s of such couples were interlaced, and
they talked very earnestly as they walked.

On fine days the husbandless wives organised picnics and boiled the
kettle over a fire of twigs. On these occasions the arrangements were
generally in the hands of a fat, jolly woman everyone called "Mrs.
Pat." She it was who chose the site, built the fire with gipsy
cunning, and cut the forked sticks on which the kettle hung. The meal
over, Mrs. Pat would produce a blackened cigarette holder and sit and
smoke with reflective enjoyment while she translated the rustling,
furtive sounds of life in brake and hedge-row around them for the
benefit of anyone who cared to listen. No one knew whence she had
acquired such mysterious completeness of knowledge. It was as if an
invisible side of her walked hand in hand with Nature; sap oozing from
a bursting bud, laden bee or fallen feather, each was to Mrs. Pat the
chapter of a vast romance: and if she bored anyone with her
interpretation of it, they had only got to get up and go for a walk.

She had a niece staying with her, the fiancee of a Lieutenant in her
husband's ship, a slim thing with blue eyes and a hint of the Overseas
in the lazy, unstudied grace of her movements. She spoke sparingly,
and listened to the conversation of the others with her eyes always on
the distant grey shadow that was the sea. Thus the days passed.

In the evenings Betty read or knitted and inveigled her stout, kindly
landlady into gossip on the threshold while she cleared away the
evening meal, and so the morning of the ninth day found Betty staring
out of her window, listening for the thrush to begin again its
haunting, unfinished song.

An object moving rapidly along the top of the hedge that skirted the
lane leading to the cottage caught her eye; she watched it until the
hedge terminated, when it resolved itself into the top of Eileen
Cavendish's hat. Her pretty face was pink with exertion and
excitement, and she moved at a gait suggestive of both running and
walking.

Betty greeted her at the gateway of her little garden, and her heart
quickened as she ran to meet the bearer of tidings.

"My dear," gasped Mrs. Cavendish, "they're coming in this morning.
Mrs. Monro--that's my landlady--has a brother in the town: I forget
what he does there, but he always knows."

For an instant the colour ebbed from Betty's cheeks, and then her
beating heart sent it surging back again.

"But----" she said. "Does