at Boulogne that
royalty was coming, at least."

There was a slight frown on Granet's forehead. He glanced half
unconsciously towards Geraldine.

"Mysterious sort of fellow, Thomson," Major Harrison continued, in
blissful ignorance of the peculiar significance of his words. "You see
him in Paris one day, you hear of him at the furthermost point of the
French lines immediately afterwards, he reports at headquarters within
a few hours, and you meet him slipping out of a back door of the War
Office, a day or two later."

"Inspector of Field Hospitals is a post which I think must have been
created for him," Colonel Grey remarked. "He's an impenetrable sort of
chap."

"Was Major Thomson going or returning from France when you saw him
last?" Geraldine asked, looking across the table.

"Coming back. When we left Boulogne, the destroyer which brought him
over was waiting in the harbour. It passed us in mid-Channel, doing
about thirty knots to our eighteen. Prince Cyril was rather sick. He
was bringing dispatches but no one seemed to have thought of providing a
destroyer for him."

"After all," Lady Anselman murmured, "there is nothing very much more
important than our hospitals."

The conversation drifted away from Thomson. Granet was making himself
very agreeable indeed to Isabel Worth. There was a little more colour
in her cheeks than at the commencement of luncheon, and her manner had
become more animated.

"Tell me about the village where you live?" he inquired--"Market
Burnham, isn't it?"

"When we first went there," she replied, "I thought that it was simply
Paradise. That was four years ago, though, and I scarcely counted upon
spending the winters there."

"You find it lovely, then."

She shivered a little, half closing her eyes as though to shut out some
unpleasant memory.

"The house," she explained, "is on a sort of tongue of land, with a
tidal river on either side and the sea not fifty yards away from our
drawing-room window. When there are high tides, we are simply cut off
from the mainland altogether unless we go across on a farm cart."

"You mustn't draw too gloomy a picture of your home," Lady Anselman
said. "I have seen it when it was simply heavenly."

"And I have seen it," the girl retorted, with a note of grimness in her
tone, "when it was a great deal more like the other place--stillness
that seems almost to stifle you, grey mists that choke your breath and
blot out everything; nothing b