A land-girl's love story

CHAPTER XVI

CURIOUS CONDUCT OF THE MAN-HATER

"To maidens' vows and swearing
Henceforth no credit give."
                                                            —GEORGE WITHER.

I ran back to the hut.

So late! I found the tea-supper all cleared away, and most of the Campites dispersed about their evening avocations.

Only Elizabeth the trusty had kept back for me milk, a huge plateful of bread-and-butter, and cold bacon.

I expected that Elizabeth would sit down near me while I devoured my meal, and would spice it with comments on the reason for my lateness. Here I had reckoned without my hostess. Not only did she not have a word to say about my having walked—or loitered—home with a young man; but she hadn't, apparently, got a word to say to me about anything, though we had hardly seen each other all day!

In an abstracted way she glanced at the food disappearing from before me, murmuring absently:

"Mustard? Or don't you take it?" Then, looking at the clock said: "Slow, I'm sure." And then, with a curious look on her small face, she left me and strayed forth into the gloaming outside the hut.

I finished my meal, cleared it away, and went out to find her. No sign of Elizabeth in the field that led down to the bathing-pool. I crossed the tiny bridge over the stream, and wandered into the next field.

Here, through the branches of some hazels growing beside a stone fence, I caught sight of the gleam of a light overall. I went up to it. I found Elizabeth in a nook where it was almost dark under the branches.

"Hullo!" I greeted her. "So this is where you've hidden yourself away, is it?"

Elizabeth, turning, gave a violent start. "Hullo," she said, in what I can only describe as a most unwelcoming tone. To me, her inseparable chum!

I let myself down on a boulder close to her.

"Elizabeth, old thing, what's the matter? Have you got a headache?" I said.

"Headache!" echoed Elizabeth quite pettishly. "You know I never have headaches."

"I thought perhaps you were a little tired."

"Tired! Not in the very least, thanks." My chum's tone was discouraging.

I tried again.

"Look here, my dear, are you stuffy with me about anything? Did I rag you too much about getting tamed by Hackenschmidt the Second, or——"

"Stuffy?" echoed the little Man-hater, her tone getting snappier and snappier. "If I were, Joan, I'd tell you."

"Yes; I should have thought so," said I, feeling perfectly convinced that something was up. "For you know that if there's anything I could do for you——"

Here Elizabeth quite took my breath away by the suddenness with which she spoke.

"There is something you can do," she blurted out through the gloom. "You can just go away, if you don't mind, and leave me alone."

I'd only just breath left to say flatly:

"Oh, righto," and to get up and set off back to the hut.

Elizabeth wanted me to leave her alone! What on earth was the meaning of that?

"To be left alone"—with most girls that means that they have fallen in love and want to pick themselves up before they can assess the damage.

But with Elizabeth? With that genuine Loather of Men?

Never—!

With most girls, to say "I dislike men" means one of perhaps six things.

1. They don't know any men.

2. No men have been known to pay any attention to them.

3. Some man has treated them very badly.

4. They wish to be contradicted and teased.

5. They are fibbing for the sake of fibbing.

With Elizabeth not one of these reasons would hold for a second.

But Elizabeth in love! Reason positively shouted an "Oh, no." ...

Yet a mad little suspicion, whispering within me, seemed to defy that voice of reason. As I walked along in the fast-gathering gloom I remembered I had seen a man look at Elizabeth quite lately. More lately still I had seen Elizabeth most uncharacteristically confused at the mention of that man's name.

Wildly improbable, I told myself. And, as I did so I walked straight into the meaning for Elizabeth's wanting to be left to herself just then.

In fact, I bumped into the young man, who was coming along the path.

"Oh, sorry," said a low-pitched, masculine voice that I had heard before. A hand was put up to a cap. Then the figure which I had run against passed quickly on up the field.

Elizabeth's "old" Colonel! She was meeting him out there!

Him?

There are no words to describe my condition of pole-axed astonishment at this.... Why try to find any?

(Elizabeth——!)

* * * * * * *

In about half an hour she returned to the hut, where the others were turning up again by twos and threes.

Elizabeth, looking about two inches taller than usual, gave a defensive glare round the groups of smiling and gossiping girls. But none of them had seen her except me. The defensive glare was then focussed upon me.

I hadn't meant to say a word to the girl! I really hadn't!

I suppose nobody feels exactly chatty when they've just fallen out of a balloon?

But Elizabeth, evidently wishful to speak, followed me up to the mattresses when I went to unroll mine for the night.

"Joan! Er—he told me he met you!"

"Oh, yes!" I said, in a voice as ordinary as possible. I didn't want her to think I was going to "rag," or make any sort of fuss about this. Why shouldn't Elizabeth go out for an evening stroll with a young man if she wanted to—just like any other girl on the land or anywhere else?

"He knows some of my people," Elizabeth flung back in that defensive mutter, "and he wanted to talk to me about another tenant for the flat in London, and, as well as that, he's got a mother who's got a friend who's got a daughter who's thinking of joining up for the Land Army. So, you see, he wanted to—talk to me."

"Yes, I quite see," said I.

Three excuses for talking, from a young man whom she only called "He"!

"So he wrote to me. I promised I'd see him for a minute after tea tonight."

"Oh, yes. When did you promise that?" slipped from me before I knew.

Elizabeth gave her mattress a little kick as she lugged it out.

"I met him on the road the other day," she said in the tone of one who shakes a fist at the world—what it is to have to live up to the name of Man-hater! —and added: "You needn't think there's any nonsense of that sort about it!"

"I never said there was," mildly from me.

"You're always ready to think it!" tigerishly from her. "So I thought I'd just tell you, to stop your getting any wrong impression!"

"Righto!" said I, pacifically. "I won't think anything about it, old thing."

Elizabeth gave a queer little sigh—was it of gratitude? —as she spread her blankets.

Whether she was just annoyed at the possibility of my thinking she had taken a fancy to a mere man who admired her, or whether she really had begun to take a fancy—well, I gave it up as I settled down to my well-earned rest.

I'd said I wouldn't think any more about it. As a matter of fact I was too stunned by the extraordinary possibilities of the subject. I left it. I turned to the thought of Captain Holiday's other guest for that concert, that girl from town who was coming to stay with her mother at the Lodge.

I found myself wondering over her again during the few minutes that elapsed between my curling up on my mattress and my losing consciousness of that and every other question.

It was all very well for that young man to announce so succinctly, "She's just the girl I want." What did he think that would convey to me? She would be rather lucky, as luck goes, to have any one so nice and amusing in love with her. But what sort of a girl would a man like that want?

Absolutely no frills about her, I decided. She would be extraordinarily practical and efficient; very out of doorish; good-looking, but not pretty in any "doll-y" sort of way; thorough sportswoman—only, why hadn't she wanted to say either "yes" or "no" to him? Why not "yes" at once? Why not——

Here a curious little incident wound up a day of curious incidents. I had, whilst engaged in these meditations, been tucking my wrist watch under the rolled-up scarf that was my only pillow. My hand met a handkerchief that I had forgotten was there. As I took hold of the thing I felt a knot that was tied tightly in the corner of it.

A knot to remind me of something.

Now what was that, and when had I tied it?

Suddenly I remembered.

Elizabeth had tied that knot in my green silk handkerchief days and days ago. And she'd said: "That's to remind you to think mournfully of Harry at least once a day."

I'd forgotten that. More than that, I'd forgotten Harry for the moment—or for how long? Had it really been days since I had given a thought to those bitter-sweet memories of the man who used to blot out every other interest from my horizon? Had the land-work cure progressed so rapidly that other interests were beginning to keep all remembrance of Harry in the background?

I looked back to the obsession that had been the indirect cause of sending me—a love-sick wreck! —on to the land.

And now—was it possible that I'd got over it so well?

In ruefulness, relief, and surprise I drew a deep breath. Then I turned over and slept.

But I never dreamt of what else was coming to remind me of Harry—and very shortly!

CHAPTER XVII

LAND-GIRLS GO SHOPPING

"Quand on n'a pas ce qu'on aime, il faut aimer ce qu'on a."
                                                                                    —FRENCH PHILOSOPHER.

A few days after I had been wondering what Captain Holiday's "the" girl would be like, my curiosity was gratified.

I met her!

This was how it occurred:

I was out in "the town" shopping—fascinating occupation—don't any woman's eyes brighten at its name?

Yes.... But the chances are ten to one against her knowing anything about the Careg Land Girl's Camp version of the function.

Not for us the dear delights of window-gazing, of comparing prices and textures in one big, temptingly set-out establishment after another.... Well, we got our delight in another way.

Shopping for the girls was a game of chance and skill, I can tell you. It "combined all the charm of novelty with that of big game-hunting!" as Vic put it. It meant diving into the funniest little caves of shops, all garlanded by festoons of such different kinds of goods as picture post-cards, hanks of darning cotton, and onions.

It sometimes included vaulting over the counter ourselves, and helping dear old ladies to forage for what we wanted in a wilderness of cardboard boxes at the back of the shop. And even after our search it generally meant that we went on our way disappointed, to the accompaniment of such remarks as "No, indeed, I'm very sorry! I'm sold out of every bit"—of whatever it was we wanted—"and I don't know when I shall ever see any! It's the war, yes, yes! I haven't got a ha'porth of nothing of the sort, not in the whole place!"

This seemed to be the keynote of supplies in the town, late on that very wet Saturday afternoon when I had accompanied Vic, and Peggy, the tiny Timber-girl, to do the shopping for the rest of our camp.

"Got the list, Celery-face?" said Vic. As we sheltered for a moment in an archway I pulled out the long list of commissions which our colleagues had drawn up for us.

Optimists! They really thought we could get these things for them in "the town"!

I read aloud.

"Last two numbers of The Tatler." (I expect the latest number they've got at the station here is April 1, Nineteen Five.)

"Pot of lemon-marmalade; you could get it at Morris's. (I don't think.)

"Sybil wants jasmine soap, 1s3d." (Why not the moon?)

"Two skeins of floss embroidery silk, deep cream or nearest." (The nearest is Regent Street, I expect.)

"Reel of black cotton, No. 40, packet needles, No. 9's, brown shoe-laces, broad." (All asked for, and none to be had.)

"Shocking!" was Vic's cheery verdict. "As for the packets of grey square envelopes for Miss Easton, nothing doing—and there was I pinning my faith to them having a good line in salvage stock left over from the Ark, this being the last place where the Flood stopped—not that it ever has really stopped in Wales, if you ask me."

"Oh, that eternal joke about the weather in Wales!" I laughed. "Just as if it didn't rain much harder in plenty of other places! Have you ever stayed in Surrey, by the way? That's where it never leaves off!"

"It 'ud have a job to beat this beauty-spot today," persisted Vic, winking the rain from her lashes. "Look at it!"

It certainly was a soaking wet afternoon, Wales running Surrey a good second for once.

For it certainly was a soaking wet afternoon! The clouds were a blanket of indigo, from which the rain poured in millions of white streams, hissing on to the narrow, little, slate-paved street, all shiny with puddles. Tossing the drops from the brim of my Land Army hat, I went on reading the list of ordinary every-day things which we Land Girls in the damp depths of that wilderness found as hard to come by as gold!

I read.

"'Gramophone needles.' (No earthly.)

"'Dri-ped for Curley's boots. (No.) 'Tin of toffee.' (No.) 'Sticking-plaister.' (No.) 'Oranges.' (What are they?) 'Writing-pad.' (Bagged the last.) 'Shampoo-powder, any decent sort that smells nice——'"

"Aha. Who's wanting to make her hair smell nice all of a sudden?" demanded Peggy with interest. "I'm astonished at her! Who is it?"

"Don't know," I fibbed valiantly—for I knew perfectly. It was young Elizabeth who had begun to want to minister to that thick, soft hair-crop of hers in this way.... A sign of the times! That fixed it, surely? I exchanged a soulful though still half-credulous glance with the nearest cottage-window, blank with rain.

"I haven't tried Mr. Lloyd, the only chemist's, for that yet," I went on. "Shall we go on and see if he's ever heard of such a thing?"

Cramming the list into my pocket, we set out again down that river of a street.

The chemist's shop was at the other end of it.

And as we splashed down the street we had a little adventure of the kind that had probably occurred to more than one set of land girls.

A group of lads who encountered us began to laugh and jeer at our uniform—they themselves were in "civvies," mackintosh and caps. Farmers' lads from remote places in the mountains!

I don't know what they said, but from the tone it was obviously not complimentary.

So feeling that blank discomfort which falls upon the average girl at any man's incivility, I found myself clutching Peggy's arm in order to hurry past, and saying hastily: "Come on, Vic——"

But Vic, to my horror, had paused.

She left my side. She took a step towards the nearest of the lads, a rosy-faced nineteen-year-old with a ragged thatch of black hair showing under his bowler hat. There she stood, firmly planted on the streaming road, handsome head well up in the rain, figure held proudly erect, and she demanded in a voice that rang:

"What's that you're saying about us?" A sheepish giggle from the group; not one of the boys spoke.

"You were saying we ought to be ashamed of ourselves, wasn't it? Something like that, eh? That's what you think of us, is it?" Vic went on.

"I'd like just to tell you what we Land Army girls think of you!" Vic announced. "And that is, that it's you who ought to be ashamed of yourselves! Huh! Why aren't you in France? Can't leave the farm, you can't. You're sheltering yourselves behind the land, you are. You ought to be standing shoulder to shoulder with the rest o' the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

"You've got regiments. Nobody can say they don't fight all right. Yet here you are at home. Exemption, eh? Indispensables—I don't think. Who's to milk father's cows? Well, we've volunteered to do that. That's what we're here for. That's why you can't bear to see us about the place. You're afraid——"

Mutters from the boys here.

"Yes, you're afraid that when it's shown that we girls can do most o' your work you'll be pushed out after all!" went on the relentless Vic. "So you try and bring a bad name on the Land Army, you little blighters, who take jolly good care you aren't in any army at all! You make game of our uniform, you that haven't a suit o' khaki among the lot of you! Nice ones you are to talk!"

Here there was an uneasy movement in the enemy's ranks.

Skulking little wretches! There are some of these in every place, town or country—the dregs of a noble race whose cream was taken first of all. Probably as soon as our backs were turned they would have wheeled round and begun to shout after us again. But this Vic did not mean to allow. She kept her face turned squarely on the retreat.

She called out after them:

"Making fun, were you, because we girls wear the breeches? A good job for the country that we do! As for you, it's a pity they can't take and make you," raising her voice to a shout, "wear petticoats!"

They were now out of ear-shot, so she turned, flushed and triumphant.

"I'm astonished at you," Peggy launched her favourite dictum reproachfully, as we plodded on in the wet. "I wouldn't stoop to answer back a lot of louts like that. I wouldn't speak to 'em."

"Daresay you wouldn't," retorted Vic, good-humouredly, "but if we were all as jolly dignified as you and Celery-face here, those Cuthberts would go through the rest of their natch never knowing what a decent girl thought of 'em! So I thought I might as well demean myself to tell them off proper just for once in a way!"

With which conclusion we found ourselves just outside the tiny chemist's shop. A dog-cart was drawn up there—little did I suspect at that moment who had driven in it! I only noticed that it was occupied by a little stable-boy who did odd jobs about the Lodge for Captain Holiday.

Well, in we all three clumped to the shop with coloured globes and show-cards and dangling bunches of "baby's-comforters" and sponges of Victorian date. And here there met our astonished eyes that figure that was so utterly and entirely uncharacteristic of "the town," or of anything at all in the country round about it!

It was a girl, in an ultra-smart, white and black rubber rain-coat, with a small black and white rain-hat set at an indescribably French angle on her head. Our first glimpse of her, as she stood with her back to us and her face to the obviously paralysed little Welsh chemist, gave us the impression of some slim and elegant magpie who had flown in there to shelter from the rain.

She was speaking. Her high-pitched, clear drawl seemed to belong to Bond Street.

"But d'you mean to say you don't keep any of Roget et Collet's things?"

Then, as we Land girls came clumping and dripping in, she turned with a little stare that seemed to say, "What figures of fun have we here?"

Our rainy-day kit is scarcely dainty. That brown Board of Agriculture mackintosh with the flappy cape-sleeves seemed to amuse the pretty townified girl.

Ravishingly pretty she was in her small-mouthed, big-eyed, Lily-Elsie style with an authentic curl twisting in front of her pink ear, and eyelashes to which the rain-drops hung. How perfectly suited, too, by the costly simple "rightness" of her clothes. Girl and "get-up" composed a type one would scarcely have expected to see here.

The last person I expected to see—for I had seen her before!

With my second good hard look at this fashionable vision I recognized her.

"Hul-lo! You here? It is you, isn't it!" I exclaimed.

She opened her eyes at me, while Peggy and Vic stood by in amazement that this chic magpie apparition should be known to me.

I hadn't been mistaken, even though I could not imagine what should bring her here of all places in the world. It was she all right.

It was Muriel Elvey, the girl who had taken Harry from me!

Muriel opened her big eyes even more widely upon me.

"Good gracious! Is it? Yes, it's Joan Matthews! How priceless!" she exclaimed in that pretty drawl of hers. She glanced from me to the other two Land Girls and back again. "Of course! How d'you do?"

Here she extended her small, perfectly-gloved hand towards my sunburnt paw, that I saw for the first time was irremediably roughened by farm work.

I saw that Miss Muriel took in this and every other detail of my appearance, while she went on gaily:

"Isn't this too funny? The last person I'd ever dreamt of seeing! Of course, I'd heard you'd gone on the land, Joan, or something quaint like that——"

"Why 'quaint'?" thought I, while the same thought showed on the faces of my two mates.

"But I didn't know at all which bit of 'the land' it was supposed to be," concluded Muriel. "Isn't it appallingly hard work? Can you stand it? It would kill me," she went on. She always could chatter nineteen to anybody else's dozen. "I get fearfully done up, with my own war work."

"I didn't know you did any."

"Oh, dear, yes. I go round to no end of hospitals in town and play the piano to the men. They adore it," declared Muriel. "Only the nurses are such cats! Women never can be decent to me, somehow I had a fiendish row with one ward-sister—all jealousy on her part, of course. I simply came away. But what a place to come away to, isn't it?" She gave a tiny grimace about the musty village shop, and towards the glimpse of streaming wilderness outside. "And imagine my meeting you here!"

I spoke up.

"Well, but imagine meeting you! I thought you were never to be seen away from London or some civilized seaside town? What brings you to Careg?"

For even yet the whole situation hadn't broken upon me. Only, I was sore and ruffled, and utterly upset by this meeting with Muriel.

