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'Why don't you do it at once? Why don't you take the job at once?' for in the back of the dark shop he would at least be safe.

He said:

'Oh, no! Not at this time! Besides the old furniture trade's probably not itself for the minute...' He was obviously thinking of something else.

'I've probably been a low cad,' he said, 'wringing your heart with my doubts. But I wanted to see where our similarities come in. We've always been--or we've seemed always to me--so alike in our thoughts. I daresay I wanted you to respect me...'

'Oh, I respect you! I respect you!' she said. 'You're as innocent as a child.'

He went on:

'And I wanted to get some thinking done. It hasn't been often of late that one has had a quiet room and a fire and...you! To think in front of. You do make one collect one's thoughts. I've been very muddled till to-day...till five minutes ago! Do you remember our drive? You analysed my character. I'd never have let another soul...But you see...Don't you see?'

She said:

'No! What am I to see? I remember...'

He said:

'That I'm certainly not an English country gentleman now; picking up the gossip of the horse markets and saying: let the country go to hell, for me!'

She said:

'Did I say that?...Yes, I said that!'

The deep waves of emotion came over her: she trembled. She stretched out her arms...She thought she stretched out her arms. He was hardly visible in the firelight. But she could see nothing: she was blind for tears. She could hardly be stretching out her arms, for she had both hands to her handkerchief on her eyes. He said something: it was no word of love or she would have held it! it began with: 'Well, I must be...' He was silent for a long time: she imagined herself to feel great waves coming from him to her. But he wasn't in the room...

The rest, till that moment at the War Office, had been pure agony, and unrelenting. Her mother's paper cut down her money; no orders for serials came in: her mother, obviously, was failing. The eternal diatribes of her brother were like lashes upon her skin. He seemed to be praying Tietjens to death. Of Tietjens she saw and heard nothing. At the Macmasters she heard, once, that he had just gone out. It added to her desire to scream when she saw a newspaper. Poverty invaded them. The police raided the house in search of her brother and his friends. Then her brother went to prison: somewhere in the Midlands. The friendliness of their former neighbours turned to surly suspicion. They could get no milk. Food became almost unprocurable without going to long distances. For three days Mrs Wannop was clean out of her mind. Then she grew better and began to write a new book. It promised to be rather good. But there was no publisher. Edward came out of prison, full of good-humour and boisterousness. They seemed to have had a great deal to drink in prison. But, hearing that his mother had gone mad over that disgrace, after a terrible scene with Valentine, in which he accused her of being the mistress of Tietjens and therefore militarist, he consented to let his mother use her influence--of which she had still some--to get him appointed as an A.B. on a mine-sweeper. Great winds became an agony to Valentine Wannop in addition to the unbearable sounds of firing that came continuously over the sea. Her mother grew much better: she took pride in having a son in a Service. She was then the more able to appreciate the fact that her paper stopped payment altogether. A small mob on the fifth of November burned Mrs Wannop in effigy in front of their cottage and broke their lower windows. Mrs Wannop ran out and in the illumination of the fire knocked down two farm labourer hobbledehoys. It was terrible to see Mrs Wannop's grey hair in the firelight. After that the butcher refused them meat altogether, ration card or no ration card. It was imperative that they should move to London.

The marsh horizon became obscured with giant stilts: the air above it filled with aeroplanes: the roads covered with military cars. There was then