Gertie Naylor had invited Cynthia to help her in entertaining the subalterns, though Gertie was really quite equal to that task herself; there were only three of them, and if a pretty girl is not equal to three subalterns, well, what are we coming to in England?  And, as it turned out, Miss Gertie had to deal with them all, sometimes collectively, sometimes one by one, practically unassisted.  Cynthia was otherwise engaged.  Gertie complained neither of the cause nor of its consequence.

The drink, or drugs, hypothesis was exploded, and Miss Wall’s speculations set at rest, with a quite comforting solatium of romantic and unhappy interest, “a nice tit-bit for the old cat,” as Mr. Naylor unkindly put it.  Cynthia had told her story; she wanted a richer sympathy than Doctor Mary’s common-sense afforded; out of this need the revelation came to Gertie in innocent confidence, and, with the narrator’s tacit approval, ran through the family and its intimate friends.  If Cynthia had been as calculating as she was guileless, she could not have done better for herself.  Mrs. Naylor’s motherliness, old Naylor’s courtliness, Gertie’s breathless concern and avid appetite for the fullest detail, everybody’s desire to console and cheer, all these were at her service, all enlisted in the effort to make her forget, and live and laugh again.  Her heart responded; she found herself becoming happy at a rate which made her positively ashamed.  No wonder tactful Jeanne discovered that the cue was changed!

Fastidious old Naylor regarded his wife with the affection of habit and with a little disdain for the ordinariness of her virtues—­not to say of the mind which they adorned.  His daughter was to him a precious toy, on which he tried jokes, played tricks, and lavished gifts, for the joy of seeing the prettiness of her reactions to his treatment.  It never occurred to him to think that his toy might be broken; fond as he was, his feeling for her lacked the apprehensiveness of the deepest love.  But he idolized his son, and in this case neither without fear nor without understanding.  For four years now he had feared for him bitterly:  for his body, for his life.  At every waking hour his inner cry had been even as David’s, “Would God I had died for thee, my son, my son!” For at every moment of those four years it might be that his son was even then dead.  That terror, endured under a cool and almost off-hand demeanor, was past; but he feared for his son still.  Of all who went to the war as Crusaders, none had the temperament more ardently than Alec.  As he went, so, obviously, he had come back, not disillusioned, nay, with all his illusions, or delusions, about this wicked world and its possibilities, about the people who dwell in it and their lamentable limitations, stronger in his mind than ever.  How could he get through life without being too sorely hurt and wounded, without being cut to the very quick by his inevitable discoveries?  Old Naylor did not see how it was to be done, or even hoped for; but the right kind of wife was unquestionably the best chance.