--after
saying all those things about remembering me as the sweetest girl he'd
ever met, and if ever I wanted a friend, et cetera--all the pathetic,
well-meant, useless things that I suppose a rejected man finds some
comfort in.

He went back to a whirl of business at his bank, and he has stayed there
ever since, "carrying on" his usual everyday job (the only sort of
"carrying on" he knows, as Vi Vassity would say). In his way he is "on
active service" too; doing his duty by his country. There is something
the matter with his heart--besides his crossed-in-love affair, I
mean--something that prevents him from enlisting. Very hard lines on
him, to be quite young and otherwise fit, but doomed to remain a
civilian. Of course there have to be some people as civilians still. We
couldn't get on without any civilians at all, could we?

My lover joined as a trooper the day before war was officially declared.

And he came over to Miss Million's house in Wales to tell us of his
plans the morning after Mr. Brace had gone off to town. He--the other
man--was still in the laurel-green chauffeur's kit that he was so soon
going to change for his Majesty's drab-coloured but glorious livery. And
I was in my maid's black, with cap and apron, when I opened the door to
him.

"Where's your mistress? In the drawing-room? Then come into the library,
child," said the Honourable Jim Burke, "for it's you I've come to call
upon."

"I've only a minute to spare you," I said forbiddingly, as I showed him
into the square, rather mouldy-smelling library, with its wall of unread
books and its family-portraits of dead and gone Price-Vaughans. "And
besides, I don't think a chauffeur ought to come to the front door
and----"

"I shall not be a chauffeur a minute longer than it takes me to get out
of this dashed kit," said the Honourable Jim. Then he told me about his
enlisting for active service.

"It won't be much time I shall have before that regiment gets its
orders," he said. "Time enough, though----"

He paused and looked hard at me. So hard that I felt myself colouring,
and turned away.

He took a step after me. I felt him give a little pull at my
apron-strings to make me look round.

"Time enough to get married, darling of my heart," said Jim Burke,
laughing softly.

And he took me into his arms and kissed me; at first very gently, then
eagerly, fiercely, as if to make up for time already lost and for all
that time yet to come when we