It was opening an old wound. I'd thought I'd forgotten. But, brought face to face with this girl for whom Harry had left me before he sailed, my heart throbbed as painfully as it had on that ghastly morning when I'd got that note to say he'd gone.

Now I wondered with a stab if she were actually engaged to him? I hadn't heard that she was.

She, the unexpected one, gave a pleased little laugh.

"What brought me to Wales?" Muriel replied. "You may well ask, my dear. I was positively dragged down here. Pestered out of my life to come! By a man, of course. No!" —laughing again—"you needn't look as if you thought it must be a romance. He is merely a cousin. My cousin Dick Holiday——"

"What—?" I echoed, thoroughly petrified by this. Her cousin? He was Muriel's cousin? He, who had been talking to me of "the" girl—and who had allowed me to leap to the conclusion that she and the girl-cousin who was coming down to stay were one and the same person! Violently I had leapt to that conclusion. Quite violently, in my haste, I thought now:

"Oh! The man-snatcher! She took my Harry. Now she's annexed Captain Holiday. She takes everybody!"

"I promised him I'd come down with mother and play the piano for his soldiers and things at some priceless concert or other that he's giving," Muriel Elvey went on. "His big place down here is turned into a hospital, you know. That is," with a glance at my muddy boots and uniform, "I don't suppose you've met him, of course, but he's——"

"What, Captain Holiday?" Vic broke in, unaddressed and heartily. "Not met the gent what's giving the concert? Met him? Huh! I should shay sho!"

Muriel, with an indescribable stiffening of her pretty, well-turned-out figure, stared up at the big Cockney Land Girl who thus accosted her.

Vic leaned against the counter, beaming. She might have stood for the symbolical figure of Young Democracy, gazing tolerantly down upon costly Convention.

"All us girls'll be turning up at Captain Holiday's concert," Vic told her. "It's going to be some beano, I give you my word. So you're going to oblige, too, are you? See you then!" She gave a little nod, and turned to the chemist who had been listening with the concentration of a male gossip to every syllable of this conversation.

"Now, Mr. Lloyd! What about this shampoo powder we've heard so much about? ... What's in that box, there, to the right? ... There we are! Egg and lemon—and very nice, too. Sixpence? Right! Good-bye-e-e-e!"

Vic marshalled us out of the shop with a friendly grin divided between the chemist and Muriel Elvey, who was left standing there—utterly pole-axed, I am sure by this glimpse of the sort of companionship into which one was launched when one joined the Land Army.

I could see that she found Vic "too impossible for words!"

This hurt me for my messmate and pal, though I am convinced Vic knew little and cared less about the fact that she had just been looked upon as a young female hooligan! I tramped back along the "puddlesome" roads to camp in a state of mind that I had not known since I'd shaken the dust of London off my feet in the spring.

Still "minding" so dreadfully about Muriel Elvey and Harry?

Why be surprised because men fell like ninepins before her expensively-shod feet? Yet I was astonished. Not at Harry. At that other man for whom she was "the" girl—or so I'd convinced myself.

Surely, though, Captain Holiday should have been the exception to the rule that men adore the Muriel type?

Yes; I'd made up mental pictures of this girl of whom he'd talked without mentioning her name.

To think that the girl he wanted could be a Muriel!

She was the girl of whom one couldn't think without setting her in the background of restaurant-lights, hothouse flowers and Bond Street dressmakers.

When one saw Muriel, one saw always her "things": Muriel and her pearl-string; Muriel and her gold-mesh purse with tiny powder-box and lip-stick attached; Muriel and her mauve leather dressing-case; Muriel and her ivory manicure-set.

Each was a lure, each was a mesh of the net for a man like my lost admirer Harry.... His people were now exceedingly well-off, but there had been no luxury in his boyhood, which, as he'd told me, had been passed in a bleak little house behind the shop where the money had been made, penny by penny, to give him his chance.

At twenty-five, luxury was still rather a new delight to him. He could not take it for granted, poor darling; he who had never seen his mother with any "pretty" things of her own. Hence the reaction. He loved a woman to have "possessions." He adored her to "fuss" incessantly about her nails and skin and hair.

But Captain Holiday, I thought, liked such different things!

Him one couldn't think of without a background of out-of-doors; woods, mountain, field—and perhaps a manure-heap with a Land Girl working there.

And now (so I persuaded myself) he had become infatuated with and wanted to marry a boudoir-type of girl, who hated to go out in a wind!

Ah, the tricks that are played by the charm of Contrast! ... and why should I feel sore about them?

CHAPTER XVIII

THE NIGHT OF THE CONCERT

At last the great day of the long-discussed Concert arrived.

At last the burning question was decided whether we Campites were to attend in uniform or "civvies."

Popular opinion had been in favour of Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. Some girls had wired home to hasten their parcels. The red-haired Welsh timber-girl had been all delight over the prospect of adorning herself in a blouse of rose-pink voile with flowers embroidered in coarse white cotton. How entirely it spoilt her looks! In fact, there was scarcely a girl in that camp who didn't look a thousand times more attractive in uniform than she did in an ordinary hat and frock.

Uniform does manage to be always "right" in a way that only the most successful "other clothes" ever achieve. But only one woman in twenty can ever be persuaded to see that.

Elizabeth and I were highly pleased, however, when the verdict came from the forewoman that uniform was to be worn at the concert after all.

That concert began early, in order to finish early. We should never have time to get back from work, have our tea, and change into civilian clothes before we set out again for the hospital—particularly the gang of timber-workers, who were now in the woods, two miles beyond the training farm. And it wouldn't look nice to have them in uniform and the farm-girls out of it. We must be all alike, decided Miss Easton, and smarten up our working kit by getting into a clean smock and giving our boots an extra polish.

Grumbling broke out—what camp in either the women's or the men's armies could go on without its grouse? But the girls agreed to lump it, as it had to be.

"After all, the boys'll have to be in their everlasting hospital blue, with those chronic red ties o' theirs that I'm getting fair fed up with the sight of, so we'll be fellow-sufferers in distress," pronounced Vic cheerfully as she swallowed her tea, left the table, and then got to work on another pair of brogues.

"After you with that brown boot-polish, young Mop"—to Elizabeth—"and when you've finished with the glass, Peggy, p'raps you'll find me a clean handkerchief, the thieves in this place having pinched the lot of mine. Ho! Why do I talk in this unfemin-nine style? Most unwomanly I call it. Effects of this here life in camp," she rattled on good-humouredly.

"I shall have to mind myself presently, before that refined pal of Celery-face's. Her what's going to play the piano. She didn't half give me a nasty look in the chemist's. Sure she thinks I'm no lady. Now what's her little game? Is she trying to get off with the Captain, Celery-face?"

I said a trifle bitterly:

"If she likes people, she does not have to 'try' for them."

"Ah, is she one o' those lucky ones," said Vic, cheerfully shining her brogues. "Well, I'm going to watch the young lady tonight, and see what she makes of——"

"Hurry up, you girls!" urged Miss Easton from the porch. "The concert starts at a quarter to. It's time we were off!"

* * * * * * *

Well! As Vic said, we were to "see life" that evening at the concert.

The scene was that big comfortable country house transformed into that jolly hospital for the boys from the Front. Its enormous double drawing-room must have witnessed plenty of "county" dinner-parties; dull and formal functions, no doubt. Nothing dull or formal about tonight, now that it was turned into an impromptu music-hall!

The wounded lads buzzed about it like a swarm of blue bees giving an At Home, welcoming the visitors, showing them into the rows of seats set in the lower half of the room.

"Here you are! Land Army to the right!" a cheery voice hailed us as we trooped in—twenty-odd girls in uniform.

It was Peggy's sergeant who greeted us. His hair was varnished brighter than the parquet floor; he wore the largest rose I have ever seen in his button-hole, and the gaudiest lucky golliwog decorated his red tie.

"I was to reserve these seats for you young ladies. The best, of course!" he beamed upon us. "Stalls this way, if you please. Peggy, you sit at the end of the row so that you can pop out quick in the interval."

"I'm astonished at you," came a Timber-girl's retort as we settled into our seats and looked about the bright, crowded place.

The farther end was occupied by the stage platform with the piano set near the wings. A curtain had been made of what looked like all the spare quilts in the house.

Standing in front of this (as I saw directly we came in) was our host, Captain Holiday.

Evening-dress made him taller and different, both from the smart soldier he was in khaki and the country sportsman he seemed in those dilapidated tweeds of his. Suddenly he seemed a stranger again to me. It chilled me.

He was talking to one of the soldiers, a red-haired Blue Boy, with a good-looking, clean-cut, actor-ish face. I heard Captain Holiday saying:

"Righto! I'll tell the Colonel to let you fix him up. That's in the second part."

"Yes, sir," said the red-haired boy.

Captain Holiday, looking down the room caught sight of our party. I heard him give an "Ah." He smiled, nodding at me. This was somehow cheering after that slight chill. He made a movement forward, I think—I'm sure he was coming to speak to me.

But at that moment a pretty, coquettish voice called "Dick!"

And there entered, by a door nearer the stage, Muriel Elvey and her mother. Mrs. Elvey, the sort of mother who never is anything but an adequate "background" to her daughters, looked placid and pleased in well-fitting black, with diamonds.

As for Muriel, she was lovely, yes, lovely! in her Frenchiest little frock of pinks and mauves, and mingled heliotropes. The girlish, low-cut bodice of it had no sleeves, and was held up over her white shoulders by strings of palest coral beads. She was a vision such as Careg had never seen. No wonder the Blue Boys gazed! No wonder the Land Girls, in their clean but coarse overalls, bent forward and studied her with the rapturous, envying sighs they would have heaved over some exquisite fashion-plate! No wonder that she was followed by a slim masculine shape in black-and-white that was Colonel Fielding.

He, too! No wonder, indeed, that her cousin, Captain Holiday, was at Muriel's side in an instant, bending his dark head over her golden one, with its fillet of coral-pink buds.

Now, curiously enough perhaps, that sight spoilt the whole first part of the concert for me.

At first I didn't know why. Such was my incredible self-deception that I gave myself quite the wrong reason for the fact that Muriel Elvey came between me and any enjoyment of the playlet "Poached Eggs and Pearls," excellently acted by a company of nurses and wounded. I was beset, I told myself, by the promptings of jealous memory.

I pictured that golden, rose-filleted head of Muriel's close to another dark head. Harry's! That was what I couldn't help thinking of. I watched Muriel—the centre of all eyes as she sat at the piano—and I realized what she'd meant to Harry. Not a thought had he had for me after that evening when I introduced him to her. And now history was repeating itself. Now Captain Holiday hadn't a look for anybody else.

It hurt.

Oh! Not the Captain Holiday part, of course! I assured myself hastily—the other. I'd thought I was getting over that. How queer are the workings of that most painful passion—jealousy! Brooding, I sat there with my mates, enjoying themselves on each side of me. I laughed with the others, with the others I watched the stage, and clapped when the curtain fell—to Muriel's music—for the end of the first part.

Then Captain Holiday, still standing by Muriel at the piano, called out:

"There will now be an interval of fifteen minutes! War-time refreshments will be found in the dining-room."

So, with a scraping aside of chairs and a babel of voices, the audience surged out of the "theatre." I went with the others. But that black mood of mine had swept my mind away out of my new and joyous country life, back to the bad old days of London after Harry left.

I sat on a big chair near the door, and watched.

Each Land Girl had found a wounded soldier or two to attend to her. Vic, with Elizabeth under her wing, was the centre of a group of blue. Then a long glass of lemonade was brought to me by the pleasant-faced, red-haired lad I had noticed with Captain Holiday. He talked to me in a gentle, but curious, voice, husky, yet high-pitched. For he told me he'd been shot through the lungs.

"Done me in for the profession if I go back after the war," he said cheerfully. "Spoilt my singing voice." He told me he'd been on the stage from the time he was ten until he joined the Army in 1914.

Here Sergeant Syd, coming up to us with an arm through Peggy's, broke into the conversation.

"Yes, and you'd have been all right, you silly blighter, if you'd have stayed where they wanted to keep you, down at the base singing to the boys in rest camp. You needn't ever have left there! But no. He would go up the line, Miss."

The red-haired actor warrior agreed in the husky voice that was spoilt for song:

"I wanted to go up the line. After all, I didn't join to go on singing."

Another aspect of life: the obscurely heroic that is taken for granted every day!

"Corporal Ferrant," said a voice at his elbow. It was Muriel again.

"Oh, will you go to the Colonel's room now?" she said pleasantly. "He's ready for you to make him up." Then:

"Hullo, Joan!" she said. "What do you think of this priceless show? My hands are dropping off with playing so hard."

She glanced around. Then she let herself down lightly on the arm of my chair as if she wanted to say something particular to me.

"I say," she said, with a sudden little shrewd glance at me. "Wasn't it funny about Harry Markham?"

"Funny?" I echoed, startled. "What—which was funny?"

Muriel, adjusting her pink shoulder strap, answered:

"Oh, just his getting brought back to Blighty again after he'd had only three weeks in Salonika!"

Harry? In England? The first I'd heard of it. Yes; naturally she'd know and I shouldn't. But it was bitter!

"Apparently the General can't do without him," she went on. "I expect Harry's jolly glad to get back to London. I had a note this morning from him; forwarded. Of course he tore up to see me as soon as he arrived."

"Of course he would!" said I, with quite a successful laugh.

Muriel, watching my face, said:

"I expect you know I saw a lot of him after that night you introduced him at 'Romance'——"

"Oh, I knew." Didn't I! I nodded quite cheerfully at this pretty, prosperous girl who had written that letter to me in the spring.

Through the confused chatter of the crowded room Muriel spoke confidentially.

"He—— Well, between ourselves, he went absolutely mad about me, you know. Proposed and proposed——"

"Really," said I, with another composed nod. Every word drove straight into my heart. Harry had proposed. Several times! Were they actually engaged, then?

I was too proud to ask, but how I wanted to know!

"He's quite nice," Muriel remarked critically. "Quite good-looking. Quite amusing to go out with. One enjoyed Harry's taking one out. But marrying him might be another matter; because——"

Here she stopped. The stage-bell was ringing. People began to scramble past us out of the room.

"I must go," cried Muriel. "The second part's beginning now."

But I held on to an end of her mauve sash.

"Wait——!" I said.

I felt I must know about Harry. "Because," she said—and stopped. Did it mean because she meant to marry her cousin? I simply must find out, for Captain Holiday's sake. Remember, I still believed she must be the girl of whom he'd told me "she hasn't said 'Yes' or 'No' to me yet." She must mean "Yes," I thought excitedly.

I kept close to her as we moved out of the doorway.

"Do tell me, Muriel," I urged, "what you were going to!"

She laughed, enjoying her power to tease.

"Oh, you want to know if I am going to be engaged to Harry or not?"

"You said 'not.' "

"No, I didn't. I simply said marrying him might—only 'might'—be another matter."

"Yes, yes," I agreed hurriedly, "but why?"

Muriel's answer was not one I should have dreamt of hearing from her.

Tilting her fair head, she smiled over her white shoulder and said:

"Oh, well! Because, after all, he isn't a gentleman, is he?"

This remark was a shock to me.

Harry Markham—"not a gentleman—" To hear Muriel say it!

Just because Harry's father, that self-made man, hadn't "made" himself in time to send his son to a public school? Didn't that seem rather like ... well, hideous snobbery?

Further, for a girl to let a man take her out to the theatre, the opera—for her to accept innumerable dinners and taxi-drives from him, and then for her to sum him up to another girl as "not a gentleman"—didn't it sound like ... to put it kindly, ill-breeding?

It surprised me so from Muriel because after all she was a lady!

But——

Would any girl who was a gentlewoman at heart have been guilty of such a remark?

And did Captain Holiday, who also—as I believed—wanted to marry Muriel—did he know that she was the sort of girl who would say such a thing?

I was resentfully wondering over that as the pink and mauve figure of Muriel slipped back to her seat at the piano. I returned to my chair next to Sybil, and the second part of the soldiers' concert began.

Now the opening item was a clog-dance by a merry-faced, one-armed Lancashire Fusilier. It was good; but I could not fix any attention on the stage just then.

Was Muriel going to marry Captain Holiday, who had now drawn up a chair close beside hers at the piano? Or did she mean after all to take Harry? Which? Which? Did she know herself, yet?

And—here an odd thought came to me as those clogs pattered faster than a shower of summer rain—did I myself know which of those two young men I least wanted Muriel to marry?

"Clicketty clicketty clack clack!" went the clogs on the stage; I watched, with the others, while the light twinkling feet within them danced on and on.

I was thinking all the while. Of course it would break my heart if I saw that pretty girl at the piano actually married to the man she had already poached. Yes, of course it would, I told myself resolutely; but at the bottom of my heart I was stifling a mad little imp of an idea. This whispered:—

"You wouldn't mind if Muriel married Harry now. Although it was a stab, it wasn't a deep one. Don't pretend! For you are really through with Harry. It is not about Harry that you are worrying any more!"

—Ah! Now I was getting nearer the truth. I was coming to it, coming... But I still told myself it was Harry whose engagement would hurt me. Why should I mind if——

Here a storm of applause broke out all round me. It was the end of the clog-dance, but in the midst of the din I went on revolving my own little problem.

I told myself that, of course, it was comparatively nothing to me if Muriel chose to marry this devoted cousin of hers, Captain Holiday. He (I considered, personally) was rather too good for her. Still, most other people would consider that no man could be too good for a girl as lovely as Muriel Elvey.

Anyhow, it was no business of mine. Who was I? Merely a Land Girl, sunburnt and coarsely clothed, a worker in training at a farm on Captain Holiday's estate. Why should I care twopence about this whole question? I didn't care. Of course, I didn't care.

Here Sybil, who had secured a programme, leant over me to look at mine. The next item read: "Song: 'Until!' by Sergeant Sydney Escott."

"Ah," said Vic, with feeling, "now we are going to hear something. Eh, Peggy?"

All the Land Girls were leaning towards the smallest Timber Girl, chaffing and smiling encouragement. Peggy, to whom this was "the" item of the programme, popped a piece of toffee into her mouth, and assumed a look as if she had never heard the singer's name before.

But just as we expected to see her sweetheart jump up on to the platform, one of the other blue-coated, red-cravated boys came up in answer to a nod from Captain Holiday, bearing under his arm a large cardboard placard. This he put up, carefully, in the number-stand at the side of the piano. The word upon it in large scarlet letters was "Extra."

Everybody in the hall murmured it aloud. Vic's carrying voice rose above all the others.

