Sir Chichester was getting ready for the Chichester Flower Show, at which, certainly, he was not going to make a speech.  Oh dear, no!  He knew better than that.

“In this marvellous collection of flowers, ladies and gentlemen, we can read, if so we will, a singular instance of co-ordination and organisation—­the Empire’s great needs to-day——­”

Harry Luttrell and Joan stifled their laughter and stole away out of hearing.

“We won’t breathe a word of it,” said Joan.

“No,” said Harry.

They had a little secret now between them—­that wonderful link—­a little secret; and to be sure they made the most of it.  They could look across the dinner-table at one another with a smile in which no one else could have a share.  If Sir Chichester spoke, it would be just to kindle that swift glance in lovers’ eyes from which the heart takes fire.  Love-making went at a gallop in nineteen hundred and sixteen; it jumped the barriers; it danced to a lively and violent tune.  Maidens, as Sir Charles Hardiman had pronounced, had become more primeval.  Insecurity had dropped them down upon the bed-rock elemental truths.  Men were for women, women for men, especially for those men who went out with a cheery song in their mouths to save them from the hideous destiny of women in ravaged lands.  The soldier was here to-day on leave, and God alone knew where he would be to-morrow, and whether alive, or perhaps a crippled thing like a child!

Joan Whitworth and Harry Luttrell had been touched by the swift magic of those days; he, when he had first seen her in the shining armour of her youth upon the steps of the stairs; she, when Harry had first entered the hall and spoken his few commonplace words of greeting.  This was the hour for them, the hour at the well with the desert behind them and the desert in front, the hour within the measure of which was to be forced the essence of many days.  When they returned to the hall they found most of the small party gathered there before going up to dress for dinner; and there was that in the faces of the pair which betrayed them.  Hillyard looked quickly round the hall, as a qualm of pity for Stella Croyle seized him.  But he could not see her.  “Thank Heaven she has already gone up to dress,” he said to himself.  A marriage between Joan Whitworth and the Harry Luttrell of to-day, the man freed now from the great obsession of his life and trained now to the traditional paths, was a fitting thing, a thing to be welcomed.  Hillyard readily acknowledged it.  But he had more insight into the troubled soul of Stella Croyle than any one else in that company.

“No one’s bothering about her,” he reflected.  “She came here to set up her last fight to win back Harry.  She is now putting on her armour for it.  And she hasn’t a chance—­no, not one!”

For Harry’s sake he was glad.  But he was a creator of plays; and his training led him to seek to understand, and to understand with the sympathy of his emotions, the points of view of others who might stand in a contrast or a relation.  He walked up the stairs with a heart full of pity when Millicent Splay caught him up.