’I shan’t obey!—­why should I?  Beryl and I must manage to see each other—­of course we shall!  Girls aren’t the slaves they used to be.  If a thing is unjust, we can fight it—­we ought to fight it!—­somehow.  Poor, poor Beryl!  Of course Aubrey will stick to her, whatever father does.  He would be a cur if he didn’t.  Desmond and I would never speak to him again!...  Beryl’ll have Arthur to help her, directly.  Oh, I wish I had a brother like Arthur!’ Her face softened and quivered as she stood still a moment, sending her ardent look towards the sunset.  ’I think I shall ask him to advise me....  I don’t suppose he will....  How provoking he used to be! but awfully kind too.  He’ll think I ought to do what father tells me.  How can I!  It’s wrong—­it’s abominable!  Everybody despises us.  And Desmond’s dying to be off—­to get away from it all—­like Aubrey.  He hates it so—­he almost hates coming home!  It’s humiliating, and it’s not our fault!’

Such cries and thoughts ran through her as she walked impetuously up and down, in rebellion against her father, unhappy for her girl friend, and smarting under the coercion put upon her patriotism and her conscience.  For she had only two months before left a school where the influence of a remarkable head-mistress had been directed towards awakening in a group of elder girls, to which Pamela belonged, a vivid consciousness of the perils and sufferings of the war—­of the sacredness of the cause for which England was fighting, of the glory of England, and the joy and privilege of English citizenship.  In these young creatures the elder woman had kindled a flame of feeling which, when they parted from her and their school life—­so she told them—­was to take practical effect in work for their country, given with a proud and glad devotion.

But Pamela, leaving school at the end of July for the last time, after a surfeit of examinations, had been pronounced ‘tired out’ by an old aunt, a certain Lady Cassiobury, who came for long periodical visits to Mannering, and made a show of looking after her motherless niece.  Accordingly she had been packed off to Scotland for August to stay with a school friend, one of a large family in a large country house in the Highlands.  And there, roaming amid lochs and heather, with a band of young people, the majority of the men, of course, in the Army—­young officers on short leave, or temporarily invalided, or boys of eighteen just starting their cadet training—­she had spent a month full of emotions, not often expressed.  For generally she was shy and rather speechless, though none the less liked by her companions for that.  But many things sank deep with her; the beauty of mountain and stream; the character of some of the boys she walked and fished with—­unnoticed sub-lieutenants, who had come home to get cured of one wound, and were going out again to the immediate chance of another, or worse; the tales of heroism and death of which