"'Extra'? Now what's this goin' to be? Surprise turn, eh?" she said.

She was right.

With an arresting jerk it brought me out of the mood in which I was beginning to forget that there was a concert going on about me at all. It brought me straight back to where I was, in the entertainment hall of Captain Holiday's Hospital, in the middle of a crowd of eager, enjoying people.

Truly it was to be a startler to me, the surprise turn that came on next!

CHAPTER XIX

THE SURPRISE TURN

"Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel
    Hard eyes that grow soft for an hour,
The heavy white limbs and the cruel
    Red mouth like a venomous flower,
When these are gone by with their glories,
    What shall rest of thee then, what remain,
Oh wicked and sombre Dolores."
                                                            —SWINBURNE.

There swept down towards the impromptu foot-lights an apparition tall and beautiful. Dressed as a Spanish lady, it was a study in black, white, and red. Black was the mantilla draped so filmily over the glossy black hair, black was the sequined gown that clung to the slim shape, black was the fan that waved, beckoned, hid, revealed and hid again in a series of gestures, each more perfectly and subtly coquettish than the last.

White was the handsome face, whiter the proud shoulders above the cut-out bodice. Scarlet was the carnation worn just under the ear, and vividly scarlet were the made-up lips of this new performer.

"Whoever is it?" ejaculated Peggy, loudly, and then clapped a hand over her mouth. But there was a perceptibly louder buzz in the talk all over the hall.

"Say; who's she?"

"Isn't she beautiful?"

"Lovely figure——"

"Little bit o' Dixie, eh?"

"Sssh—— The Captain's goin' to make a speech about her!"

For Captain Holiday had stepped forward from his place by the piano and had, with a sort of little laughing flourish, taken the lovely creature's black-gloved hand.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he announced, "as an extra, my friend Signora Dolores has kindly consented to sing an old-fashioned song, entitled 'Carissima.' "

He went back to his seat. Muriel at the piano, with an unexpectedly sweet smile towards this rival beauty, this wonderful stranger who was to sing, struck the first rippling chords of an accompaniment.

Then, from those vermilioned lips there broke out in a low contralto voice the first notes of the song:

"Carissima, the night is fair——"

What a voice! It was not powerful—indeed, it seemed to me as if the singer were using only part of it—but to what purpose! It was sweet as the deepest brown honey, and of a quality that—well! even as the water-finder's rod goes straight home to the hidden spring, so that kind of voice, "finds" the listener's heart—finds tears.

Surprised at myself, I blinked those tears away. I glanced from the black, white and scarlet beauty on the stage to the audience for a moment. All spellbound, all a-gaze.

I saw little Mrs. Price—a row back—slip her hand into that of her gentle giant beside her. I saw Vic's face without a smile, full of brooding tender memories. I saw Elizabeth all tense ... the soldier-boys were serious, intent; the country people behind them looked as full of solemn, poignant enjoyment as if this were not a mere Concert, but a funeral itself.

As for me, I was ashamed of myself. I had to bite my lips and clench my hands as the syrupy Victorian melody was crooned out to the inanely Victorian words:—

        "Carissima!         Cariss—ima!
The night and I wa-ant oh-oh-oh-only thee!"

Yes; I was having to fight those senseless tears away from my eyes as I listened.

Oh! It wasn't "cricket" for that woman to sing so that she could reduce a healthy matter-of-fact Land-worker to this state of—of mushy sentimentality!

She did more than that. Before the end of the second verse she made me realize something that left me gasping.

I was just thinking, while I listened:

"Ah, if her voice goes so straight home, unconsciously, what must be the effect if she sings 'at' somebody?"

Then I saw her do that very thing. Slightly, raising the fan with a little studied gesture, the singer tilted her head and launched from under her eyelashes a deliberate glance at Captain Holiday. I saw him raise his brown chin out of his hand and look back at her hard, too.

Then I saw the Signora's reddened lips tremble, even through the song, into the very wickedest of smiles that would not be suppressed. It dimpled her powdered cheeks; it almost shut her long-lashed eyes; what a tantalizing and lovely sight! But everybody in the place must have seen that she was singing "at" him; must have heard it!

"Carissima!"

cooed that wooing contralto with its invincible appeal,

        "Cariss-ima!
My boat and I will come to thee."

And with "thee" the glance was more unmistakably "at" Captain Holiday than before.

Then I knew.

This Spaniard—if she were Spanish? —this stranger with the voice and the fan and the shoulders, and the slim hips and the witching glances that surely no man on earth could withstand, must be "she" of whom Captain Holiday had spoken to me!

Not Muriel, after all. The blonde prettiness of Muriel looked positively ineffectual beside this vivid brunette. She, yes! she must be "THE" girl he'd meant.

Here was a discovery.

But the annihilating part of it was this—that I minded horribly.

For in a flash I felt that I could not deny it to myself. No longer could I pretend to my own heart. Jealous I was, more so than I'd ever been before. But now it was not because of Harry at all. It never would be Harry again.

It was mad pain to me to see a woman—any woman—bent upon attracting Dick Holiday.

Yes, I'd come to the truth now. This had shown it to me.

At last I realized that I was in love with him....

Here was a discovery, wasn't it?

* * * * * * *

In love with Captain Holiday! Of all people in the world!

What in the world had he ever done to make me in love with him?

That first time at the hut he had been hideously rude to me; had come up to me and, unintroduced, had asked me how long I thought I was going to stick life in the Land Army!

I remembered his smile as he said it.

Then that next time in the cowshed. He'd come upon me in the act of chucking work, and he'd let me know that he knew it. Then he'd laid down the law to me about the way to "muck out," as the country phrase has it, the way to hold a pitchfork, and the way to trundle a barrow up to the manure-heap. Nothing in that to make a girl take any sort of a fancy to him!

Later on, he had informed me that I should make a rotten poor hen-wife, just because I'd forgotten the milk for the chickens' food! Not very endearing, that remark!

That same afternoon, however, he had been friendly. He'd walked back with me, talking all the way. But what about? His own love affair. The problem of the girl to whom he had proposed, and who had said neither "yes" nor "no" to him. And I—not realizing that I was getting too fond of the sound of his voice whatever it happened to be saying—I had asked him what sort of a girl she was. He'd said the words that had been ringing in my head ever since: "Ah, well! She's just the girl I want."

* * * * * * *

And now here she was; I saw her before me, the beautiful Spanish-clad singer, on this very concert platform, not more than arms' length from him.

I found myself simply hating her! The last words of her song—oh! how that tune of "Carissima" was going to haunt me—melted away. Muriel played the last chord, and again the racket of applause broke out.

She smiled with all her white teeth; she bowed, gracefully enough but put her hand with a curious little jerk to her side as she did so.

How the boys clapped her! So did I, of course, and, holding myself well in hand, I exchanged comments on the lovely voice with the other girls through the clatter and the cries of "'Core! Encore!"

The Signora gave a little nod that she would take the encore to Muriel, who was clapping as enthusiastically as any of the audience.

And the second song she sang was the revue success: "For the First Love is the Best Love!" which she rendered as perfectly as she had the Victorian ballad. I could have murdered her for that!

Half in anguish of jealousy, half in rapture because of the performance, I sat listening again. She had the low, throaty deliciousness of some of Miss Violet Loraine's own notes; very wisely, she was imitating her as closely as possible in her rendering of her best song.

"The new Love
Is never the true Love!"

she carolled, and again I felt the keen stab of seeing her mischievously tender glance at Captain Holiday.

Oh, yes. She must be going to take him—after that!

And at the end of the song, when she stood still again, swaying her fan to the applause, she maddened me by a further piece of deliberate coquetry.

Putting up a hand to the coal-black hair under her mantilla, she took out the scarlet carnation that was tucked close to her ear. She kissed the flower with those lips, painted so red. Then, holding it for a moment, she smiled from the carnation to Captain Holiday, if saying, "Shall I let him have it? Shall I?" She made a little, quick gesture as if to toss it to him, across the platform. Then, with a lightning-swift shake of her lovely head, she took that flower and threw it down into the auditorium for any to catch who could.

A dozen hands went out for it. I don't know if she were specially aiming at the row in which we Land Girls found ourselves, but at all events the carnation dropped almost straight into the small, brown, competent paw of Elizabeth, my chum, who had always been used to catch and throw a cricket ball just as a boy does.

She, Elizabeth, tucked the scented souvenir into the breast of her overall. The signora, standing tall and slim just above the footlights that beat up on to the vivid white and scarlet of her make-up, sent down one more smile—a specially witching one. Then she withdrew. Captain Holiday set up another piece of music on the piano, and the concert proceeded.

It was Peggy's sweetheart, the sergeant, who sang next.

At least, I fancy it was. For, to tell you the truth, I have only the most confused impression of the various faces and figures that appeared, one after another, close to Muriel's piano on that stage.

Sometimes it was one of the red-white-and-blue wounded boys. Sometimes the slim, white-frocked figure of the village schoolmaster's daughter, for whom they brought in a harp.

I was drawn away from it to the drama in my own mind.

I—to have grown to care for Captain Holiday! Fool that I was to have allowed myself——

But, then, I hadn't allowed myself. I had not known it was happening. Now it had irretrievably happened. Tonight had shown me that too plainly.

What fate was upon me? Twice in my life I had been doomed to fall in love with the wrong man. First with Harry Markham, who certainly had done all in his power to bring it about. Now with Captain Dick Holiday, who had never flirted with me for an instant.

Well, I must try to cure myself as soon as possible—that was the only thing.

I must, somehow, take myself severely in hand and refuse to let myself mind so horribly because a woman with a voice to match her lovely face had got Captain Holiday at her feet.

But for the life of me I could not help wondering who the singer was. Signora Dolores—was she really a Signora? Or was she an English girl of an arrestingly Spanish type? Where had she come from? And when had she come to Careg? How long was she going to stay in the house?

I wondered how Muriel liked that Spanish girl who had so completely taken the shine out of her.

I wondered if she—the wonderful singer—were going to sing again.

She did not.

I realized that this was more of her coquetry; to make one marvellous appearance, to reap her success, and then to refuse to reappear until the last note of "God save the King" had been sung, with all the wounded soldiers, and ourselves of the Land Army, standing to attention.

Yes; at last it came to the end of the concert. Votes of thanks had been proposed and seconded. Cheers had been given for our host, Captain Holiday, for the performers, and for "the pretty young lady who had so kindly consented to act as accompanist," but there was no further sign of the lovely lady who had sang "Carissima."

I supposed that she, with the rest of the house-party, would be having a merry little supper afterwards, presided over by Captain Holiday. I am afraid that at the thought of this I felt myself literally trembling with passionate envy.

The audience, laughing and talking, began to move slowly from between the rows of chairs out from the concert-room. I found that I was deadly tired; an evening of emotion takes it out of a girl considerably more than a day of farm-work! I turned for comfort to the sturdy little boyish figure of Elizabeth.

I made myself say, "It has been jolly, hasn't it?"

Elizabeth nodded her bobbed head.

I glanced at the red flower she had tucked into her overall, and said: "That woman, you know, who sang those two songs, she was the best of all."

Elizabeth, with a very quick look up at me, asked brusquely, "Which woman?"

I had opened my mouth to answer, "Why, the Spanish lady, of course," but the words froze on my lips at the picture of which I had caught sight at this moment.

In the vestibule, at the foot of the wide stairs, stood Captain Holiday, laughing whole-heartedly; a group of people were clustered about him and about another figure standing close to him waving a big black fan. This figure was the sight that arrested me.

It was tall and slim-hipped, clad in a black and spangled gown with a low-cut bodice that revealed noble white shoulders; it was, as far as the figure went, that of the Signora Dolores who had appeared at the beginning of the second part of the concert; but—where were the mantilla and the glossy black tresses over which it had been so artistically draped? Gone—one with the other! Above the white shoulders appeared the laughing face and the small mercilessly-groomed golden head of a young man!

"Topping girl he makes, doesn't he?" I heard the voice of the red-haired actor-soldier say just behind me. "That's when I make him up; his own mother wouldn't know him. Why, the female impersonator we had in our Brigade troupe isn't a patch on him; not the professional who used to get fifteen quid a week salary! Asked me for a few tips, he did. But there was nothing I could teach him; only lace him into his 23-inch ladies' corsets——"

I was gasping as I looked. Now that I saw the black wig dangling from the hand that held the fan, now that I knew—oh, I felt I ought to have guessed before.

The things that give away any masquerading "girl" were there. Bert Errol and Co. have not yet learnt to hide the thickness of the wrist, the muscle down the neck just under the ear, the checked and conscious movements of limbs that know no medium between mincing and the normal stride, and (most unmistakable of all) the angle of the male arm at the elbow, which makes "V" instead of "U," as in a woman's soft arm.

All the rest was—what an excellent disguise!

"Elizabeth!" I exclaimed stupidly, "look!"

"I know," said Elizabeth briefly.

"But, my dear," I said, still aghast over the revelation that Dolores was not "THE" girl, not even "a" girl, "did you know when she—when he was singing?"

Elizabeth, with a hand at the red flower in her smock, said: "I knew days ago. Colonel Fielding told me himself that he was going to."

Colonel Fielding!

The "lovely" stranger was—Elizabeth's "old Colonel."

CHAPTER XX

LAND ARMY TESTS

The discussions of the concert, after it had happened, went on for as many days in our camp as the pre-concert discussions.

I'll skip those. I'll skip the days which suddenly seemed to have "gone flat," with all the thrill gone out of Land-work, for the time being. I'll skip my own broodings—which were those of just any other girl in love with a man who prefers another woman! For since it could not be the "Signora" I concluded that it was Muriel after all.

I'll come to the next excitement in the Land-worker's life—namely, the test-exams.!

You see our time was nearly up at the Practice Farm. Our six weeks' training was drawing to a close. If, at the tests, we gained a certain percentage of marks, Elizabeth and I would be considered "finished pupils," and we would be passed out and sent off.

Where?

Heaven and the Organizing Secretary of the County knew where that job would be found.

I told myself that I only hoped it would be a good long trail away from Careg, away from the farm of bitter-sweet memories.

Vic was instructive on the subject of the changes to come.

"Any people ought to like the look o' you two, now you've shaped to the work," she kindly remarked. "Still, you never know whether looks is going to help a girl or to stand in her way in this world. A nice thing it would be if you was landed like one of the smartest-looking girls I ever saw join up, Chrissie Devon!"

"What happened to her?" I inquired.

"Chrissie was fine with horses," Vic said, "all her people having ridden. She was a clever girl, well educated, and a beautiful figure on horseback. I-T, she was. The secretary got her a job with a brother of our Mr. Rhys, the bailiff, who keeps a lot of horses. Thought it would be just the right thing for her. So it would have. The only thing was, our Mr. Rhys's brother didn't consider himself half-artful. He——"

Vic broke off to laugh.

"He turned up at the station before the one that she was going to, and saw her in the train. And," Vic concluded with an impressive nod, "sent her back to the depot by the next one. Then he strafed our poor little organizing secretary till she didn't dare see him for a year. 'The idea!' says he, 'of sending me a girl that looked like that! Me, a widower. She would be owning the horses and me inside o' six months!' "

"So then," Vic told us, "Chrissie was sent to a very old married couple up in the hills. The old man was about ninety, and the old woman p'raps a shade more juvenile. Chrissie worked her hardest for them. But, if you'll believe me, she didn't give satisfaction there neither. The old woman asked our secretary if she couldn't be removed. And when the secretary asked what was the grouse, it turns out that the old woman was certain that the new Land Girl had taken it into her head that she would be 'his second.' I ask you!"

"And where did she go to next?" Elizabeth asked.

"Chrissie? Oh, now's she going in for motor-tractor driving. She don't stay long enough in one place to put anybody's back up with her fatal beauty. That's the story of her. I wonder what they'll do with you and Mop?"

The day of the tests arrived.

It should have seen the arrival also of the examiner from London. Of this unknown personage we were all, including the gentle giant, Mr. Price, in a state of terror. However, a telegram came to say that this magnate was unable to attend.

His place was taken by the local examiner, who turned out to be that other Mr. Rhys, the widower who had strafed the organizing secretary for sending him a too-good-looking Land Girl. Now he and that secretary, a little bright-eyed Welshwoman who had been a school-marm, had evidently made up their difference.

She, the secretary, had come over to help with the tests, for which we had in the big farmyard an audience that I had not expected. Not only these examiners and the two Prices looked on while I brought in the cows to the stalls and set to work with stool and pail, but also the visitors from the Lodge!

Heavens! how my heart sank into my clumping Land Army boots as I beheld the little procession coming through the red-painted farmyard gate. Captain Holiday, in those disgraceful but becoming grey tweeds of his, was walking with Mrs. Elvey in her smartest toque! Behind them the slim-waisted, uniformed figure of young Colonel Fielding, escorting Muriel Elvey.

"We've come to look on at the tests, if we may," Captain Holiday announced cheerfully to the Prices.

Greetings were exchanged with the ladies, and though I kept my eyes quite steadily upon the work that I had in hand, I could not help seeing Muriel's amused stare and smile, just as I couldn't help hearing her treble twitter to the men of "mustn't it be too quaint to have to wear those clothes and things—and how wonderful not to be afraid of all those great animals—I should be terrified of cows, I know I should."

Indulgent laughter came from all the men. I remembered one of Elizabeth's contemptuous axioms about the sex—"a pretty girl can't be too helpless or too afraid of mice to please a man, even now!"

Elizabeth, at this moment sitting beside the cow, Blodwen, wore her most man-hating looks upon her small, set face. As for me, I felt that now, on this occasion of all others, when, as a Land-worker, I ought to have been at my best, I was absolutely at my worst, nervous, flurried and awkward.

I had a hideous presentiment that I should overturn my milking-pail, or some fiasco of that sort!

Raging inwardly, I approached the black-and-white cow who had become my friend. She was the easiest in the stable, as Mrs. Price had said on that first time of all when I had milked her. But now, to my horror, I realized that she was going to fidget and to be difficult. She was going to "let me down" before all these people!

Suddenly I heard Captain Holiday's voice, not brusque as usual, but quiet.

"I say, Muriel, my child," he said, "stand outside the door, will you? If strangers go and stand close up to the cow when she's being milked she gets bad-tempered and there's no doing anything with her."

"Oh, isn't there? I didn't know. I'm so sorry," said Muriel, airily, and she fluttered out to stand beside Colonel Fielding.

