* * * * *

Meanwhile Captain Marsworth was walking along the road from Grasmere to Rydal with a rather listless step.  As a soldier he was by no means satisfied with the news of the week.  We ought to have been in Lille and weren’t.  It seemed to him that was about what the Loos action came to; and his spirits were low.  In addition he was in one of those fits of depression which attack an able man who has temporarily come to a stand-still in life, when his physical state is not buoyant enough to enable him to fight them off.  He was beginning plainly to see that his own part in the war was done.  His shattered arm, together with the neuralgic condition which had followed on the wound, were not going to mend sufficiently within any reasonable time to let him return to the fighting line, where, at the moment of his wound, he was doing divisional staff work, and was in the way of early promotion.  He was a man of clear and vigorous mind, inclined always to take a pessimistic view of himself and his surroundings, and very critical also of persons in authority; a scientific soldier, besides, indulging a strong natural contempt for the politicians and all their crew, only surpassed by a similar scorn of newspapers and the press.  He had never been popular as a subaltern, but since he had conquered his place among the ‘brains’ of the army, his fame had spread, and it was freely prophesied that his rise would be rapid.  So that his growing conviction that his active military career was over had been the recent cause in him of much bitterness of soul.  It was a bitter realisation, and a recent one.  He had been wounded at Neuve Chapelle in March, and up to July he had been confident of complete and rapid recovery.

Well, there was of course some compensation.  A post in the War Office—­in the Intelligence Department—­would, he understood, be offered him; and by October he meant to be at work.  Meanwhile an old school and college friendship between himself and ‘Bill Farrell,’ together with the special facilities at Carton for the treatment of neuralgia after wounds, had made him an inmate for several months of the special wing devoted to such cases in the splendid hospital; though lately by way of a change of surroundings, he had been lodging with the old Rector of the village of Carton, whose house was kept—­and well kept—­by a sweet-looking and practical granddaughter, herself an orphan.

Marsworth had connections in high quarters, and possessed some considerable means.  He had been a frequenter of the Farrells since the days when the old aunt was still in command, and Cicely was a young thing going to her first dances.  He and she had sparred and quarrelled as boy and girl.  Now that, after a long interval, they had again been thrown into close contact, they sparred and quarrelled still.  He was a man of high and rather stern ideals, which had perhaps been intensified—­made a little grimmer and fiercer than before—­by the