whatever
happens. . . .

"Is that Lady Auldfearn's?" Vane took the telephone off the table.
"Oh! Lady Auldfearn speaking? I'm Captain Vane. . . . Is Miss
Devereux stopping with you? Just left yesterday, you say. . . .
Yes--I rather wanted to see her. Going to be where? At the
Mainwarings' dance to-night. Thank you. But you don't know where she
is at present. . . ."

He hung up the receiver, and sat back in his chair, with a frown. Then
suddenly a thought struck him, and he pulled the letters he had
received that morning out of his pocket. He extracted one in Nancy
Smallwood's sprawling handwriting, and glanced through it again to make
sure.

"Dine 8 o'clock--and go on to Mainwarings' dance afterwards. . . . Do
come, if you can. . . ."

Vane, placing it on the table in front of him, bowed to it profoundly.
"We might," he remarked to Binks, "almost have it framed."

And Binks' quivering tail assented, with a series of thumps against his
basket.

"I hope you won't find your dinner partner too dreadful." Nancy
Smallwood was shooting little bird-like glances round the room as she
greeted Vane that evening. "She has a mission . . . or two. Keeps
soldiers from drinking too much and getting into bad hands.
Personally, anything--_anything_ would be better than getting into
hers."

"I seem," murmured Vane, "to have fallen on my feet. She isn't that
gargantuan woman in purple, is she?"

"My dear boy! That's George's mother. You know my husband. No, there
she is--the wizened up one in black. . . . And she's going on to the
Mainwarings' too--so you'll have to dance with her."

At any other time Vane might have extracted some humour from his
neighbour, but to-night, in the mood he was, she seemed typical of all
that was utterly futile. She jarred his nerves till it was all he
could do to reply politely to her ceaseless "We are doing this, and we
decided that." To her the war had given an opportunity for
self-expression which she had hitherto been denied. Dreadful as she
undoubtedly thought it with one side of her nature, with another it
made her almost happy. It had enabled her to force herself into the
scheme of things; from being a nonentity, she had made herself a person
with a mission. . . .

True, the doings and the decisions on which she harped continually were
for the benefit of the men he had led. But to this woman it was not
the men that counted most. They had to fit into the decis