Feeling grateful beyond words to the man who had helped me thus, I went on milking with more assurance. The nervous flurry melted away from me. I succeeded in forgetting that I was doing what I was with a maximum of so many marks for "approach," for "time," for "quantity," for "clean-stripping."

I forgot Mrs. Elvey's lorgnette upon me from the cow-house door; and the eyes of the others, and the chatter of Muriel to the two young men.

I just did the best I could.

Presently Mr. Rhys, the examiner, had taken Elizabeth and me into an empty shed, and, looking doubtfully upon us, began to ask us simple questions as to our everyday work. I was glad to realize that—as is so often the case with the male examiner—he was more nervous than we were. Or did he think that we, too, had designs upon his widowerhood?

At all events, the marks that Mr. Rhys put down upon his papers seemed to be satisfactory.

"Well, after all, I may have squeezed through!" I thought.

And half an hour later Mrs. Price came to Elizabeth and me in the kitchen, where she had insisted upon our having a cup of tea after our labours, and told us that we had both got through our tests with nearly full marks in all subjects.

Pride filled my heart, as you may imagine. Surely it was not an unnatural thing for the thought to flash across me:

"Well, now Captain Holiday will hear that! He'll know that I am not a complete imbecile at my job after all, even if he did go away this afternoon before he saw that I had got over my nervousness!" —for the whole of the Lodge party had disappeared towards the farm before I had begun upon my second cow. "He'll have to think that I am some sort of a credit to him after all the tips he's given me. And perhaps he will say so to Muriel, even if he is in love with her."

And then I put away those thoughts.

As Elizabeth and I tramped back to camp with the glad news that we were now fully fledged Land-workers, I turned resolutely to the future and the new job.

The little organizing secretary had promised to let us know in a day or two what she had settled for us. She had also promised to arrange that Elizabeth and I should be sent somewhere together.

For the meantime we were to stay where we were in camp, as it seemed scarcely worth while to move us to the depot. The secretary said she was almost certain she had got us our job—at a rectory with a farm attached. It was at the other side of the county.

"That's a good thing!" thought I.

I did not say so to Elizabeth. I hadn't confided a word to Elizabeth of what I felt. I had taken my confidence away from the once-intimate chum.

And then suddenly her confidence returned to me; in fact, I had it as I'd never had it before.

It was on the afternoon after we'd passed our tests—Sunday. (On the Monday we were to hear for certain about that new job of ours.) I'd missed Elizabeth shortly after the midday meal, and I found her in that old haunt of hers on the wall under the bushes.

Crouched up there she was sobbing as if her heart would break.

I was afraid she would be furious that I'd come upon her like this.

But the unexpected happened. She turned and clung to me.

"Oh, Joan! I am so unhappy," she sobbed. "Oh, it's so awful. We are going away from this place, and I shall never, never see him again!"

CHAPTER XXI

THE MAN-HATER DISCUSSES MEN

"Man delights not me." —SHAKESPEARE.

"And the taable staained wi' his aale, an' the mud o' 'is Boots o'
    the stairs,
An' the stink o' 'is pipe i' the 'ouse, an' the mark o' 'is 'ead o'
    the chairs!"
                                                                                                        —TENNYSON.

I didn't ask for any explanation.

I had the sense not to show any surprise at the self-abandonment of this usually so sturdily reserved little chum of mine.

I just plumped down on the stones beside her and slipped my arm about the sobbing little overalled body. I suppose it comforted her. For presently she left off sobbing, drew a long breath, blew her nose, and began, in a resigned little voice, to open out her whole heart to me.

"You know who I mean, Joan?"

"Yes, old kid."

The name of "Colonel Fielding" seemed to hang in the air above us as tangibly as those hazel boughs against the sky, but neither of us uttered it.

In rueful little spurts the truth began to gush from the once silent and matter-of-fact Elizabeth.

"I guessed you'd guess. Oh, Joan! I'm idiotic about him. Crazy! As silly about him as you ever were about your precious Harry in London.

"I used to laugh at you!"

"Everybody starts by laughing at people in love," I said, settling myself on that wall. "And everybody ends by being quite as silly themselves. You're no worse than anybody else."

"Yes I am, much," declared Elizabeth.

"Why? Because you've always thought you couldn't like men, and now you find you can?"

"No!" declared Elizabeth, shaking still more vigorously. "I still can't like 'men.' It is still true enough about that. I still hate them! ... You don't mind my talking, do you? I've bottled myself up so ever since I met himBut as for 'men'——"

She talked, setting out plainly and sincerely what I do believe is the attitude of a certain type of girl.

* * * * * * *

Men seldom hear it. If they do, they disbelieve it. But let them—if any of them are reading this story—be reminded that this point of view exists. Here's its creed as told me by my bonniest and best of little pals, Elizabeth Weare.

I'd heard lots of it, in scraps, already. Tonight, when she was stirred and troubled, I got it in swathes, which I scarcely interrupted.

"I don't think men are amusing," she declared. "Perhaps I have no sense of humour. If it is sense of humour that makes their smoking-room stories funny, I am glad I haven't. They think those stories funny, I think them far-fetched; as if they'd been thought out with lots of trouble. It's not the improperness of them that I mind, those that are supposed to be so 'naughty.' It's the ugly sort of pictures they nearly always make. Think of any you know; don't they mean something rather horrid to look at? Men haven't enough imagination to see that's what one hates. Men laugh at those 'jokes,' with a noise like the Prices' old Jack, braying. And they tell some of them to their wives. And the wives pass them on. And the girls tell me; pretty girls, with their soft red mouths, repeat these hideous stupid Limericks and things. And I feel like crying, Joan. Only I have to laugh, or they'd think I didn't understand. What I do understand is that every time I've been put a little bit more off men!

"Then, I think men are dull. They don't hear what you say quickly enough. They don't see what it means half the time. And they aren't noticing what's going on around them. They're wrapped in a fog of newspaper print and tobacco. They're slow. Slow!

"I think men are so ugly, too. Look at them in omnibuses and trains. Look at them anywhere! Are they attractive? Not to me. I don't like their nubbly knuckles and their huge feet (not that I need talk in these land boots, but still)—I can't bear those great wrists they have. I hate their horrid skins where they shave—all nutmeg-graters! How any girl wants to be kissed by them I don't know. I don't suppose she does really; it's just the Idea. Bristly moustaches, too. Awful!

"They do such hideous things, men. What can be more revolting than the sight of one of them knocking out a dirty, smelly black pipe? Or wolfing down a plateful of half-raw steak? Or mopping up—as they call it—a fat pint of beer out of a pewter pot? I could not love one after seeing him do those things!" declared Elizabeth.

"Yet women do, my dear," I reminded her. "They like a man to be even rather rough-hewn and coarse-fibred, so that he is unlike them. They don't mind his smelling of tobacco, and wearing scratchy tweeds, and tanks on his feet. They like him rugged. I—I speak for myself and for the majority of girls, I think. They like him 'manly.' "

"Heavens!" ejaculated Elizabeth, with equal fervour and truth in her voice. "How I do loathe what they call 'a manly man'! All lumps, and a bull's voice, and irregular features!"

"But," I suggested mildly, "you wouldn't want a man to look like the picture off a chocolate-box lid?"

"I should adore it," declared this exception in girls. "When I was a little girl, once, I was given a box of sweets with a picture on the lid called 'The Falconer.' He wore a golden-brown hunting-dress and he had a hawk on his shoulder, and golden hair and soft eyes, and, oh! such a pretty face! I thought at the time, 'If only I could ever see a young man looking like that Falconer!' And now I have. Colonel Fielding is exactly like that picture. Oh, Joan, I think he's the most beautiful thing I've seen."

How true it is that when a really reserved person breaks down the barriers it will babble out ten times more than some one who is more expansive in every-day life!

I, for instance, should never have dreamt of calling any young man "the most beautiful thing I'd seen." Not Harry, handsome as he was. Not Captain Holiday, though he was good-looking enough for any girl to rave over; manly good looks, too. Very different from the namby-pamby prettiness of Elizabeth's young Colonel! Personally, I considered that it would take more than his D. S. O. and the devotion of his men to their officer to make one forget that he could dress up and look exactly like a girl!

Yet here was the boyish, resolute, no-nonsense-about-her Elizabeth glorying in the fact!

Again the force of Contrast, I supposed.

Well! Well, if the Man-hater were drawn to him I could only hope it was for her happiness. She didn't look happy at the moment, sitting there on that wall, her chin on her knees and her hands hugging her gaitered legs.

"To think," she mourned, "that at last I've met the sort of man that I could care for—even I who never do care for them! —and that it's no good!'

"Why 'no good,' my dear? Because we're going away? But he's not going to stay in Careg himself for ever! Besides, he'll write to you. He always did about the flat, and he will more now," I comforted her. "I know he likes you."

With her characteristic gesture my chum shook her head till her hair danced about her face.

"He does like you," I persisted. "I saw it when he met you first! And at the concert he threw that red carnation straight for you to catch! I suppose you've kept it?"

A rueful laugh from Elizabeth, a movement of her hand to the breast of her smock. Kept it? It was her treasure. Oh, yes. She'd got it badly.

"Besides," I went on, "he met you. He came to talk to you. He wanted to see you——"

"He used to! But not now!" broke despairingly from the little figure on the wall. "That's the worst of it! To begin with, he—he did like me! I was almost sure of it! But not since that girl came down here to take him from me!"

"Which girl?"

In a tone of passionate despair Elizabeth pronounced the name.

"Muriel Elvey!"

"Muriel—oh, my dear girl, no. That's absurd."

But nothing would persuade Elizabeth that it wasn't true. She had seen Muriel, who was so lovely that every man must fall in love with her. She had seen her at the concert, where Colonel Fielding was talking to her every minute that he was not singing. She'd seen her at the Tests, still with Colonel Fielding in attendance. She, Miss Elvey, was staying at The Lodge, where Colonel Fielding was also staying. Oh! Elizabeth knew what would happen.

I wished I did! Personally, I thought it very unlikely that Muriel meant to look at Colonel Fielding; but was she going to marry her host, Captain Holiday? In the meantime she was causing the bitterest jealousy to both me and my poor little chum!

To think that this was Elizabeth who had strafed me about fretting over what any young man had said or done!

"I wish I hadn't come," she mourned; "and now it will almost kill me to go."

Here she stopped, starting as if shot. She lifted her head from her knees and sprang off the low wall.

There had been a rustling of the leaves that I'd thought was the breeze; but Elizabeth had heard and recognized the light footstep that accompanied that rustling.

Another moment and there appeared before us the slim figure and half-girlish face of the man who was the cause of all this agitation.

I looked hard at him as he saluted and said "How do you do?"

He blushed—yes, he had that trick of blushing which camouflages some of the effrontery of some of the least diffident of men. I realized now that it was all a "put-on"—his quietness, his nervousness, his seeming shyness.

"Er—er—I'm so glad I happened to come across you," he said. "The fact is I've something I—I rather wanted to ask you—you two people."

How deprecatingly he spoke, but what a gleam of mischief there was behind those ridiculously long lashes of his! What did he really mean?

I saw him again as I'd seen him at that concert, dressed up in that successful imitation of a Spanish beauty, singing in a contralto that would have lured the bird from the tree, taking in half the audience by his mock "glad eye" at Captain Holiday, and finally tossing that red flower into the little brown paw of the Land Girl whom he most admired. Not too milk-and-watery, all that! And as Elizabeth herself defended him later, "It's not by being namby-pamby that a man gets the D. S. O." In spite of his distressingly—to me—pretty-pretty appearance, there were depths in this idol of Elizabeth's.

Now what had he come to say?

"Er," he began, "I've heard you finished your training and are going away from here."

"Yes, we're off on Monday," Elizabeth said quite steadily.

He tapped against a moss-covered stick with his cane, and went on, as if shyly:

"Er—Holiday told me something of the sort. Do—do you like the job you're going to?"

"We don't know yet," said I, cheerfully enough. "I expect we shall."

"Oh! Holiday didn't know—that is, I expect Holiday might be rather annoyed if he thought I'd said anything to you about this," returned this maddeningly puzzling young man. "But, still, it was an idea of his. And—er—I don't see how he could find out if he didn't ask you himself, do you?"

Together Elizabeth and I demanded, "Ask us what?"

"Well, Holiday wondered if you two would care to stay on at the farm," suggested Captain Fielding.

I saw Elizabeth's head go up.

"Stay on?" I echoed. "But we've finished our training!"

"Er—yes. But the Prices want two more land-workers to take the places of two more men they've had called up. And Holiday thought that—er—since they're pleased with you, and you've got through the exam. —well, it could be managed," concluded Colonel Fielding, diffidently. "It depends upon whether you'd like to stay on jobs there. Would you?"

Here was a question!

To go—or to stay on?

In less time than it takes you to read about it I'd revolved it rapidly in my own mind as I stood there by that wall under the hazels, glancing from Elizabeth to the young officer who had made the suggestion.

To go meant good-bye to so many things I'd come to care for. Good-bye to the Prices, the gentle giant and his dainty wife, to whom her silvered hair gave the look of a little French marquise; good-bye to their kindliness and interest—not every land-worker finds employers as helpful and as considerate. However charming the Rectory people might turn out to be I could not hope that they would come up to these kind people.

It meant good-bye to the Practice Farm, of which I'd become attached to every field, every distant view, every shed—even the celebrated cow-house that I'd cleaned out on that first morning! Good-bye to the merry midday meals in the jolly kitchen! Good-bye to the dear old white mare, and the cows who now knew me well! Good-bye to the morning tramp to work through the dew-spangled, ferny lanes! Good-bye, too, to the life in camp; good-bye to Vic, the irresistible Cockney, to Sybil, and little Peggy with her "I'm astonished at you!" —to Curley, to the red-haired Aggie with her rich Welsh voice, and to the young forewoman who had mothered the whole mixed lot of us!

We had been one big family; I had found sisters of every class and kind. Now I had to leave them all, after sharing their life and their hearts, for six unforgettable weeks. To part—with the chance that we should never meet again! It's the fate that breaks up so many a cheery mess, both in the Army and the Land Army! To go meant all this.

But to stay meant, for me, seeing Captain Holiday still. How could I grow to forget him and thrust him out of my mind, as I hoped, if I knew that round any corner I should meet him still, the golden-and-white collie trailing at his heels? How could I grow resigned and philosophical, and all those things which I meant to be, if I had the constant pain of seeing him with Muriel? (The Elveys, by the way, seemed to be staying on indefinitely at the Lodge.) Oh, I thought that to stay was the very worst thing I could do for myself!

But then I hadn't only myself to think about.

At the very sound of the words "stay on" I'd seen Elizabeth's small face lighted up as if by a ray of sunshine from within. She'd turned it hastily away again. But well I knew what her sentiments were!

So I decided in an instant.

"Oh! If it could be arranged! Of course we'd both prefer to stay on here. We'll stay!" I said, without hesitating.

Enormous relief appeared in the very tilt of Elizabeth's Board of Agriculture hat. As for the young Colonel—what did he think or feel? Was he interested in my little infatuated chum, or wasn't he? Was he just another slave at the chariot wheels of the all-conquering Muriel? And what had he said to Captain Holiday about our staying here? Or had it been the other young man's idea? Afterwards I wondered very much about this.

Why had Captain Holiday thought of us? The Practice Farm was on his land but what had the actual working of it got to do with him, he being merely down in this part of the country on sick leave like his friend, Colonel Fielding?

Further, I wondered how much longer Muriel and her mother would be here, and when the coy, uncertain, and hard-to-please Muriel would make up her mind whom she wanted to marry?

CHAPTER XXII

HAY-HARVEST

"Go see the wholesome country girls make hay,
Whose brown hath lovelier grace
Than many a painted face,
        That I do know
        Hyde Park can show."

All these questions were still there, unanswered, a fortnight later.

That date found Elizabeth and me settled as permanent Land-workers under our friend Mr. Price, but still living in camp, whence we walked to our work. It found Curley gone; she had taken the Rectory job; Sybil, too, was away. She had got the post of gardening girl at a country house outside Careg that supplied the hospital with extra vegetables. The Elveys were still at the Lodge, for poor Mrs. Elvey had had a rheumatic attack and could not move. Very probably, thought I with a pang, Miss Muriel did not want to move!

All this marked the date of the beginning of one of the farm's biggest days—the gathering in of the second hay crop.

I shall never forget this as one of the greatest scrambles that I've ever rushed through. A "thick day" at the office was nothing to it!

It was intensely hot. The sky was cloudless, not blue, but a sultry mauve.

Now at dinner-time Mr. Price strode in on his inordinately long legs that he had given no rest since early morn; his blue eyes were alert and excited.

"The glass is going down," he said. "And I heard thunder beyond the town. I'll tell you what. I believe it'll be a race between a big storm—and us getting in that field of hay!"

Little Mrs. Price lifted her tiny, dignified face as she sat at table.

"We'll have to do it then," said she. "Everybody will help."

"Everybody it'll have to be," declared Mr. Price, dispatching his dinner full speed ahead. "Everybody on the farm. And I'll see if some of the wounded boys can take a hand. And you get every one of the workmen's wives, too. Tell them to leave their washing, leave their baking, bring their babies to the corner of the field and all come!"

Off went Mrs. Price to mobilize these volunteers. Out we dashed—the Regulars.

It was indeed all hands to the pumps—that breathless afternoon.

The big field seemed to hold half Careg; farm hands, old men, boys in hospital blue, rosy-faced women in sun-bonnets—these last were the workmen's wives whom Mrs. Price had fetched. They worked like niggers. And as we toiled the air grew more breathless; the pale mauve of the sky deepened to an angry indigo, and far away we heard a muttering of thunder. The storm was gathering slowly.

I felt myself becoming part of a regiment, part of a willing machine that walked quickly down the rows raking the fragrant swathes.

Should we do it? Should we get in that hay in time, beat the on-rolling field-grey clouds that were coming up, massed like German divisions?

It was exciting. It was for the moment the most important thing in the world that that field should be cleared before the thunder-rain came on to spoil all.

I raked, handling the rake with ease and rhythm; I scarcely realized who walked just in front of me, or that the two shirt-sleeved figures—one with an absurdly slim waist! —were Captain Holiday and Colonel Fielding.

Steadily the storm was coming up, but steadily we worked.

"We shall do it!" declared little Mrs. Price, as she passed me once, "we shall have time for tea and all!"

Presently, as I raked in front of the road-gate, I saw our organizing secretary fling herself off her bicycle and run up.

"Mrs. Price!" she called. "What can I do to help?"

