Pamela assented mutely.  She did not want to talk about Arthur Chicksands.  There was in her a queer foreboding sense about him.  She did not in the least expect him to fall in love with her; yet there was a dim, intermittent fear in her lest he might become too important to her, together with a sharp shrinking from the news, which of course might come any day, that he was going to be married.  She had known him from her childhood, had romped and sparred with him.  He was the gayest, most charming companion; yet he carried with him, quite unconsciously, something that made it delightful to be smiled at or praised by him, and a distress when you did not get on with him, and were quite certain that he thought you silly or selfish.  There was a rumour which reached Mannering after the second battle of Ypres that he had been killed.  The Chicksands’ household believed it for twenty-four hours.

Then he was discovered—­gassed and stunned—­in a shell-hole, and there had been a long illness and convalescence.  During the twenty-four hours when he was believed to be dead, Pamela had spent the April daylight in the depths of the Mannering woods, in tangled hiding-places that only she knew.  It was in the Easter holidays.  She was alone at Mannering with an old governess, while her father was in London.  The little wrinkled Frenchwoman watched her in silence, whenever she was allowed to see her.  Then when on the second morning there came a telegram from Chetworth, and Pamela tore it open, flying with it before she read it to the secrecy of her own room, the Frenchwoman smiled and sighed.  ‘Ca, c’est l’amour!’ she said to herself, ‘assurement c’est l’amour!’ And when Pamela came down again, radiant as a young seraph, and ready to kiss the apple-red cheek of the Frenchwoman—­the rarest concession!—­Madame Guerin did not need to be told that Arthur Chicksands was safe and likely to be sound.

But the Frenchwoman’s inference was premature.  During the two years she had been at school, Pamela had thought very little of Arthur Chicksands.  She was absorbed in one of those devotions to a woman—­her schoolmistress—­very common among girls of strong character, and sometimes disastrous.  In her case it had worked well.  And now the period of extravagant devotion was over, and the girl’s mind and heart set free.  She thought she had forgotten Arthur Chicksands, and was certain he must have forgotten her.  As it happened they had never met since his return to the front in the autumn of 1915—­Pamela was then seventeen and a schoolgirl—­or, as she now put it, a baby.  She remembered the child who had hidden herself in the woods as something very far away.

And yet she did not want to talk about ‘Arthur,’ as she had always called him, and there was a certain tremor and excitement in her mind about him.  The idea of being prevented from seeing him was absurd—­intolerable.  She was already devising ways and means of doing it.  It was really not to be expected that filial obedience should reign at Mannering.