“Please come to see me—­Graham,” he read, and the actual receipt of the message stirred within him such a whirl of emotion that, for a moment or two, Joan Whitworth spoke and he was not aware of it.  Suddenly, however, he understood that she was speaking words of importance.

“I hope I did right to open it,” she said.  “Colonel Brockley rode over this morning to tell us that his son had been recalled to his battalion by a telegram.  I knew you were expecting one.  When this one came, I thought that it might be important and that you ought to have it at once.  On the other hand it might be another telegram,” and her face dimpled into smiles, “from Linda Spavinsky.  I didn’t know what to do about it.  But Mario Escobar was quite certain that I ought to open it.”

“Mario Escobar?” cried Hillyard.

“Yes.  He had just arrived.  He was quite certain that we ought to open it, so we did.”

“We?” A note of regret in his voice made her ask anxiously: 

“Was I wrong?”

Hillyard hastened to reassure her.

“Not a bit.  Of course you were quite right, and I am very grateful.”

Joan’s face cleared again.

“You see, I thought that if it was important I could bring it over and drive you back again.”

“Will you?” Hillyard asked eagerly.  “But now you are here you ought to stay.”

Joan would not hear of the proposal, and Hillyard himself was in a fever to be off.  They found Sir Chichester and his wife in the paddock, and Hillyard wished his hosts good-bye.  Mario Escobar, who had driven over with Joan Whitworth, was talking to them.  Escobar turned to Martin Hillyard.

“We met at Sir Charles Hardiman’s supper party.  You have not forgotten?  You are off?  A new play, I hope, to go into rehearsal.”

He smiled and bowed, and waved his hands.  Hillyard went away with Joan Whitworth and mounted beside her into a little two-seated car which she had been accustomed to drive in her unregenerate days.  She had not forgotten her skill, and she sent the little car spinning up and down the road into the hills.  It was an afternoon of blue and gold, with the larks singing out of sight in the sky.  The road wound up and down, dark hedges on one side, fields yellow with young wheat upon the other, and the scent of the briar-rose in the air.  Joan said very little, and Hillyard was content to watch her as she drove, the curls blowing about her ears and her hands steady and sure upon the wheel as she swung the car round the corners and folds of the hills.  Once she asked of him: 

“Are you glad to go?”

He made no pretence of misunderstanding her.

“Very,” he answered.  “If the great trial is coming, I want to fall back into the rank and file.  Pushing and splashing is for peace times.”

“Oh, I understand that!” she cried.

These were the young days.  The jealousies of Departments, the intrigues to pull this man down and put that man up, not because of his capacity or failure, but because he fitted or did not fit the inner politics of the Office, the capture of honours by the stay-at-homes—­all the little miseries and horrors that from time immemorial have disfigured the management of wars—­they lay in the future.  With millions of people, as with this couple speeding among the uplands, the one thought was—­the great test is at hand.