‘Make haste, please!’ she said, breathing quickly.  ’There isn’t very much time.’

His face changed.  He sat up, and held out his hand to her.

‘Dear Cicely, I want you to do something for me.’

But she put her own behind her back.

’Have you been quarrelling already?  Because if you want me to make it up, that really isn’t my vocation.’

He was silent a moment surveying her.  Then he said quietly—­’I want you to help me.  I want you to be kind to that little girl.’

’Daisy Stewart?  Thank you.  But I’ve no gift at all for mothering babes!  Besides—­she’ll now have all the advice, and all the kindness she wants.’

Marsworth’s lips twitched.

’Yes, that’s true—­if you and I can help her out.  Cicely!—­aren’t you a great friend of Sir John Raine?’

He named one of the chiefs of the Army Medical Department, a man whose good word was the making of any aspirant in the field he ruled.

Cicely looked rather darkly at her questioner.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I want you to help me get an appointment for somebody.’

‘For whom?’

‘For the man Daisy Stewart wants to marry.’

Cicely could not conceal her start.

‘I don’t like being mystified,’ she said coldly.

Marsworth allowed his smile to shew itself.

’I’m not trying to mystify you in the least.  Daisy Stewart has been engaged for nearly a year to one of the house-surgeons in your hospital—­young Fellows.  Nobody knows it—­not Willy even.  It has been kept a dead secret, because that wicked old man the Rector won’t have it.  Daisy makes him comfortable, and he won’t give her up, if he can help it.  And as young Fellows has nothing but his present pay—­a year with board and lodging—­it seemed hopeless.  But now he has got his eye on something.’

And in a quiet business-like voice Marsworth put the case of the penniless one—­his qualifications, his ambitions, and the particular post under the Army Medical Board on which he had set his hopes.  If only somebody with influence would give him a leg up!

Cicely interrupted.

‘Does Willy know?’

‘No.  You see, I have come to you first.’

‘How long have you known?’

’Since my stay with them last autumn.  I suspected something then, just as I was leaving; and Miss Daisy confessed—­when I was there in May.  Since then she seems to have elected me her chief adviser.  But, of course, I had no right to tell anybody anything.’

‘That is what you like—­to advise people?’

Marsworth considered it.

’There was a time’—­he said, at last, in a different voice, ’when my advice used to be asked by someone else—­and sometimes taken.’

Cicely pretended to light another cigarette, but her slim fingers shook a little.

‘And now—­you never give it?’

‘Oh yes, I do,’ he said, with sudden bitterness—­’even unasked.  I’m always the same old bore.’