"Cut bread and butter if you like!" laughed the farmer's wife. "It's tea-time, and we've earned it! I'm just going to bring out a white cloth and two big loaves, and a huge bowl of butter, and the kettle, and tea in bags! Yes, come on!"

Twenty minutes later the last load of hay was carried. The haymakers sat down on the grass in the corner of the field to feast their achievement, farmfolk groups and little clusters, friends, families together. Mr. Price seated himself in triumph on the cutter, waving a cup at the threatening purple skies.

"We've done it!" he cried. "We have, indeed!"

I had cast myself down in the nearest shady patch, had thrown off my hat, and dried my streaming forehead. Life was extraordinarily good at that moment; I felt it surging in fulness through every vein. I was heated and spent for the instant; but how happy! Work is an anodyne; but it must be the right kind of work. This had been splendid. I'd forgotten everything else!

I stuffed my handkerchief into my sleeve, and came to myself to find that in my shady corner I was one of a group of four.

Elizabeth had thrown herself down close beside me. Next to her the slim Colonel had sat down. Opposite to me, holding out bread and butter on a large burdock leaf, was Captain Holiday.

The quartette of us devoured our tea together with an enjoyment which was, as Captain Holiday presently said through a mouthful, barely decent!

"Why?" demanded Colonel Fielding, with that misleading diffidence of his. "Why shouldn't we—er—enjoy this? I—I may tell you that this"—he drank more tea, reached for another hunk of bread and butter, and looked sideways at Elizabeth—"this is going to represent one of the meals of my life!"

I said, rather tritely, "That's because you worked so hard for it!"

"Oh—er—no. I don't think I like anything I've deserved," said this young man, with (outward) mildness. Much faith I put in that as he began on his fourth hunk, eating by tiny mouthfuls as he must have been taught in the nursery. "Anything one's earned makes one feel—er—one doesn't want it any more. At least, I feel like that——"

"Not often, my dear chap," put in his friend, Captain Holiday, brusquely. "If you were dependent upon what you earned or deserved—by gad, you would be fairly destitute!"

Now it always amuses me the way in which men will show warm regard for a special chum by insulting him in public. But Elizabeth, over her white japanned mug of tea, shot a really furious glance at the man who had dared to say this thing to her idol!

Colonel Fielding just laughed through those eyelashes, nodded good-naturedly at his friend, and took up the conversation again as he lounged on the grass.

Hoping for Elizabeth's sake that what he said might tell something about him, I prepared to listen to every word of it!

CHAPTER XXIII

COLONEL FIELDING DISCUSSES "ENJOYMENT"

Now, as we sat in that field, between the blond stubble and lowering purple sky, there was one thing the others didn't guess.

I wouldn't have changed places with a Queen. Just to be so near Captain Holiday, rested and feasting after work, was sheer joy to me. He would never know.

But it was odd to find his friend, Colonel Fielding, suddenly putting my thoughts into words!

He repeated his own words of a moment before.

"Yes, this is one of 'the' feasts," he said softly. "Tea and bread and butter in a hayfield. And—er—absolutely topping. It's Enjoyment; pukka. It's what people are always chasing. They flock to—er—the most expensive restaurants in town for this. They go on to boxes at theatres, supper clubs. It's what they order champagne for. Jazz bands. Dressing up to the nines. All to get it! They—er—they don't get it," murmured the young Colonel, in his meekest of meek voices. "You can't buy it. It comes to you—or it doesn't. Fact."

Nobody said anything. Fielding continued:

"When people look back on the best time they've ever had, they don't find that those are the times that—er—that have swallowed up every stiver at Cox's. No. Nor the times when they set out deliberately to do themselves well, and—er—dash the expense. No! As often as not, that is a wash-out. Er—I don't know why. But somehow the best time nearly always comes down to something that costs hardly anything."

Captain Holiday, smoking, gave a sort of non-committal grunt.

Meanwhile Elizabeth was listening spellbound to the homily on Life's Good Times, given by the young officer, who talked as if he were the shyest of the shy—but whose shyness did not stop him from holding forth.

"A woman once told me," the Colonel began again.

Here I saw Elizabeth prick up her ears even more, if possible!

The Colonel saw it too. The smile he gave might have been the smile of some coquette who, deliberately "playing" her lover, sees him "rise." Ah, if Elizabeth looked like that Princess who on her bridal-night was metamorphosed into a lad, this slim Colonel might have been the bridegroom who, to keep her love, was bewitched in turn into becoming a Princess....

He went on:

"Yes, a woman who's taught me rather a lot about women once told me that the most delightful lunch of her life was—er—was in a poisonous little musty coffee-room of a country pub."

Here Captain Holiday put in: "What induced you to take her there?"

A gleam of mischief behind the Colonel's lashes, but no reply to this.

"It was stuffy with the smell of bygone chops," he enlarged dreamily. "It was hung with huge dark oil-paintings of spaniels, and horses, and wild duck and things, and there were umpteen hulking sauceboats on each sideboard; all very plated and dirty——"

"How fascinating," snapped Elizabeth.

"The table decorations," pursued Colonel Fielding, "were five napkins arranged as mitres and a tall 'fluted ruby' glass vase full of dead daffodils——"

"May one ask what the unfortunate lady was given to eat?"

"She was given cold ham, Miss Weare, tinned apricots, and black Indian tea at three o'clock in the afternoon——"

"How extraordinarily nasty," sniffed Elizabeth, obviously wrung with jealousy of the woman who had thus lunched.

Deprecatingly, Colonel Fielding smiled. "This woman told me," he said, "that she knew now what was meant by the expression 'A Priceless Binge.' It was that lunch. She would not have exchanged a crumb of it for two years of living at the Ritz."

How well I understood that woman's point of view! I opened my mouth to say so; then I saw that Captain Holiday, leaning up on his elbow on the grass, was watching me hard behind a cloud of smoke.

Why? Curiosity again? I said nothing.

"I suppose that woman meant that the person she was lunching with made all the difference in the world to her?" said Elizabeth, whose small, brown paw had been pulling quite viciously at the grass during these last remarks, in the voice of bravado.

"Well," he replied, "I believe that she did happen to be lunching at the time with 'the person' she cared rather a lot about. He was—er—an old love or something she hadn't seen for ages. At least—I think it must have been that."

"You 'think'!" I said exasperated. "You don't know?"

"No," returned the young Colonel, "I couldn't ask her, could I?"

"Why not?" demanded Captain Holiday, with his abruptness.

"How could I ask her if she didn't choose to tell me?" Colonel Fielding answered very gently.

Here I thought there had been enough of this hair-splitting; besides, I couldn't bear to see Elizabeth's afternoon being spoilt.

So, bluntly and directly, I blurted out:

"But, Colonel Fielding, wasn't it you that this woman was having lunch with when she said that?"

"I?" He opened his eyes at me just as Muriel might have done, and I thought exasperatedly what a lot of girl's tricks he had. Still, one girl adored him for them. I saw poor Elizabeth sitting there doing it at that moment.

"I?" he said. "Oh, no. I—er—wasn't there, that time. I wasn't—the fact is I wasn't born. My mother only told me about it lately."

Elizabeth stopped pulling up the stubble with a jerk, and at the same moment I said sharply, "Your mother—but what's your mother got to do with it, Colonel Fielding?"

"She was the woman who had lunch," explained the young man simply. "She—er—is the woman who's taught me most things, I think. I always think men might learn more from their mothers than any other woman allows 'em to—er—know. 'You'll get a sweetheart any day, but not anothah mothah!' D'you know that song, Miss Weare?"

Villain! He had simply been "trying it on," "playing up"! He was quite "up" to the fact of Elizabeth's jealousy. And now he was equally "up" to the look of exquisite relief that was lighting her up again—just as it had done when she found she was not to go away after all.

All this, I thought, was cruel.

I turned to Captain Holiday, who was just laughing—at this rate I should soon change places with my chum. I should become the Man-Hater. Men were too irritating, too little worth all this trouble and affection that we lavish upon them!

But, in the meantime, we had forgotten the storm. Suddenly it broke out, deafeningly, over our heads.

"Ah!" exclaimed Captain Holiday sharply, springing to his feet.

We followed his example.

"Here it is," he cried. "The storm!"

CHAPTER XXIV

STORM

"Lightning may come, straight rains and tiger sky."
                                                                                        —MEREDITH.

I turned up my face. Splash! came the first huge thunder drop upon it.

"Run for it. Run for the farm!" exclaimed both the men. I saw Colonel Fielding's slender hand dart out and catch that sunburnt paw of Elizabeth's as they dashed after the farmer's wife. Hand in hand they ran over the field like children, laughing like children too—and I knew this would be another of "THE" moments of life to my little chum.

I was legging it after them when I was stopped as if by a shot. From behind me there was a sharp cry.

"Joan! Joan!"

I turned to the corner under the elms where we had been picnicking. Every one had left it in their dash for cover before the rain came on. Only Captain Holiday was there; he stood, his back to the biggest elm, his hands spread out behind him on the trunk, his face ghastly white.

"Joan!" he called like a child.

I ran back to him.

"What's the matter?" I asked anxiously. "Has your knee let you down?" —I knew that one of his wounds had been in the knee—"Where are you hurt?"

"I'm not hurt," he said, and tried to smile. "Only I——"

Crashing thunder drowned his voice. Then I saw an odd thing happen. His whole body seemed to shrink and flatten itself against that tree. He caught his hands away from the bark and covered his face. He was in an agony.

I hurried to him. He clutched my arm.

"Don't go," he muttered. "I say, I'm mad sorry, but I can't help it. I thought I was right again. I've been like this ever since the Somme. Those guns—I'm afraid you'll have to stay with me. I can't move from here yet. You see I——"

Crash! came the thunder just above us again. He shook as it rolled away. Then in a whisper that seemed torn from him I heard him say: "I'm frightened of that."

I could have cried. For in a flash as of the lightning now playing above the hills I seemed to understand all.

Shell-shock! This healthy and normal young man had been through every horror of war, and I knew how bravely. Some of the wounded soldiers at the hospital had been in his old company; they had had plenty of tales to tell. He was as plucky as any lion—but he was "done in" now. Thunder, that brought back to him the guns of that hell in which he had been last wounded, found him paralysed and helpless with shock.

I took both his hands.

"I'll stay with you," I said as comfortingly as I could. "Come to the other side of the tree, it's absolutely sheltered there." I sat down, leaning against the trunk. "Sit down by me."

I remembered how often I had been told as a child not to shelter under trees in a thunderstorm, but what else was there to do?

The big warm thunder-drops, that had been coming one by one, were now pattering faster and faster on the leaves. Again the thunder crashed; Captain Holiday crouched up close to me. I found myself slipping my arm about his neck—he was trembling. What else could I do? I heard him say "Thank you, dear." And he put his head down on my shoulder. He buried his brown face against my overall when the next crash came.

Yes! He clung to me for comfort as if there were no other help for him in the world. At that moment there was no other.

What a half-hour! I felt I must be dreaming. Could it be I, Joan Matthews, Land Girl, who was sitting there? Yes; here was my own overalled arm round the quite solid-feeling neck of the young man; it was my own shoulder against which his head was refuged. Once I was nearly, nearly sure I felt his lips against the rough holland of my smock—but that was a chance touch. Once I found myself wishing wildly that the storm need never stop, and that I could stay here like this for ever, not moving, not speaking!

To speak would mean a drop out of the seventh heaven and back to Britain in war-time, to a world full of disappointments—and Muriel.

Even Muriel would never be able to take this one little half-hour from me when I had been Dick Holiday's only help in distress, when he had just once said "Dear" to me; even if he hardly knew in his agitation to whom he was speaking!

I should always have one perfect memory.

It was he who spoke first, in the lull that came after thunder that seemed now receding.

He lifted his head at last, and said huskily:

"Joan, I'm afraid you'll think I'm the limit. I mean you'll never think anything of me again! Cold feet—a coward!"

"A coward? You?" I retorted.

Tears rushed into my eyes again. I was red with conflicting emotions.

The young soldier beside me was still pale. I looked at his downcast face.

"You think I think you're the kind of man who gets cold feet?" I cried.

My voice shook with reproach.

"Oh!" I exclaimed, "how horrid of you to say such a thing."

At this he sat up straight under that tree and looked at me. A more normal expression came over his face.

"Horrid?" he echoed.

And then in quite his own brusque, ragging voice he declared:

"Mention any subject on earth to a woman, and she'll always find the unexpected comment. Always! Anyhow, this woman will. I don't understand why you've just called me 'horrid,' Joan!"

"You don't understand me at all when you think I understand so little," I said bitterly. "As if I didn't realize what it meant for a man to be wrecked by shell-shock. As if I thought it was the same thing as his being frightened, cowardly! Good heavens! As if I didn't know how you'd behaved out in France, Captain Holiday?"

Resentfully I wound up: "But you will persist in thinking me a fool!" I said bitterly.

Now he was quite himself again.

"Why should I think you a fool?" he barked.

"I don't know!" I barked in return.

Staring at the now abating rain, I suggested sharply: "Perhaps you laugh at me for being on land work at all?"

Captain Holiday turned, looked hard at me. I thought he would snap again. Instead of that he replied gently.

"Land work? Honestly I think it's the noblest work women can do today."

He glanced at the hayfield, cleared only that afternoon, gleaming under the rain.

"Cramped occupations, unhealthy city life, flat chests, specialists' fees—all swept away!" he said musingly. "Land work would help us to that, you know. Land work would give us rosier wives, better babies"—then he turned upon me with his abruptest question—"I suppose you think it's odd of me to think of such things?"

"Certainly not. I agree with every word you say," I assured him. "Only——"

I was thinking of Muriel. Land work and she were as the poles apart, yet he loved her (or so I was driven to suppose). And yet he clung to his ideals of a country life!

"Only—what?" he took me up. "What were you going to say?"

"That girl you spoke to me about the other evening," I said, "that girl who won't say either 'Yes' or 'No' to you—'the' girl—what does she think about all this?"

He paused for a moment and glanced at the sky.

Presently he turned those grey and friendly eyes of his upon me again. They smiled very sweetly as he answered my question.

"She? Oh! She thinks as I'd like her to think."

So then I knew he must be completely under Muriel's sway. That lovely, super-civilized girl could "take him in" about her views on any subject. If she wanted him to believe that she hated town and luxury and only loved roughing it on the land, he would believe her.

He was all hers!

Suddenly chilled, and sore at heart, I got up. I took a step outside the shelter of those elms that had seen my wonderful half-hour. It was over, over. All over!

CHAPTER XXV

AFTER THE RAIN

"And the world grew green in the blue."
                                                                            FOLK-SONG.

"It has stopped raining," I said. "What is the time?"

He turned his wrist.

"A quarter past six," he said. "You're supposed to have knocked off?"

"Yes, but I expect Elizabeth is waiting at the farm. Good-bye, Captain Holiday."

"Good-bye!" But he was walking by my side across the field. "I haven't thanked you yet for being good to me."

"Please don't."

"All right! I won't!" said he serenely. Striding by my side, he came on as far as the farmyard gate.

He opened it for me.

Then, leaning on the gate, he lingered. In quite his old manner he launched a question.

"D'you miss town much?"

I laughed.

All about me there went up that sweet incense of the country earth after rain; the ever-vivid colours of the Welsh landscape were heightened to brilliance; each twig of the hedge had its hanging diamonds. Across the green breast of the hill behind the farm there lay, striped like a medal-ribbon, the end of the rainbow. Hope and gaiety smiled from every inch of the rain-washed country; and I echoed: "Miss town? Not now, thank you."

"But you did at first, Joan."

"Oh, yes," I admitted. "Badly."

"Then why did you ever leave it? I've often wondered," said Captain Holiday. "Why did you come away?"

I hesitated. How could I tell him about Harry?

"It was a toss-up whether I stayed or came," I said.

Still leaning on that gate, Captain Holiday said: "I'm glad the country won that toss."

Still leaning on the gate, Captain Holiday said: "I'm
glad the country won that toss"

Sweet of him, and friendly! But it meant no more than mere friendliness.

I fought down a sigh.

"Good-bye," I said again.

He did not move from the gate. He just went on with the conversation.

"So you came here; left London. Sometimes one hates leaving—places, I mean, of course."

I said rather bitterly, "Yes—places."

"Not people?" he took up, with a very quick tilt of his head.

What could one say? I agreed.

"Oh, people are hard enough to leave sometimes."

"Are they?" he said, looking down at me. I could not meet his friendly eyes. I moved to go on.

Then at last he took his arm from that gate and followed me through it, shutting it behind him.

"Perhaps there were people who were hard to leave in London?"

What right had he to say it? I was angry with him. Considering he had his own love-story to attend to, why should he question me still—try to find out how love had treated me? What business was it of his?

Temper flamed up in me.

"No! When I left town to join up there was nobody I minded leaving. Else I should not have left. The—the people I should have hated to leave had left themselves!"

My voice grew harder as the memory of Harry Markham surged back into my mind. Black eyes, red tabs, soft caressing voice that promised "all things to all women," tender ways—how I had adored him. And how completely that adoration had died away now!

Oh, the unexpected things that happen in life; nearly always in our own selves! But I didn't intend to give any of that away to this other young man who stood beside me, quietly attentive to what I was saying, outside that closed green door.

I put out my hand; but his was on the latch before me. He held it there as if he were just going to open it for me.

"Oh! So 'they' had left." He took up, in his quiet steady voice.

"Yes," I said defiantly. "If you must know, and it seems as if you always must know everything about everybody——"

"Not everything," he assured me seriously, "and not about everybody. Only some things, and about my—well, I can say we are friends, can't I?"

This, of course, melted me again to him. I had to look away, back over the yard, the cloister-like sheds, the now-smiling country beyond.

"Friends? Oh, yes," I said.

"Then tell me what you were going to say when you began, 'if you must know'?"

Still looking away, I finished the sentence.

"If you must know," I said, "'they' sailed for Salonika days before I left London."

Very quickly he said:

"That was why you left?"

"Yes," I admitted.

The main lines of the story were known to him now. I didn't care.

Speaking as lightly as I could, I said:

"Well! That's that. D'you think you've had enough questions answered for one day, Captain Holiday?"

"'Dick' is my name really," he observed for the second time that day; "and I'd like to ask one other question, if I may. Don't imagine that I don't know it's neck my asking. I do know better. But I'm going to ask. Do you——"

Even he hesitated for a moment. Then went on:

"Do you hear from—these people?"

"These people in Salonika?"

"Yes. From him," said Captain Holiday.

