“Mysterious sort of fellow, Thomson,” Major Harrison continued, in blissful ignorance of the peculiar significance of his words.  “You see him in Paris one day, you hear of him at the furthermost point of the French lines immediately afterwards, he reports at headquarters within a few hours, and you meet him slipping out of a back door of the War Office, a day or two later.”

“Inspector of Field Hospitals is a post which I think must have been created for him,” Colonel Grey remarked.  “He’s an impenetrable sort of chap.”

“Was Major Thomson going or returning from France when you saw him last?” Geraldine asked, looking across the table.

“Coming back.  When we left Boulogne, the destroyer which brought him over was waiting in the harbour.  It passed us in mid-Channel, doing about thirty knots to our eighteen.  Prince Cyril was rather sick.  He was bringing dispatches but no one seemed to have thought of providing a destroyer for him.”

“After all,” Lady Anselman murmured, “there is nothing very much more important than our hospitals.”

The conversation drifted away from Thomson.  Granet was making himself very agreeable indeed to Isabel Worth.  There was a little more colour in her cheeks than at the commencement of luncheon, and her manner had become more animated.

“Tell me about the village where you live?” he inquired—­“Market Burnham, isn’t it?”

“When we first went there,” she replied, “I thought that it was simply Paradise.  That was four years ago, though, and I scarcely counted upon spending the winters there.”

“You find it lovely, then.”

She shivered a little, half closing her eyes as though to shut out some unpleasant memory.

“The house,” she explained, “is on a sort of tongue of land, with a tidal river on either side and the sea not fifty yards away from our drawing-room window.  When there are high tides, we are simply cut off from the mainland altogether unless we go across on a farm cart.”

“You mustn’t draw too gloomy a picture of your home,” Lady Anselman said.  “I have seen it when it was simply heavenly.”

“And I have seen it,” the girl retorted, with a note of grimness in her tone, “when it was a great deal more like the other place—­stillness that seems almost to stifle you, grey mists that choke your breath and blot out everything; nothing but the gurgling of a little water, and the sighing—­the most melancholy sighing you ever heard—­of the wind in our ragged elms.  I am talking about the autumn and winter now, you must remember.”

“It doesn’t sound attractive,” Granet admitted.  “By-the-bye, which side of Norfolk are you?  You are nowhere near Brancaster, I suppose?”

“We are within four miles of it,” the girl replied quickly.  “You don’t ever come there, do you?”

Granet looked at her with uplifted eyebrows.

“This is really rather a coincidence!” he exclaimed.  “I’ve never been to Brancaster in my life but I’ve promised one or two fellows to go down to the Dormy House there, to-morrow or the next day, and have a week’s golf.  Geoff Anselman is going, for one.”