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such time as the
Hun should be taught that he had no place among white men. Aunt
Margaret and Cecilia, knitting frantically at socks and mufflers and

Balaclava helmets, were desperately proud of him, and compared his
photograph, in uniform, with all the pictures of Etienne and Henri and
Armand, and other French boys who had played with him under the
trees at Fontainebleau, and had now marched away to join him at the
greater game. It was difficult to realize that they were not still little
boys in blouses and knickerbockers--difficult even when they swooped
down from time to time on short leave, filling the quiet houses with
pranks and laughter that were wholly boyish. Even when Bob had two
stars on his cuff, and wore the ribbon of the Military Cross, it would
have astonished Aunt Margaret and Cecilia very much had anyone
suggested that he was grown up.
Indeed, Aunt Margaret was never to think of him as anything but "one
of the children." Illness, sudden and fierce, fell upon her after a long
spell of duty at the hospital where she worked from the first few
months of the war--working as cook, since she had no nursing
experience, and was, she remarked, too old to learn a new trade. Brave
as she was, there was no battling for her against the new foe; she faded
out of life after a few days, holding Cecilia's hand very tightly until the
end.
Bob, obtaining leave with much difficulty, arrived a few days later, to
find a piteous Cecilia, white-faced, stunned and bewildered. She
pleaded desperately against leaving France; amidst all the horror and
chaos that had fallen upon her, it seemed unthinkable that she should
put the sea between herself and Bob. But to remain was impossible.
Aunt Margaret's English maids wanted to go back to their friends, and a
girl of seventeen could scarcely stay alone in a country torn by two
years of war. Besides, Aunt Margaret's affairs were queerly indefinite;
there seemed very little money where there had formerly been plenty.
There was no alternative for Cecilia but England--and England meant
the Rainham household, and such welcome as it might choose to give
her.
She was still bewildered when they made the brief journey across the
Channel--a new Channel, peopled only with war-ships of every kind,
from grim Dreadnoughts to submarines; with aircraft, bearing the red,

white and blue circles of Britain, floating and circling overhead. Last
time Cecilia had crossed, it had been with Aunt Margaret on a big
turbine mail boat; they had reached Calais just as an excursion steamer
from Margate came up, gay with flags and light dresses, with a band
playing ragtime on the well-deck, and people dancing to a concertina at
the stern. Now they zig-zagged across, sometimes at full speed,
sometimes stopping dead or altering their course in obedience to the
destroyer nosing ahead of them through the Channel mist; and she
could see the face of the captain on the bridge, strained and anxious.
There were so few civilians on board that Cecilia and the two old
servants were greeted with curious stares; nearly all the passengers
were in uniform, their boots caked with the mud of the trenches, their
khaki soiled with the grime of war. It was all rather dream-like to
Cecilia; and London itself was a very bad dream; darkened and silent,
with the great beams of searchlights playing back and forth over the
black skies in search of marauding Zeppelins. And then came her
father's stiff greeting, and the silent drive to the tall, narrow house in
Lancaster Gate, where Mrs. Rainham met her coldly. In after years
Cecilia never could think without a shudder of that first meal in her
father's house--the struggle to eat, the lagging talk round the table, with
Avice and Wilfred, frankly hostile, staring at her in silence, and her
stepmother's pale eyes appraising every detail of her dress. It was
almost like happiness again to find herself alone, later; in a dingy little
attic bedroom that smelt as though it had never known an open
window--a sorry little hole, but still, out of the reach of those
unblinking eyes.
For the first year Cecilia had struggled to get away to earn her own
living. But a very few weeks served to show Mrs. Rainham that chance
had sent her, in the person of the girl whose coming she had sullenly
resented, a very useful buffer against any period of domestic stress.
Aunt Margaret had trained Cecilia thoroughly in all housewifely virtues,
and her half-French education had given her much that was lacking in
the stodgy damsels of Mrs. Rainham's acquaintance. She was quick and
courteous and willing; responding, moreover, to the lash of the
tongue--after her first wide-eyed stare