plucking a sprig, too, and holding
it to her nose. A sudden want of love had run through every nerve and
fibre of her; she shivered, standing there with her eyes half closed,
above the pale violet blossom. Then, noting by her wrist-watch that it
was four o'clock, she hurried on, to get to her bed, for she would have
to be on duty again at noon. Oh! the war! She was tired! If only it were
over, and one could live!...

Somewhere by Twickenham the moon had floated down; somewhere up from
Kentish Town the sun came soaring; wheels rolled again, and the seven
million sleepers in their million houses woke from morning sleep to that
same thought....

IX

Edward Pierson, dreaming over an egg at breakfast, opened a letter in a