’And the “Offensive”?

‘Let them!  Our men want nothing better.’

On which the dinner resolved itself into a device for making the Captain talk.  The War Office crisis, the men gathered in conclave at Versailles, and that perpetual friction between the politician and the soldier, which every war, big or little, brings to the front, and which will only end when war ends—­those were the topics of it, with other talk such as women like to listen to of men about individual men, shrewd, careless, critical, strangely damning here, strangely indulgent there, constant only in one quality—­that it is the talk of men and even if one heard it behind a curtain and strained through distance, could never by any chance be mistaken for the talk of women.

At intervals Pamela got up to change the plates and the dishes, quieting with a peremptory gesture the two males, who would spring to their feet.  ’Haven’t I done parlour-work for six months?—­no amateurs, please!’ And again, even while he talked on, Arthur’s eyes would stray after the young full figure, the white neck and throat, the head with the soft hair folded close around it in wavy bands that followed all its lines—­as it might have been the head of one of those terra-cottas that her father had stolen from the Greek tombs in his youth.

But unfortunately, after dinner, in a corner of the dark drawing-room, he must needs try and play the schoolmaster a little, for her good of course; and then all went to pieces.

‘I hear you ran away!’

The voice that threw out this sudden challenge was half ironical, half affectionate; the grey eyes under their strong black brows looked at her with amusement.

Pamela flushed at once.

’Aubrey told you, I suppose?  What was the good of staying?  I couldn’t do anything right.  I was only making things worse.’

’I can hardly believe that!  Couldn’t you just have kept Miss Bremerton’s work going till she came back?’

‘I tried,’ said Pamela stiffly, ‘and it didn’t do.’

’Perhaps she attempts too much.  But she seemed to me to be very sensible and human.  And—­did you hear about the ash trees?’

‘No,’ said Pamela shortly, her foot nervously beating the ground.  ’It doesn’t matter.  Of course I know she’s the cleverest person going.  But I can’t get on with her—­that’s all!  I’m going to take up nursing—­properly.  I’m making enquiries about the London Hospital.  I want to be a real Army nurse.’

‘Will your father consent?’

’Fathers can’t stop their daughters from doing things—­as they used to do!’ said Pamela, with her chin in the air.

She had moved away from him; her soft gaiety had disappeared; he felt her all thorns.  Yet some perversity made him try to argue with her.  The war—­pray the Lord!—­might be over before her training as an Army nurse was half done.  Meanwhile, her V.A.D. work at Mannering was just what was wanted at the moment from girls of her age—­hadn’t she seen the appeals for V.A.D.’s?  And also, if by anything she did at home—­or set others free for doing—­she could help Captain Dell and Miss Bremerton to pull the estate round, and get the maximum amount of food out of it, she would be serving the country in the best way possible.