’Very sorry I can’t come on Tuesday with Aubrey, but there’s some good-bye calls I must pay.  Hope Arthur will be about.  I want awfully to see him.  Hard luck his being hit like that, after all the rest.  Snipers are beasts!

     ’P.S.—­You can’t think what a brainy young woman father’s got
     for his new secretary.  And she’s not half bad either.  Pamela’s
     rather silly about her, but she’ll come round.’

Beryl paid small attention to the postscript.  She had heard a good deal from Pamela about the newcomer, but it did not concern her.  As to the business aspect of the Squire’s behaviour, Beryl was well aware that she was an heiress.  Aubrey would lose nothing financially by giving up the Mannering estate to marry her.  Personally she cared nothing about Mannering, and she had enough for both.  But still there was the old name and place.  How much did he care about it? how much would he regret it?  Supposing his extraordinary father really cut him off?

Beryl felt she did not know.  And therewith came the recurrent pang—­how little she really knew about the man to whom she was engaged!  She adored him.  Every fibre in her slight sensitive body still remembered the moment when he first kissed her, when she first felt his arm about her.  But since—­how often there had been moments when she had been conscious of a great distance between them—­of something that did not fit—­that jarred!

For herself, she could never remember a time since she was seventeen when Aubrey Mannering had not meant more to her than any one else in the world.  On his first departure to France, she had said good-bye to him with secret agonies of spirit, which no one guessed but her mother, a colourless, silent woman, who had a way of knowing unexpectedly much of the people about her.  Then when he was badly wounded in some fighting near Festubert, in May 1915, and came home for two months’ leave, he seemed like a stranger, and Beryl had not known what to be at with him.  She was told that he had suffered very much—­it had been a severe thigh wound implicating the sciatic nerve—­and that he had been once, at least, very near to death.  But when she tried to express sympathy with what he had gone through, or timidly to question him about it, her courage fled, her voice died in her throat.  There was something unapproachable in her old playfellow, something that held her, and indeed every one else, at bay.

He was always courteous, and mostly cheerful.  But his face in repose had an absent, haunted look, the eyes alert but fixed on vacancy, the brow overcast and frowning.  In the old days Aubrey’s smile had been his best natural gift.  To win a smile from him in her childhood, Beryl would have done anything—­have gone on her knees up the drive, or offered up the only doll she cared for, or gone without jam for a week.  Now when he came home invalided, she had the same craving; but what she craved for came her way very rarely.  He would laugh and talk with her as with other people.  But that exquisite brightness of eye and lip, which seemed to be for one person only, and, when it came, to lift that person to the seventh heaven, she waited for in vain.