There flashed into my head the thought that had I been Muriel I should have replied neither "Yes" nor "No" to this question. It's the successful type of girl who always "keeps a man guessing" about everything she does, or means, or is. But I was cursed from my cradle by the fairies with the quality of truthfulness. Out it came now.

"Write to me! No," I replied definitely. "Not a line! Not a word! I shall never hear from him again. I shall probably never see him again as long as I live!"

And to avoid being asked more questions on this sore subject, I looked meaningly at Captain Holiday's hand holding the latch of the back door. At once he opened it.

"I want to speak to the Prices," he said, and followed me through the slate-paved scullery into the big light kitchen.

It seemed full as a railway station of people gathered about the wood fire, sheltering or drying after that storm.

On the settle a dainty but ruffled figure in pale mauve was sitting and holding out tiny silk-stockinged feet to the blaze; her drenched white kid shoes stood on the range. Muriel caught in the wet!

She turned as I came in.

"Hullo, Joan; talk of angels!" she said.

Talk of angels, indeed. My eyes had flown past her to the man's figure standing close to the fire that lighted up his red tabs.

There he was, the very man of whom we had been talking. The man of whom I'd said I should never see him again as long as I lived!

I was face to face again with Harry Markham!

* * * * * * *

After the first moment of blankest astonishment, I realized that this was not so very startling after all.

Harry, here?

Well, I knew he was back from Salonika. I knew he had a staff job in town. Town, after all, is still within a day's journey from these depths of mid-Wales. I also knew that Captain Harry Markham had always had a bit of a reputation as "a leave-hog." I need not be so amazed that he had secured a week's freedom out of that old General of his.

As to why he should spend it in Careg—well, I think trout-stream and a jolly little inn were the explanations that the young man offered in those first hectic moments, filled by spasmodic hand-shaking and those inevitable remarks of: "I say, fancy coming across you here!" and "You're looking jolly fit," and all the other things people say on these occasions, whether they are thinking about them or about something totally different, or wondering how soon they can get away.

It was a curiously mixed crowd in the Prices' hospitable kitchen!

It was like the collections of people you sometimes meet in a dream. I felt as if it were some dream that brought me there to the man whom I had adored, with the man whom I adored now, and with the girl who had taken them both away from me!

With very mixed feelings I let myself down on a kitchen chair near the big grandfather clock. I felt as if I must be "looking," as Vic might have put it, "all ways for daylight." Fortunately nobody there had much time to notice me.

There were Harry and Captain Holiday ("my cousin, you know, whose place this is!" ) to be introduced by Muriel Elvey. (A characteristically questioning look, here, from Captain Holiday at the new man; at whom he stared before whilst I was shaking hands.)

Then I watched Harry being introduced to Colonel Fielding, who, by the way, had left Elizabeth's side and was now sitting on the arm of the oaken settle by Muriel, in an attitude suggesting that she, Muriel, was the only girl to whom he'd paid any attention in his life. Wretch! It had wiped all the joy and sparkle out of my chum's face once again.

Then there was more tea suggested, more cigarettes handed round, spills lighted at that comforting blaze. I listened, just as detachedly as if I were in the auditorium of a theatre, to the buzz of talk that went up around me—chatter about the hay-carrying, the recent storm, and the weather prospects for the morrow of which Mr. Price, looming tall against the window, seemed rather doubtful.

"Miss Elvey's sweet little white shoes!" Mrs. Price's cheerful voice broke in. "Don't let them scorch. I do hope they are not ruined——"

"You will have to take to boots and leggings, yet, Miss Elvey," demurely from the young Colonel.

"Oh, can you imagine me!" from Muriel, toasting her mauve-silk clad toes. "Colonel Fielding, think of little me in those clodhopping things! Of course, I think it wonderful of people to wear them!" with a glance at Elizabeth. "I ought really to be on the Land myself—now, why do you laugh, Mr. Price?" with a pout at the farmer. "I believe you think I shouldn't be very useful!"

"Well, indeed, I don't think you would," declared the gentle giant with an indulgent smile. "Only ornamental!"

"How horrid of you! I've a good mind to join up and show you! It's only that I can't leave mother. But I adore the country really, don't I, Dick? I was longing to come and make hay. I brought Captain Markham out on purpose, and then the rain came and we had to fly in here.

"If you only knew how I admired all these splendid girls who are so brave and strong, and who simply don't mind how they get themselves all burnt and rough for evening dress!" declared Muriel, with a glance at me as I sat mum. "I should look a perfect fright! I know I should!" twittered Muriel, glancing at Harry.

I saw Harry smile back at Muriel as he'd often smiled at me. He murmured something about sunburn being sacrilege in some cases.

Muriel laughed back.

"Of course, if you're a man you can get as burnt as a brick and it doesn't matter," she said. "You're so brown I hardly knew you at the station!" Then casually to me: "Joan, don't you think Harry's got frightfully much thinner and sunburnt since he went out to Salonika?"

At that word I met Captain Holiday's clear straight glance.

It was directly upon me.

I saw that he'd seen. He knew! Yes! He'd tumbled to it that this Captain Markham who had lately come from Salonika was the man to whom I'd referred as "people" that had sailed for Salonika before I left London.

Why had I ever opened my mouth about that?

For now Dick Holiday, who was in love with Muriel, knew the whole of my silly, humiliating little tragedy.

I felt that it was written on my face anyhow.

I turned away, wishing that the tiled kitchen floor would swallow me up.

As I turned Elizabeth was at my elbow.

"Let's go home," she muttered forlornly.

We slipped out of the party without any leave-taking. Silently we made our way back to camp. And I am sure that to hear us laughing with Miss Easton and Vic, to see us fox-trotting together to the rowdiest record on the Camp gramophone, you would never have guessed that the Man-hater and I were about the most miserable pair of girls in the Land Army that night!

CHAPTER XXVI

COLONEL FIELDING DISCUSSES "LOVE AND THE LIKE"

"'Tis Love breeds love in me, and cold disdain
Kills that again." —DONNE.

With the morning we had pulled ourselves together again. Not a word did Elizabeth address to me on the subject of our having met my old love in attendance on Muriel. Not a syllable did I say to her about the object of her own misplaced affections, that finished and unscrupulous flirt, that philanderer more accomplished than Harry—Colonel Fielding. The name of Captain Holiday was not mentioned. In fact, there might not have been "such a thing as young men" in our world that morning.

A wet morning it had turned out! Hay-culling would be out of the question. This we knew even before we scrambled into our brown Land Army mackintoshes and splashed away down the road.

Elizabeth congratulated herself on the nice dry indoor job that would be hers, for Mrs. Price was going to let us take turns at helping her on baking-day, and this was the turn of my chum.

As for me, I found that I should also be kept out of the wet. My morning's work was in the big shearing-shed, turning the shearing-machine for Ivor, the shepherd. He held down the fat lambs on a wooden bench set on the great black floor-sheet of tarpaulin, and went slowly and methodically to work with a sort of twelve-pointed clipping-knife over the body of the lamb, while I turned the big red wheel with its belt and pipe attached to the knife. It was not hard work, but quite soothing—rather like knitting!

And I was at this occupation when I had a visitor, brought in by Mr. Price. It was none other than young Colonel Fielding, who asked diffidently whether he might take a turn and give a hand either to Ivor or Miss Matthews.

Ivor, a blond, quiet man in a dark-blue linen coat, looked up and smiled benignantly upon this slim young officer. Ivor had no English, Mr. Price explained, but he understood pretty well everything else. Especially everything about sheep.

"Then—er—you're lucky to have had him turned down by the doctor, and to be able to keep him on the farm," said Colonel Fielding.

"Oh, he would make a very poor soldier," was the Welsh farmer's verdict. "Very reserved man; very reserved indeed!"

Ivor smiled again as the lamb upon which he had been operating dropped the last of his heavy coat upon the sheet and, shaven, shorn, and freed at last, scrambled out into the adjoining shed.

The shepherd seized another struggling and woolly one, downed him into his place, and took up the shearing-knife once more.

"Now," he said in Welsh, with a little nod to me, and I continued to work the wheel.

Mr. Price in his oilskin coat had stepped out again into the rain. Colonel Fielding did not go with him. He unfastened his brown, trench-worn mackintosh, threw it on one of the big wool-sacks, and took a pace nearer to me and my wheel.

I wondered if he had expected to see Elizabeth in the shed. Taking absolutely no notice of him I worked on.

"Let me have a turn, won't you?" came the meek voice of the intruder—for I felt, as I never had with Captain Holiday, that an intruder he was. "You take a rest, Miss Matthews."

"Thank you, I am not in the least tired." I said it coldly. I thoroughly disapproved of this young man who had been trifling with Elizabeth's feelings.

Elizabeth, bless her, was too good to be at the mercy of this young scamp with his D. S. O. and his subtle way of flirting so that you could hardly nail it down and say that it was flirting at all. Elizabeth had said hard things of Harry, in the days of my infatuation for him. But she hadn't thought any harder things of him than I thought now of this slender-waisted ruffian with the moustache that looked as if a pinch of light-gold paint had been rubbed on to his upper lip.

Cruel hard lines that he should turn out to be the one and only exception to Elizabeth's rule of hating men!

In his meekest of voices he said:

"Perhaps you are not tired. But why are you so—er—poisonously angry with me?"

Before I could reply he answered, still meekly, his own question.

"You loathe me because you think I've been heartlessly flirting with your little friend."

I stared!

He smiled deprecatingly.

"Oh, yes!" he continued, "women think it takes a woman to spot those things. But—er—I knew. Now I'll tell you—er—something."

He glanced towards that "reserved" man, the shepherd.

"No English, eh?" he broke off. "I wish no servants knew any! By Jove, how it would simplify life for a lot of people——"

"But what did you want to tell me?" I said crossly.

"Just this," replied Colonel Fielding, with his most deceptive, most shrinking bashfulness. "I'm going to marry your little friend, Miss Weare."

"To marry Miss Weare?"

You can imagine how I stared afresh at this. In fact, I stopped turning the wheel.

Deftly taking the handle from me, Colonel Fielding began turning it in my place rhythmically, easily. I stood there beside him, watching him blankly.

I remembered Elizabeth's forlorn mood of last night. I went back to her, as I'd seen her this morning, turning to the kitchen, where she was to help Mrs. Price bake. Her small face under its thick crop had been set with the determination to let work drive away trouble. For trouble, I knew, had been as heavy at her heart as it was at my own. Then was all that altered already?

"What!" I exclaimed. "You've seen her this morning?"

His eyes under their long lashes did not leave the turning-wheel. He only said gently:

"No, I haven't seen her this morning."

"But——" I exclaimed. I knew he could not have seen her last night after we got back to camp.

"You haven't even asked her yet?" I said.

"No," he agreed. "I haven't asked her yet." And he went on turning that big red wheel as if he were a Fate in khaki. After half a dozen turns he added, "But I am going to marry her, for all that."

Rebukefully I said, "You mean you're going to marry her if she'll have you?"

"She will have me," he said gently, but firmly. He blushed a little, but the girlish blushes that this young man went in for never seemed to make the faintest difference to his cheek—in another sense. "She'll have me. I know that."

"How do you know that?" I retorted, sitting there on that sack, and hardly knowing whether I were more glad on Elizabeth's account, or more indignant or more puzzled by this young man of hers.

He answered: "I know, because I know the—er—the kind of man I am myself." ... Here he looked up, shyly, from that wheel, and said, "Miss Matthews, you think I'm—er—the last word in fatuous conceit."

I was thinking so. How could I help it after what he had just said?

"Er—I'd hate you to think that. You are her pal. I—er—owe you an explanation. Please forgive me if I talk to you for a bit just about myself——"

I put in "That's a thing all men do."

"Yes. But—er—all men don't ask you to forgive them first, do they?" he said very quickly. "Generally they yarn on and on and on, imagining a woman must be jolly interested to hear it. They don't realize that the woman (unless she happens to be wildly in love with them), the woman's—er—mostly thinking of something miles away all the time!"

I couldn't help smiling. To hear a man himself say such a thing! It sounded more like something Elizabeth herself might give out.

He said, "You have forgiven me? Well, I'll tell you why I know Miss Weare will have me. If she were not attracted enough for that, I should not be attracted. You see I am talking—er—quite frankly; no camouflage at all. Unless a girl liked me, I shouldn't begin to seek her. Not after the first look. I must be liked," he said very simply and with that blush, but very definitely, "I must feel that I am wanted."

He seemed to me extraordinary, from what I knew of men. I said, "But, Colonel Fielding, men always prefer a girl who doesn't seem to want to have anything to say to them! They say men want the chase!"

"I can't help a lot of the silly conventional things people say," he declared blandly. "Er—I suppose those things are true enough about people who are all alike, like a flock of sheep." Here he nodded towards the lamb which had just sprung out of Ivor's hands, and had made off to join his shorn brethren. "But I say—er—what I feel myself."

I looked at him doubtfully, the graceful creature whom I personally could not admire.

He said, "It wouldn't amuse me to try to make—er—love to anybody unless I felt that it would amuse them too, and—er—delight them!"

I objected, "But that's a woman's point of view."

"Why only a woman's?" asked the young soldier mildly, turning his wheel. "I learnt it from my mother. The woman's view! I find it useful to look at—er—Love and the like. 'Two things greater than all things are, the first is Love and the next is War.' The average man has made good on War, these last four years. But—er—I don't listen to him much on Love."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't think the average man makes a success of it," declared this puzzling creature coolly. "Give a kid of two a violin to play; what? I think he (the average man) could learn plenty from the average woman—on that one subject. It's with her my sympathies are, Miss Matthews.... Of course I talk too much.... And now you'll call me effeminate."

His face wore a mask of harmless politeness with a gleam behind his lashes as I looked at him. Effeminate? With that striped ribbon on his breast, with his colonelcy at twenty-six, with all the praise and devotion of his men? These things are not won by effeminates.

He was a man all right, even if he did say and think things which we imagine are exclusively feminine. He was a puzzling exception. And even if he were the kind of man whom I could never have loved I was beginning to like him.

Without replying to his remark about effeminacy, I smiled and got up.

"Let me take a turn," I said.

I took the handle of the wheel from him and began to work. He sat down on the wool-sack that I had left. And even as we changed places something else changed between us.

He realized it, as I did.

"We shall be friends now," he said very quickly and gently.

"Yes," I nodded.

"They say—your dear 'They'! —that there's no such thing as Platonic friendship. Here's the one exception," he told me. "Where all the Love goes elsewhere. You know you think I'm utterly unattractive. But you want to listen to me. As a matter of fact, you'll never talk to a fiancé, Miss Matthews, as freely as you'll talk to me."

"Never," I agreed.

"Nor shall I ever jaw like this, to Elizabeth." ... He broke off and said affectionately, "You're such a pal to her!"

"She is to me."

"I know," he said. "I knew it before I saw you two girls. It spoke out of her letters to me from the flat. You know, when I got her letters, I—er—wanted to see her!"

"They were mostly about the kitchen sink," I said, laughing.

"Yes, that's what she told me when I told her she put herself into her letters," said the man whom we had called "the old Colonel" in those days. "Somehow I made up my mind that this girl I'd never seen would be different from—er—most girls. I came down here, you know, to look. And then—when I caught sight of her by that cart in the field—looking such a little picture! —I could have caught her up then and there!"

"I wonder you weren't discouraged; she was chilling enough that morning!"

"No," he denied. "I felt she didn't mean that. That was just the first minute when she had realized I was that distasteful creature a man, and yet that she didn't dislike the look of me."

"Ah! She's told you she hates men."

"Yes, we've had all that," he admitted, "and I explained to her that I ought to understand, because, as a rule, I don't like girls."

Here I lifted my head and looked severely at this humbug.

"You? Not like girls!" I exclaimed.

"Not usually," he persisted, smiling at me. "I think they're too little."

"Little? But you are in love with Elizabeth. And Elizabeth's tiny!"

"Elizabeth," he repeated, and I heard him give a little laugh of delight over the name of the beloved. "Elizabeth has a heart as big as the earth! I was—er—talking of hearts, natures, minds. So often girls make me feel their minds are rather narrow," confessed this odd type of woman-hater.

"Petty, you know," he went on. "Saying—er—things about other women—oh, brrrr! Spiteful to their own sex. Then being decent and jolly enough with—er—us. That puts me off; by Jove, nothing worse! I can say all this to you, Miss Matthews. You're different; like her. But lots of girls make me feel they—they—— Well, not enough cold tub!" he wound up ingenuously, "and too much face-powder!"

The last words brought a certain image into my mind; exquisitely-dressed, scented, powdered Muriel!

Thinking of yesterday, I said to the young man, "You're very severe on girls, but I saw you when you were flirting outrageously with one—no, not with Elizabeth. With Miss Elvey."

"To see if it annoyed Elizabeth!" he admitted, so frankly that I had to laugh over my work.

I said: "Now that was feminine enough! That was 'little'! Anybody would have imagined that you were very much attracted. In fact, I thought you were."

"Attracted? To Miss Elvey?" he cried out as if I'd said something too wildly improbable. "I? To her? Of all the girls on this earth?"

"Why not?" I asked, surprised. "Nearly every man is!"

"Yes, but I couldn't possibly be—er—attracted to Muriel Elvey!" he declared, vigorously shaking that small golden head of his. "Oh, no. Not to her! I know too much!"

"You hardly know her at all. You've only met twice."

"I know a great deal about her," declared young Colonel Fielding, impressively. "Not about this girl personally, perhaps. But about her kind."

He got up off the sack with an air of "that finishes it."

Deeply interested, since this was Dick Holiday's pal speaking of Dick Holiday's lady-love, I asked: "What do you mean by 'her kind'?"

"I'll tell you some day," the young man promised me, getting into his Burberry again. "I could tell you—er—yards! And I will. Only I am afraid there isn't time just now. I promised to meet old Dick at the bridge at eleven, by Jove. I must tear myself away. Good-bye. I say, I am glad we had this—er—little talk."

"Little talk" was good! His tongue had been going at least as fast as the shearing-wheel, or as the clipping-knife in Ivor's hand.

As he nodded to the shepherd and saluted me, I said, in a tone more cheerily friendly than I'd ever thought I should use to him, "Wait, wait; do stop a minute! This is all very well, Colonel Fielding, but when are you going to have that other little talk?"

"Which other?" he asked, standing, a graceful black silhouette, in the opening of the shearing-shed.

"Oh, you know! What a young Pretender you are, always!" I cried, half laughing. "I mean when are you going to speak about this, to her?"

