Rupert shifted his position, and looked out of the window.  Down in the garden Chris was dispensing tea to three of his brother-subalterns, assisted by Noel.  Bertrand was seated by her side, alert and watchful, ready at a moment’s notice to come to her aid.  It was his customary attitude, and it had been so more than ever since the death of Cinders.  There was a protecting brotherliness about him that Chris found infinitely comforting:  He understood her so perfectly.

She had not wanted to emerge from her seclusion to entertain her brother’s friends on that sunny Sunday afternoon, but he had gently persuaded her.  A change had come over Chris during the past four days.  The violence of her grief had spent itself on the night that she and Noel had mingled their tears over the loss of their favourite, and she had not alluded to it since.  She accepted her husband’s sympathy with gratitude, but she shrank so visibly from the smallest allusion to her trouble that he found no opportunity for expressing it.  He would not intrude it upon her.  It was not his way, and she made him aware that for this also she was grateful.

But it was plainly from Bertrand that she drew her chief comfort.  His very presence seemed to soothe her.  He was just the friend she needed to help her through her dark hour.

That she fretted secretly Mordaunt could not doubt, but she was so zealous to hide all traces of it from him that he never detected them.  He only missed her gay wilfulness and the sunshine of her smile.  She responded to his tenderness even more readily than usual, but she did not open her heart to him.  There seemed to be a barrier intervening that she could not bring herself to pass.

In his own mind he set this fact down to a certain feminine unreasonableness, imagining that she could not forget his share in the tragedy that had affected her so deeply.  He trusted to time to soften the painful impression, and meanwhile, with his habitual patience, he set himself to wait till the physical strain had passed and the very sweetness of her nature should bring her back to him.  He knew that all Bertrand’s influence would be exercised in this direction, and his faith in his young secretary’s discretion was considerable.  Their brief conversation on the night of the disaster had rooted it more firmly than ever.  Bertrand was so essentially a man of honour that he trusted him in all things as he trusted himself.  Their code was the same, and their friendship of the kind that endures for life.  If there were one thing on earth before all others upon which Trevor Mordaunt would have staked his all, it was this Frenchman’s loyalty to himself.  He was as staunch as Chris’s brothers were unstable.  He believed him to be utterly incapable of so much as an underhand impulse.  And he was content that Chris should have for friend this man who was so close a friend of his own, upon whose nobility of character he had come to rely as a power for good that could not fail to raise her ideals and deepen in her that sense of honour which was still scarcely more than an undeveloped instinct in her soul.