The others listened.  Pamela became silent and pale.  All the old jealousy and misery of the autumn were alive in her once more.  She had looked forward for weeks to this meeting with Arthur Chicksands.  And for the first part of his visit she had been happy—­before Elizabeth came on the scene.  Why should Elizabeth have all the homage and the attention?  She, too, was doing her best!  She was drudging every day as a V.A.D., washing crockery and scrubbing floors; and this was the first afternoon off she had had for weeks.  Her limbs were dog-tired.  But Arthur Chicksands never talked to her—­Pamela—­in this tone of freedom and equality—­with the whole and not the half of his mind.  ‘I could hold my own,’ she thought bitterly, ’but he never gives me the chance!  I suppose he despises girls.’

As the hall clock struck half-past five, however, Elizabeth rose from her seat, gathering up the papers she had brought in from the office, and disappeared.

Arthur Chicksands looked at his watch.  Beryl exclaimed: 

‘Oh, no, Arthur, not yet!  Let’s wait for Desmond!’

Pamela said perfunctorily—­’No, please don’t go!  He’ll be here directly.’

But as they gathered round the fire, expecting the young gunner, she hardly opened her lips again.  Arthur Chicksands was quite conscious that he had wounded her.  She appeared to him, as she sat there in the firelight, in all the first fairness and freshness of her youth, as an embodied temptation.  Again he said to himself that other men might love and marry on the threshold of battle; he could not bring himself to think it justifiable—­whether for the woman or the man.  In a few weeks’ time he would be back in France and in the very thick, perhaps, of the final struggle—­of its preparatory stages, at any rate.  Could one make love to a beautiful creature like that at such a moment, and then leave her, with a whole mind?—­the mind and the nerve that were the country’s due?

All the same he had never been so aware of her before.  And simultaneously his mind was invaded by the mute, haunting certainty that her life was reaching out towards his, and that he was repelling and hurting her.

Suddenly—­into the midst of them, while Mrs. Gaddesden was talking endlessly in her small plaintive voice about rations and queues—­there dropped the sound of a car passing the windows, and a boy’s clear voice.

‘Desmond!’ cried Pamela, with almost a sob of relief, and like one escaping from a nightmare she sprang up and ran to greet her brother.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Elizabeth had found the Squire waiting for her, and, as she saw at once, in a state of tension.

‘What was that you were saying to me about timber last week?’ he demanded imperiously as she entered, without giving her time to speak.  ’I hear this intolerable Government are behaving like madmen, cutting down everything they can lay hands on.  They shan’t have my trees—­I would burn them first!’