He looked down, tilting his head sideways in a characteristic pose he had, lashes down, a gleam of small white teeth showing between the parted lips under the Avenue-gold smudge that he called a moustache. Oh, he was much too like a coloured advertisement for Burberry's! Still, it was Elizabeth's choice. I was thankful that she was going to be happy with it. Only, when?

He said, laughing, "What a staunch little friend you are to her! You even go as far as to—er—ask people their 'intentions' about her.... Miss Matthews, you'll be the first person we shall tell!"

Now what did he mean?

In spite of his caring, genuinely, was he going to keep his love guessing a little longer?

"Do you think," he said teasingly to me, "that I ought to go off and bother her with this—er—on the nail? In the middle of whatever job she's on? I don't knew where she is?"

He was answered—as he deserved.

Not by me!

It was that "reserved man," Ivor the shepherd, reputed to speak only his own language, who suddenly took us both aback.

Lifting his head from his shearing, the Welshman put in, in his pleasant up-and-down accent, "You looking for that other lady, sir? Miss Weare? I do think it is in the kitchen!"

Here was a bit of a shock.

The young Colonel and I had been chatting so freely, so confidentially! Imagining ourselves quite uncomprehended, we had literally forgotten the presence of the silent, blue-jacketed Welsh shepherd, who knelt there busily shearing, while one of us turned the wheel and both of us talked.... How we had talked, to be sure!

And Ivor had not only heard; he had followed the conversation!

This was what he sprung upon us now! Consternation! The blankest of awkward pauses!

Then Colonel Fielding, biting that golden morsel of a moustache, cleared his throat, turned to the shepherd, and said coldly and with as much dignity as could be lent to an obviously foolish remark, "I thought you didn't know any English?"

Ivor blinked mildly back at the officer and answered: "'Deed, I not know only very little, sir."

"I expect you all know a great deal more than you—er—give out, you Welsh!" declared Colonel Fielding, half-exasperated, half-amused. "That's how you get on in the world, isn't it?"

"Sir?" said Ivor, with a pleasant, puzzled smile.

Impossible to tell whether he understood or not! We should never know, either, how much of the talk we'd had had been eagerly taken in by him! All of it? We couldn't exactly ask him! Colonel Fielding glanced at me with a half-humorous little shrug. The same thought struck us both at the same minute.

One thing was pretty certain. Very shortly Ivor would retail to Mrs. Ivor in fluent Welsh everything that he had understood of our English. In that gossipy little nest which was Careg, gaping for any crumb of news, it would very soon be all over the place that Colonel Fielding was to marry "that little young lady that's working for Mr. Price"! Yes; by midday it would be proclaimed. It would run like wildfire up to the Hospital and down to the Land Girls' Camp. Everybody would know! Before Elizabeth herself knew!

I could not help laughing at the dismayed face of young Colonel Fielding as he stood there, frowning, the wind taken out of his sails. It did serve him right! Mischievous as he was, and full of guile and wile and teasing, sheltering himself behind that pretence of shyness, he found his match in this Welshman who put up that bluff of ignorance! The game was to Ivor the shepherd, who did understand English after all....

But Colonel Fielding trumped that. He turned to me and remarked: "I am going to find her now, at once."

And he said it in rapid French!

With which he left me to my soothing mechanical work in the shearing-shed.

I watched his figure (waisted as if he wore corsets always, though to do him justice he never did except for his masquerades) disappear across the farmyard to the red-brick house.

CHAPTER XXVII

A KITCHEN COURTSHIP

For the rest of the morning, turning steadily away at that wheel, I found myself wondering rather wistfully how things were going in there.

In spirit I saw the whole setting for this love-scene. Mrs. Price's back-kitchen with the big table, where she "put up" the dough for baking, set under the latticed window. The huge, hive-shaped "batch-oven" where I myself had helped with the baking last week. That oven had to be heated, early, by filling it with a stack of brushwood (some quite big boughs), setting the stack on fire, and leaving it so until the wood was powdery-ash, and the bricks of the domed oven-roof were white-hot. Then in went the loaves which Mrs. Price's tiny expert hands had shown us how to knead and to put up!

They—Mrs. Price and Elizabeth—had reached this stage of the morning's work by the time Colonel Fielding made his appearance in search of the girl he'd decided to marry.

What happened I heard something of later. (Not all.) Partly from Elizabeth, partly from him.

An odd courtship; so entirely War-time and modern! Yet going back hundreds of years; for what could be more old-fashioned than for the young man to seek his love among the warmth and the fragrance and the homely domesticity of the kitchen on baking-day! There was little Mrs. Price in her crisp grey overall with an old ivory brooch at her throat, busy and brisk and looking with every inch of herself "a Lady" in every sense, including that of the original Saxon "Loaf-ward." There was my chum Elizabeth helping her. With her hat off and her short thick hair rumpled about her small flushed face I expect she looked like a rather defiantly conscientious cherub!

To them, enter Colonel Fielding (with his blush!) telling Mrs. Price (with his usual shy charm of manner!) that he thought he'd like to come and help her, since he understood she'd got a busy day on.

Mrs. Price, demurely: "It will be a wonder if the farm doesn't prosper this year, considering the amount of help we are getting from the Army! It's very good of you, I'm sure. The bread is all into the tins now, Elizabeth? That's right; perhaps the Colonel will help you put them into the oven with this."

She gave him the immensely long-handled oven-shovel. On this Elizabeth set loaf after loaf in the tins, and he shoved one after another into the farther part of the hot oven.

Then Mrs. Price turned to get water from the pump which is set just over the spring in the scullery, and then she bustled away on one of the thousand odd jobs that await the farmer's women-folk at every turn. Or did she do it on purpose to leave those two together, working in the cosy, fragrant place?

For some minutes they were silent as a couple of working ants. Not a sound but the scraping of that shovel against the oven-floor!

Then he began, very gently, "D'you know who I feel sorry for?"

"No," from Elizabeth, setting her last tin loaf on the shovel. "Who?"

"Er ... People who have to get engaged in town," was his unexpected reply. "Such a beastly rush. All mixed up with—er—taxis, and catching trains and crowds of people in restaurants all watching you! Having to go to the theatre.... And then the lights going up, or the curtain. And people all hissing 'Ssh!' when you want to talk to the girl. Everybody jostling you. Not a bit of peace, you know. No room! No—er—time to say anything or feel anything. Don't you know?"

I can picture the Man-hater suppressing her happy little fluster at this; taking up the fruit tarts that had to go in in front of the oven, after the loaves.

Colonel Fielding's shy but deliberate voice went on: "I think one's—er—courtship ought to come in pleasant places. Where there's quiet. And nice things about. And jolly things to do. Making hay. Or ... bread. Don't you think so?"

Of course she thought so. The fields, the farm; any girl might envy Elizabeth the scenes that set first love for her, without hurry, without artificiality or fatigue! But I expect Elizabeth only flushed deeper and deeper pink, half with emotion, half with the heat of that oven. Little bright beads of moisture had gathered about her forehead and neck; annoyed, she brushed them away with the sleeve of her overall, hoping that he did not see.

As if anything she did would escape him now!

He moved from the oven and said thoughtfully: "I wish I could remember that quotation properly."

"A quotation?"

"Yes, something I read about the sweetest sight in the world being that of a woman baking bread, and how, even if it were in the—er—sweat of her brow, what man was there 'who would not rather kiss those drops away, than the powder from the cheek of a Duchess'?"

Having arrived at this stage of the story as told me by Elizabeth herself, I said to her: "And immediately after this, I suppose, the young man proposed to you?"

Elizabeth then told me: "He didn't propose at all."

"What?" I cried.

"He didn't propose," repeated the Man-hater obstinately. "I did."

"You?"

"I had to," explained my little chum, glowing. "He made me."

"What can you mean, 'made' you?"

Elizabeth explained how "that quotation" had made her so embarrassed (being quite unused to these remarks from men) that she hadn't known what to say and had practically snapped the young man's head off.

She told him sharply: "The bottled currants have got to go into the oven when the bread comes out. You might help to fetch them and their tin trays out of the scullery, instead of just standing there talking."

At that Colonel Fielding seemed positively to wither away where he stood. He looked suddenly miserable (according to Elizabeth). He said in the most unhappy voice: "Have I—er—put my foot into it again? I suppose I must have, somehow. You're angry with me, Miss Weare. I'll go."

Elizabeth begged him not to go (I don't suppose the creature had made a movement to the door), and said she wasn't in the least angry, why should she be?

The young Colonel then adopted a truly pathetic tone (I could hear it!) about his being "very unfortunate with women, who always had a down on him. Yes! They thought he was like a barber's block, and hated him. All of 'em!"

I could imagine his sidewards tilt of the head as he told the tale to Elizabeth, the boyishly-sincere.

She, blurting out "I don't hate you!" hurried into the scullery for a couple of those tall glass jars of fruit for bottling. He followed her, carrying more fruit and murmuring that no girl could be got to care for him; not really care!

Elizabeth said he looked more than ever like that picture "The Falconer" on her chocolate-box lid. I can imagine her adoring glance up at him!

This was in the kitchen, again in front of the oven. He had taken hold with both hands of the tray that she still held.

"I shouldn't believe it," the young villain told her, gazing into her flushed face. "Not unless I heard it out of a girl's own mouth! Not unless she cared enough to say so first!"

Here Elizabeth broke off the story with a defiant "So you see!"

"What did you say?" I urged.

Neither of them would ever tell me. However! Before kind Mrs. Price returned (to see they did not repeat that old story of Alfred and the Cakes!) Elizabeth had said whatever it was.

In this proposal-scene she, the girl, had been forced to take the initiative.

That went against all my instincts; I couldn't have done that. How human beings vary! For she, strange little thing, simply loved being made to "make the running." This I didn't understand.

"He understood. He's not like that great hulking brute you prophesied for me, the one who would trample on me with policemen's seventeens! You thought I would be 'tamed' by somebody bullying me. That's not what happens to a girl like me; that's all wrong psychology," babbled my chum exultantly, while I realized that the last phrase at least must have come from him. "It's only the frilly, helpless, overfeminized weepers that admire these huge, bullying navvies with ugly faces and muscles like vegetable marrows! I'd have been safe from them for ever! But he's so wonderful! He's not a usual young man——"

"And you're not a usual girl," I told her affectionately. "My dears! There is only one thing to be said: you certainly have found each other!"

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE ONLOOKER

                    "Hélas, mon ami!
C'est triste d'econter le chanson sans le chanter aussi."
                                                                                        —BRETON BALLARD.

As for me, I was delighted. Let one of us be happy, I thought; let Elizabeth, since I was evidently fated to be lonely!

Yes! Any love-story for me, Joan Matthews, seemed to be something quite past praying for.

Twice, now, I had fallen in love. Twice I had drawn a blank!

The first time I'd set my affections upon a philanderer (Harry Markham) who had given me every reason to think they were returned, but who probably hadn't "meant" anything, even before he deserted to Muriel.

The second time I had lost my heart to a man worth a hundred Harrys. This man (Dick Holiday) had never attempted to admire me. He was just helpful and jolly and friendly, but he'd never pretended to think of me in that other way. Yet I couldn't stop caring for him with all the best that was in me. And now he was Muriel's too; I only waited to hear when their engagement would be announced.

"Really I ought to be phenomenally lucky at cards, seeing the sort of luck I've had in Love!" I laughed at myself.

For I could still laugh; and here I must put forward something in my own defence! I was taking the second love-fiasco very differently from my first.

In London, over Harry's desertion, I had let go all ropes, and had fretted and wept myself into a nervous wreck.

Here on the Land, I never thought of behaving like that. I set my teeth to "stick" unhappy Love, which is a girl's equivalent for a soldier's "sticking" his most painful wound. I found I could still enjoy myself among the other girls, I could still be sympathetic over my chum's engagement. I could throw myself body and soul into the work on the farm, where the hay-harvest was now in full swing.

That work saved me, my self-respect, my spirits, and my looks from the ruin that threatens the very being of the girl who is crossed in love. How she endures that is so largely a matter of health after all. My health was now magnificent. Every day I grew fitter, more vigorous, rosier (though my nickname of "Celery-face" would persist to the end of my life here!) and more full of zest for anything that happened along. For on the Land one soon learns not only to take the rough with the smooth, but also to take plenty of interest in both.

Now, after a couple of weeks of strenuous toil, there came a promise of "smooth"; a little treat.

A note arrived for me at the Land Girls' Camp which said:

"DEAR CELERY-FACE—

"These nice people that I work for suggest that I should ask a couple of 'my young friends' over to tea next Sunday.Will you and Mop be the young friends?They know Captain Holiday and are asking him, so I expect he will bring Mop's 'lovely Spaniard' with him.Do come.

"Yours, SYBIL.

"P. S. —These people think the uniform so 'picturesque,' so come in it, even if Mop does want to wear garden-party clothes for the fiancé!"

By the way, I have not yet dwelt on the enormous excitement that blazed all over our Camp at the news that "little Mop, the Man-hater!" had actually got engaged to be married to "Colonel Fielding who was that Spanish lady at the Concert!"

That sensation could have been beaten by nothing, unless perhaps news had come that same day of the sudden and complete surrender of the whole German Army.

Anybody who has lived the communal life among girls (as most girls have in these days of Women's Service!) can imagine the whirlwind of exclamations, congratulations, questions, laughter that almost carried the newly-engaged messmate off her sturdily-booted little feet. Only, no imagination can do justice to the golden camaraderie with which that Timber-gang and those other Land-workers at our Camp took Elizabeth to their hearts. (I hoped that her fiancé would realize it; for after that he could never again say that girls were usually "little" and "spiteful"!) They had always liked my plucky, downright little chum. Now, they couldn't do enough for her!

Peggy, who had started an elaborately crocheted camisole-top for her own bottom-drawer, dedicated it to Elizabeth. Peggy's Sergeant Syd brought an offering of a table-centre, designed and worked by himself in the gaudiest silks with the crest of Colonel Fielding's regiment, as well as with a Land Army hat, a rake and a rifle crossed, the motto "England must be fed!" and other emblems. This was her very first wedding-present, an object that, whatever shape it takes, never fails to stir the heart of any engaged girl! But Elizabeth, who had flashes of defensiveness and of seeming to make (outwardly) little of Love and Marriage, declared that the wedding was not going to be for ages.

"The Colonel, he'll watch that," had been Vic's laconic comment.

"The earliest that it can be," Elizabeth had then announced, "is when my year is up."

"Good idea," Miss Easton, the forewoman, had pronounced drily. "But you might remember that the Secretary is able to let you have a brand-new overall in advance before the six months yours has got to go, if you want it."

"I don't want a new overall," from my chum, glancing down at her already well-worn garment. "What for, Miss Easton?"

"Lots of the girls like to get married in uniform, my dear."

"I shan't be getting married for eighteen months at least," had been Elizabeth's ultimatum.

"That's putting a lot of extra work on me and Vic!" the young forewoman had sighed whimsically.

For every evening now Miss Easton had a Thermos filled and a packet of bread-and-butter or rock-cakes ready for "Mop" to take after work, so that she could have her tea out with her fiancé in the field, where they met at a stile. (Those were the halcyon hours for them both!)

As for Vic, the big, good-natured Cockney had taken in hand the appearance of Elizabeth. Vic now "shined" her Sunday brogues, Vic saw that she always had a pair of the neatest brown stockings to wear with them, Vic ironed her smock, Vic "saw to" her armlet and badges; Vic, every evening, gave ten minutes to brushing "young Mop's" short, thick crop until it shone and floated out like raw brown silk round her face.

"Must have you looking a credit to US," the self-constituted female batman said to her. "Remember, all eyes—such as there are of 'em here—are upon you! The girl that's going to marry the D. S. O. You jolly well reflect back on the Camp, my girl, and then some more D. S. O.' s will come round looking to see if there's any more at home like you (perhaps). You let me put your belt straight. Now, got a clean handkie? Like a drop o' Lil's scent on it? No? He don't care for scent? All right. Now I think you're ready"—all this was just before Elizabeth and I started off for that somewhat eventful tea at the house of Sybil's employers.

"Now, young Celery-face," Vic went on, "how do you look? Yes, you'll do nicely. Of course I may be a bit more particular about the way I turn you out as soon as you get engaged. You'll be the next, I bet——"

"I shouldn't bet much," I advised her, smiling above the little stab at my heart as I disengaged myself from Vic's kindly hands—and clothes-brush. "You'll only be disappointed. I shall not oblige you by getting engaged from the farm, Vic!"

"Oh! Why ever not, if I may inquire?"

"Largely because nobody is likely to ask me!" I answered as we left the hut.

"Ah, go on!" Vic called after me as she stood in the doorway, laughing and waving the clothes-brush. "F'rall you know, somebody's going to ask you at this Do this very afternoon!"

Now if Vic had heard the story of that Sunday afternoon-party that was coming, I expect her verdict would have been: "There! What did I tell you? Many a true word is spoken in jest!"

That afternoon witnessed my first offer of marriage—No, I had forgotten. It was not my first. My first had been by letter, that improbable-sounding sort of letter that I'd received in the Spring from the young man called Richard Wynn, and that I had tossed away by mistake into a London County Council waste-paper bin before I'd even answered it. That was the first!

The second was by word of mouth, and it took place under the sun of early July, in one of the prettiest country gardens that ever——

But I'll begin with the house where we were invited by these people for whom our colleague Sybil was now working.

We walked for a good two miles down a lane branching off, under trees, from the road to our farm; we came at last to a white gate and then up a drive bordered with tall flowers that flourished as they chose in the long grass. The house—which had one of those interminable Welsh names beginning with "Dol"—was long and white, striped green by creepers, and with a wide porch garlanded with heavy-headed roses.

Just to the right of the porch a long window-box filled with black pansies stood in front of an open upper window. A girl's rosy face and wavy hair peeped out; it was the daughter of the house who called to us in a voice which, though pleasant, would have made her fortune as a pilot on the Mersey, "A-hoy! How d'you do? ... Syb—il! Here are your friends! ... Come in, will you? Don't stop to ring; it doesn't."

Elizabeth and I went straight into the cool, shady hall, and into the midst of one of the most welcoming and hospitable, the least conventional homes that I have ever entered.

We were greeted by Sybil's employers, the master and mistress of the house. He, an old soldier, wearing the hearthrug-like tweeds and the mossy stockings of a country squire of that neighbourhood; she a plump and still pretty woman in spotted black and white muslin, with wavy hair like her daughter's grown grey, and with an egg-basket which she never put down, over her arm. He and she seldom stopped talking, always talked at once; generally in the form of questions.

Thus—

"My dears, won't you come and sit down? Did you walk all the way from Careg? Aren't you tired?"

