the brow overcast and frowning. In the old days Aubrey's smile had
been his best natural gift. To win a smile from him in her
childhood, Beryl would have done anything--have gone on her knees up
the drive, or offered up the only doll she cared for, or gone
without jam for a week. Now when he came home invalided, she had the
same craving; but what she craved for came her way very rarely. He
would laugh and talk with her as with other people. But that
exquisite brightness of eye and lip, which seemed to be for one
person only, and, when it came, to lift that person to the seventh
heaven, she waited for in vain.

Then he went back to France, and in due course came the Somme.
Aubrey Mannering went through the whole five months without a
scratch. He came back with a D.S.O. and a Staff appointment for a
short Christmas leave, everybody, except his father, turning out to
welcome him as the local hero. Then, for a time, he went to
Aldershot as the head of an Officers' School there, and was able to
come down occasionally to Chetworth or Mannering.

During that first Christmas leave he paid several visits to
Chetworth, and evidently felt at home there. To Lady Chicksands,
whom most people regarded as a tiresome nonentity, he was
particularly kind and courteous. It seemed to give him positive
pleasure to listen to her garrulous housekeeping talk, or to hold
her wool for her while she wound it. And as she, poor lady, was not
accustomed to such attention from brilliant young men, his three
days' visit was to her a red-letter time. With Sir Henry also he was
on excellent terms, and made just as good a listener to the details
of country business as to Lady Chicksands' domestic tales.

And yet to Beryl he was in some ways more of a riddle than ever. He
talked curiously little about the war--at least to her. He had a way
of finding out, both at Chicksands and Mannering, men who had lost
sons in France, and when he and Beryl took a walk, it seemed to
Beryl as though they were constantly followed by friendly furtive
looks from old labourers who passed them on the road, and nodded as
they went by. But when the daily war news was being discussed he had
a way of sitting quite silent, unless his opinion was definitely
asked. When it was, he would answer, generally in a rather
pessimistic spirit, and escape the conversation as soon as he could.
And the one thing that roused him and put him out of temper was the
easy complacent talk of peop