e Arthur will be about. I
want awfully to see him. Hard luck his being hit like that,
after all the rest. Snipers are beasts!

'_P.S._--You can't think what a brainy young woman father's got
for his new secretary. And she's not half bad either. Pamela's
rather silly about her, but she'll come round.'

Beryl paid small attention to the postscript. She had heard a good
deal from Pamela about the newcomer, but it did not concern her. As
to the business aspect of the Squire's behaviour, Beryl was well
aware that she was an heiress. Aubrey would lose nothing financially
by giving up the Mannering estate to marry her. Personally she cared
nothing about Mannering, and she had enough for both. But still
there was the old name and place. How much did he care about it? how
much would he regret it? Supposing his extraordinary father really
cut him off?

Beryl felt she did not know. And therewith came the recurrent
pang--how little she really knew about the man to whom she was
engaged! She adored him. Every fibre in her slight sensitive body
still remembered the moment when he first kissed her, when she first
felt his arm about her. But since--how often there had been moments
when she had been conscious of a great distance between them--of
something that did not fit--that jarred!

For herself, she could never remember a time since she was seventeen
when Aubrey Mannering had not meant more to her than any one else in
the world. On his first departure to France, she had said good-bye
to him with secret agonies of spirit, which no one guessed but her
mother, a colourless, silent woman, who had a way of knowing
unexpectedly much of the people about her. Then when he was badly
wounded in some fighting near Festubert, in May 1915, and came home
for two months' leave, he seemed like a stranger, and Beryl had not
known what to be at with him. She was told that he had suffered
very much--it had been a severe thigh wound implicating the sciatic
nerve--and that he had been once, at least, very near to death. But
when she tried to express sympathy with what he had gone through, or
timidly to question him about it, her courage fled, her voice died
in her throat. There was something unapproachable in her old
playfellow, something that held her, and indeed every one else, at
bay.

He was always courteous, and mostly cheerful. But his face in repose
had an absent, haunted look, the eyes alert but fixed on vacancy,