"Does Miss Sybil know these young ladies have come, Mother? Can't we have some tea for them at once?"

"One of you is engaged to that friend of our friend, Captain Holiday's; is it you? No? You? Isn't that very nice? Will it be a long engage——"

"Where's Miss Sybil?" (Enter from the back our friend Sybil, smiling, but unable to get a word in.) "Now, where's Vera, where's that girl Violet——"

Violet (the daughter of the house) came running down to add her voice to this family anthem.

"Hullo! Did you find your way easily? Daddy, where are the dogs? ... Dogs!" (loudly). "Sybil, you're not going to try to introduce everybody, are you? Why are we all standing here? Why aren't we taking these people into the drawing-room?"

We were borne along into the big drawing-room to the right of the hall. It was full of flowers and lovely old furniture and silver-framed photographs and an immense round tea-table and a cluster of other guests.

Here the sun rose again upon Elizabeth's world. Her eyes had fallen at once upon her fiancé, Colonel Fielding. He was sitting there, near his friend, Captain Holiday.

What a merry tea-fight that was in the hospitable and happy-go-lucky Welsh country-house!

To sit in a dainty drawing-room amidst a cluster of strangers wearing "real" summer frocks. To see a winking bright silver spirit-kettle and a snowy cobweb cloth. To drink tea from fragile cups and to spread, with crystal-handled knives, honey upon wafer bread-and-butter!

These little luxuries we never noticed in our pre-War days. But now—— Remember! It was the first time for weeks that we Land-girls had tasted such refinement!

"What a treat this all is," I remarked to Captain Holiday as he handed hot cakes in a lordly dish.

He replied: "Ah! Now perhaps you'll have an idea how fellows feel when they get out of the mud and plum-and-apple-with-chloride-of-lime up the Line, and back to Civilization for a few days' leave."

"When I got my Paris leave last year," put in the demure voice of Colonel Fielding, who had dropped into a low chair close to his fiancée, "do you know what was the first thing I did?"

"D'you want us to guess, my boy?" boomed the genial master of the house, who was also a Colonel.

The younger man smiled at him. "I'll tell you, sir. I ordered a great sheaf of La France roses and lilac to be sent up, with a huge glass jar to put 'em in, to my room at the Hotel. And there I lay and looked at 'em, till déjeuner, because I hadn't seen a flower for months!"

The other guests then took up that never-failing topic of leave, and how some people always get it and some never; why? A question unanswerable. I thought of Captain Harry Markham, nicknamed in his regiment "The Special Leave King." But the thought of my faithless admirer could not depress me now. For the moment I was perfectly content, sitting at that gay tea-table between my motherly hostess and Dick Holiday.

He chaffed me about "a woman's ineradicable love of luxury, on the Land or off!" and I laughed, glad that I could sometimes see him thus for half an hour, without any Muriel to spoil it all.

On the other side, my hostess's questioning talk flowed on.

"You like the Farm-work, my dear?" to me. "Your people don't mind you taking it up? The Prices look after you? Perfect dears, aren't they? Has Mrs. Price had the Isle of Wight disease? Her bees, I mean? No? How's that, I wonder, when everybody else's bees in the county—oh, she doesn't keep bees? ... When are your friend and Colonel Fielding to be married?"

"Not for a long time!" burst from Elizabeth, but our kind hostess went on, unheeding.

"Couldn't we arrange to have the wedding from this house? I adore weddings, don't you? ... Vera!" to a laughing blonde in light blue who was a niece of the house, "you haven't eaten all the light-cakes? Aren't there any more light-cakes for when Captain Holiday's cousin comes in? Dick! You did say your cousin, Miss Elvey, was coming later?"

"Yes!" from my neighbour. "She's driving up presently."

My heart sank.

Muriel Elvey was coming after all?

Even as I thought it there was a crunching of light wheels on the gravel outside. A dog-cart drove up holding khaki and the flutter of a dress.

A moment later Muriel entered. Just a bright-headed bouquet of muslin, rose-sprigged with mauve! Even as she uttered smiling greetings she made every other girl there look comparatively plain at once.

As for me, I instantly became a hopeless clodhopper sitting there in rough breeches and smock, with my thick brogues planted on the soft carpet. Awkward and out of place, all enjoyment was over for me as soon as Dick Holiday's fashionable contrast of a girl floated into the drawing-room.

The man who had driven her up came in a few moments afterwards.

To my surprise, it was Harry again! "More leave, Markham?" I heard Colonel Fielding laugh; and then Harry, "No, I just got down for the week-end."

So he had come all that way, just to be near Muriel. Oh, what it must be to have her power over men! As far as I could see, there was only one man in that party who wasn't at her little feet as she sat coquetting now with the master of the house. Elizabeth's fiancé had said, "I know too much about her! I know her kind!"

What did the young Colonel mean?

However! He didn't count; being engaged, and, as Elizabeth herself said, "not a 'usual' young man."

One thing I noticed about one of the more "usual" young men there. Harry Markham was not himself that afternoon. Something was weighing on him.

I knew it! I knew his face and ways so well. Hadn't I studied them, as only a girl in love has patience to study, for a whole year?

Nobody else out of that roomful of people would detect any cloud. Harry was a young man who could "make himself at home" anywhere. He did so now. I saw everybody—except perhaps Dick Holiday, who suddenly turned silent—summing up Captain Markham as a charming fellow.

He talked pleasantly; to our host of salmon-fishing and of soldiering in the East; to our hostess of bees and poultry. Elizabeth he congratulated prettily, telling her that he (Harry) had spotted Fielding as "a man determined to win" the first time he met him. Even Elizabeth had been slightly mollified by this towards the man she'd once pronounced "a rotter!" He laughed and made himself agreeable. And only I realized that while he did so his mind was not in any of it.

Why?

I thought I guessed.

As they came along in the dog-cart he had been trying to make love to the only girl he couldn't win over at once.

Muriel had been unkind to him. What a revenge for me—if I wanted a revenge, which I didn't.

So far I guessed. But not what was coming!

CHAPTER XXIX

LOVE——AFTER THE INTERVAL

"Let this be said between us here,
One love grows green as one grows grey,
Tomorrow has no more to say
                                        To yesterday."
                                                            —SWINBURNE.

At last the long leisurely tea of Sunday afternoon in a country-house came to an end. People strayed out into the grounds, a little green and golden world of peace it was!

I heard Colonel Fielding's velvet voice murmuring "Carissima——"

This was his pet name for his sweetheart. She called him "Falconer." The pair of them wandered off together and disappeared with the swift and utter completeness possible only to lovers—or to small boys who are called to have their faces washed.

The others drifted towards the water-garden, or to inspect the vegetables which were Sybil's domain; Sybil, the garden-girl, was entirely one of the family here.

Muriel (of course) called to Dick Holiday to come and translate the motto on the sun-dial for her.

And then, suddenly, I found a figure in khaki with soft dark eyes under a scarlet-banded cap, edging purposefully towards me in a manner that recalled a year now dead.

How often I had longed in vain for this to happen! What fruitless tears I'd shed! And now—— Oh, why do people pine, after long years to see their first loves again? It is, nearly always, a mistake to meet them any more.... It is a wash-out!

Shakespere's most characteristic lover puts it all in a nutshell.

                            "Enough, no more!
'Tis not as sweet now as it was before."

But Harry Markham, whom I had once thought such a man of the world, had less savoir vivre than the Count Orsino.

"Joan," he murmured ingratiatingly as he came up, "I haven't been allowed a single word with you——"

Presently I found myself having the "word" alone with him at the bottom of the garden, away from the others in a sheltered nook screened by a hedge of sweetpeas.

Harry always was an adept at these arrangements. Strange, to think that he should be making them again for me after all these months!

He began in a voice distinctly sentimental, "It's a long time, isn't it, since ... last summer? Look here, there's a seat. We'll sit down."

"Not for long," said I, matter-of-fact. "I have to get back soon, to Camp."

"Camp," returned Harry, as he sat down beside me on the garden-bench. "Sounds odd to hear all you girls talking about 'Camp' like a lot of Tommies."

"We're rather proud of being like them."

"Of course. But, I say, who are you with all day? What do you have to do?"

I answered his questions as concisely as I could. I, who used to prize every moment with him! felt I wanted to join the others!

He nodded; asked "Don't you mind having to rough it?"

"I don't call it 'roughing it' very badly, thank you. I enjoy it."

"Sporting of you," declared Harry, "but not a bit the sort of thing you used to be keen on, Joan. You've altered."

"Yes," I agreed quietly. "I think I have altered a good deal."

He sent one of those well-known glances of his from under the peak of his cap as he sat. "I needn't tell you how the life suits you, as far as looks go. I've never seen you with such a colour, and your hair's all full of those gold gleams I always thought so topping——"

For the first time in my life that caressing voice left me cold.

"That kit is jolly becoming to you."

"Yes?" I said politely. "I thought you admired pretty frocks."

"Those suited you, too. But in this you're a young Ceres."

"I'm afraid I've forgotten what those were."

"She was the goddess of Harvest or something," explained Harry, discomfited. "Somebody outdoor and glowing and rosy, with a lovely figure, if I may say so——"

"Why not?" I smiled at him in a friendly way.

He amused me, now. I was rather tickled to see him not quite knowing how to talk to me after this silence of months in which he'd left me without a good-bye.

I saw him like a precocious schoolboy who has been rude to somebody and who wants to apologize without losing his dignity.

And, as I say, I used to see him as the most wonderful, the cleverest mixture of a man of the world and a demigod!

To think how we can change.... But he imagined I was still the adoring conquest of those old days in town.

He thought I was putting up a gallant little bit of feminine bluff. He imagined that my heart was still beating as wildly as ever it did at the sound of his voice, the glance of his eyes that courted and caressed.

Gone was their magic for me! Harry Markham didn't realize that.

That want of perception helped him towards one of the biggest mistakes he was ever to make!

I, who thought I could read every sign of his handsome, rather self-conscious young face, I'd never foreseen it.

No, not even when he began by lowering his voice to its most persuasive pitch.

"Joan! You aren't being very nice to me. You're fed with me about something."

"Not a bit," I assured him.

Reproachful glance from Captain Markham. "My dear little girl——"

How long was it since I'd thrilled to hear myself called this? Today I found it the wrong expression; I was nearly as tall as he was, after all, I thought. Also I felt rather bored with the turn that the conversation was taking.

No more flirtation for me, thanks.

"My dear little girl, d'you suppose I don't know the difference between this and the jolly chummy times we used to have?" he appealed to me. "You've forgotten the day we went to Hampton Court."

"I have not," said I, looking away. "I remember it perfectly. We came back too late to go to the theatre, and we were so disappointed."

"I don't remember any disappointment," he said softly. "I only remember ... a perfect day."

Of course I too remembered that the day at Hampton Court had been the first time Harry had kissed me. My face flamed with annoyance to think I had permitted this. I rose from the garden-bench. What busy centuries I'd lived through since that morning at breakfast with Elizabeth in our London flat, when the universe had been darkened for me by the news of Harry's going! Now it had come to my turn to want to go. Uncanny in the light of what had been, but true! The familiar figure in khaki and scarlet seemed to me that of a quiet, strange young man to whom I didn't want to talk at all.

I took a step down the grassy path. He followed me, speaking in the ingratiating manner that was second nature to him. I could not help hearing a note of insincerity in his voice now; yes, and a note of odd impatience. It was as if he'd set himself to play some part and were irritated with me because I did not play up to him.

"Ah, Joan, wait! I brought you out here on purpose to say something to you. Not about Hampton Court——"

"No; that's all over," I assured him, meaning more than just one picnic.

"But I want to talk about you. How long d'you mean to go on with this farm-business?"

"I signed on for a year. Why?"

"What d'you suppose you'll do after that year?"

I pulled a mauve-and-purple sweetpea out of the hedge as we passed. "Who knows? Perhaps stay on the Land for good."

"A girl like you?"

"Or I might transfer into the Women's Forestry Corps later on. They'll want people for replanting the timber where all the lovely woods have been cut down. The Forester here says girls are particularly good for nursery-work; they're quick and light-footed, and don't trample down the young plants."

Harry seemed to care little about that question, though he'd surprised me by his sudden interest in my own career. This after months of forgetting my existence!

"It's all very well for you to do this in War-time," he told me. "The War, though, will be over before we're old, I hope. You can't go on tramping round filthy turnip-fields and feeding pigs and pigging it yourself in a wooden shanty with Heaven knows who!"

"I like it."

"No," he insisted, rallying. "Now your little friend, Miss Weare, has done the sensible thing. So will you. Of course you'll get married too, Joan."

"I? No," I said with unsmiling finality. "I shall not get married."

At this my old love put back his head and laughed.

Then it came.

Standing there close to me on the path bordered on one side by the sweetpeas, on the other by the high garden wall with its fans of plum and apricot, he moved as if to pull himself together for a jump. He gave one very odd glance about him. That glance seemed made up of so many things: resolution, amusement, pettishness, teasing, ruefulness, a certain kindliness, and triumph.

Then his eyes came back smiling to mine as he exclaimed, "Ah, darling, rot! I'll tell you something. You are going to get married. I am going to marry you myself."

I suppose no man in this world had ever made that announcement to a girl feeling more utterly sure of his success than was Captain Harry Markham at that moment. I think no girl in this world can ever have had more difficulty than I had then in conveying to a suitor that his proposal was not to be accepted after all.

How he clung to the conviction that I could not mean what I said, that I was teasing him, paying him out!

"Paying you out? Why should I? For what?"

"Because—well, perhaps because I went away without saying anything that time in the Spring," was Harry's idea. "But, darling, I'll make up for that now, see if I don't——"

I put up the hand that held the sweetpea. His arms that he was putting out to me fell to his sides again.

"Don't, please don't," I begged him. "It's no use. I do mean it. Honour bright, I am not just saying this to make you ask me again and again. I am not going to marry you. I do not care for you."

His dark eyes stared blankly, as they well might. Last time they had looked deep into mine they had found adoration. And that was only a few months ago; quite a short time, as time is counted!

He muttered, crestfallen, "I thought you cared. I could have sworn it! ... You were pulling my leg, then, all last summer!"

This from him was almost funny! But I said quite gently, "I wasn't."

"I believed you liked me a little then," said Harry Markham softly. "Will you tell me that?"

Now, is it kinder to tell the man whom one no longer loves that one did really love him once, or better to let him think that he was mistaken from the first? Uncertain, I sniffed at that sweetpea and said nothing.

He lifted his head and asked quietly: "Some one else, then?"

I turned to pull another sweetpea, shaking my head as vigorously as Elizabeth could have done. After all, there was nobody else ... that wanted me!

Harry's voice, encouraged, said over my shoulder: "Ah, then! I could get you to like me again if you would only give me the chance, dear! Be kind to me. Look at me——"

Unreasonably, perhaps, I felt a quick irritation over that caressing tone that held the note of insincerity as a soft flower holds a spoiling insect.

I turned to look straight at him as he asked me. I met his dark eyes. I said bluntly: "Oh! Why do you pretend like this? I know as well as you do that you don't care for me yourself a bit!"

He gave a quick involuntary movement of surprise. The charming humbug of the Harry-type seldom gives anybody credit for seeing, never for seeing through him. Immediately he pulled himself together to look cruelly injured.

"Not care for you?" he echoed, indignantly. "Look here, I've always thought you one of the sweetest and straightest—I mean, the sweetest girl I ever met. The prettiest, too. If you knew how lovely you looked now at this minute with the sun on you! Lovely and warm-hearted and true. If you cared for any man, by Jove, he could bank on you! And he'd be the luckiest fellow in——"

"Perhaps," I cut him short rather ungraciously. "But I am afraid none of this that you say ... Forgive me, but none of it rings true to me."

"Not true? You're trying to make me out a liar?" retorted Harry heatedly. "Not true? A man doesn't ask a girl to be his for keeps, my dear, unless he's pretty serious about it. If it weren't true, why on earth should I ask you to marry me now, Joan?"

"For a reason that I have guessed," I said steadily. I moved on to the end of the hedge, turned up the path towards the garden gate.

Harry followed. I felt that he was fuming and bewildered. He muttered: "What do you mean?"

Without looking at him I replied: "I think you're asking me to accept you because another girl has refused you too often. You want to show another girl that you don't care; that other people have jumped at you! I know that some men have married for no better reason. You proposed to me out of pique. Now, isn't that the truth?"

With the last word I stopped and faced him again. I saw his face change under my eyes.

I insisted: "You don't want to marry anybody but the girl I introduced you to myself—Muriel Elvey!"

Slowly the scarlet flush deepened on the young man's face; his eyes wavered, left mine. Utterly abashed he looked, shamefaced, miserably embarrassed; and how much younger in his awkwardness! He was a schoolboy again, caught out in some wrong-doing that put him not only in the wrong, but made him ridiculous—a thing no man can stand.

And no woman who is a woman can stand the sight of any man suffering thus! He was at my mercy; and my heart melted to him. Not with the old feeling. That, once dead, no power on earth can revive. Only a new feeling filled me; real kindliness towards him. Now that we could never be lovers I felt we might be friends.

Impulsively I cried, in a softened voice, "I couldn't help guessing. You needn't mind me, Harry!"

It was the first time that day that I'd called him by his name.

The trouble in his face seemed lightened by a gleam. His eyes softened as they met mine again. I suppose he saw the offered friendliness in them.

Deeply touched, he repeated boyishly, "You are decent, Joan!"

I laughed, repeating, "You needn't mind my having guessed; I shan't say anything!" I added, very gently, "Won't she have anything to do with you?"

Gloomily he shook his head; the handsome head that so many girls found irresistible. "Won't," he said, curtly. "She's turned me down half-a-dozen times, but I've always thought that I might ... might get round her. Until this last time when I've seen her with this fellow Holiday, down here——"

I had a sharp stab of remembrance. "Ah, yes. Her cousin," I said as casually as I could.

Harry, more humbly than I had ever heard him speak, said: "He's got that fine old place and everything. My people have only the money they made. I understand her preferring what Holiday could give her."

He concluded, huskily: "He's the fellow she will marry, I expect."

We were fellow-sufferers in the thought, Harry and I!

With quick sympathy I laid my hand lightly on his red-tabbed shoulder.

"Poor old boy! I'm so sorry."

"You're a little brick," muttered Harry. Dropping his chin, he put a small grateful kiss upon my fingers as they lay on his jacket.

It was this scene that met the eyes of Dick Holiday as he turned the corner of the path, coming to see what had become of us.