Cicely rarely cried.  When she was moved, she had a way of turning a grey-white, and speaking with particular deliberation, as though every word were an effort.  Of late, for some mysterious reason, she only indulged occasionally in ‘make-up’; there was no rouge, at any rate, on this afternoon, to disguise her change of colour.  She looked oddly at Nelly.

‘I danced with him at Christmas,’ she said.  ’There was a very smart party at a house in Grosvenor Square.  The Prince was there, home on short leave, and about twenty young men in khaki, and twenty girls.  Edward Longmore was there—­he wrote to me afterwards.  Oh, he was much younger than I. He was the dearest, handsomest, bravest little fellow.  When I saw his name in the list—­I just’—­she ground her small white teeth—­’I just cursed the war!  Do you know’—­she rolled over on the grass beside Nelly, her chin in her hands—­’the July before the war, I used to play tennis in a garden near London.  There were always five or six boys hanging about there—­jolly handsome boys, with everything that anybody could want—­family, and money, and lots of friends—­all the world before them.  And there’s not one of them left.  They’re all dead—­dead!  Think of that!  Boys of twenty and twenty-one.  What’ll the girls do they used to play and dance with?  All their playfellows are gone.  They can’t marry—­they’ll never marry.  It hadn’t anything to do with me, of course.  I’m twenty-eight.  I felt like a mother to them!  But I shan’t marry either!’

Nelly didn’t answer for a moment.  Then she put out a hand and turned Cicely’s face towards her.

‘Where is he?—­and what is he doing?’ she said, half laughing, but always with that something behind her smile which seemed to set her apart.

Cicely sat up.

’He?  Oh, that gentleman!  Well, he has got some fresh work—­just the work he wanted, he says, in the Intelligence Department, and he writes to Willy that life is “extraordinarily interesting,” and he’s “glad to have lived to see this thing, horrible as it is."’

‘Well, you wouldn’t wish him to be miserable?’

‘I should have no objection at all to his being miserable,’ said Cicely calmly, ’but I am not such a fool as to suppose that I should ever know it, if he were.’

‘Cicely!’

Cicely took up a stalk of grass, and began to bite it.  Her eyes seemed on fire.  Nelly was suddenly aware of the flaming up of fierce elemental things in this fashionably dressed young woman whose time was oddly divided between an important share in the running of her brother’s hospital, and a hungry search after such gaieties as a world at war might still provide her with.  She could spend one night absorbed in some critical case, and eagerly rendering the humblest V.A.D. service to the trained nurses whom her brother paid; and the next morning she would travel to London in order to spend the second night in one of those small dances at great houses of which she had spoken to Nelly, where the presence of men just come from, or just departing to, the firing line lent a zest to the talk and the flirting, the jealousies and triumphs of the evening that the dances of peace must do without.  Then after a morning of wild spending in the shops she would take a midday train back to Cumberland and duty.