As a boy—­it now seemed aeons of years ago—­it had been far otherwise.  But Betty Tosswill had been very young, only nineteen, and when he had fallen on evil days she had thrown him over in obedience to her father’s strongly expressed wish.  He had suffered what at the time seemed a frightful agony, and he had left England full of revolt and bitterness.

But to-day, when the knowledge that he was so soon going to Beechfield brought with it a great surge of remembrance, he could not honestly tell himself that he was sorry.  Had he gone out to Australia burdened with a girl-wife, the difficult struggle would have been well-nigh intolerable, and it was a million to one chance that he would ever have met the man to whom he owed his present good fortune.  What he now longed to do was to enjoy himself in a simple, straightforward way.  Love, with its tremors, uncertainties, its blisses and torments, was not for him, and in so far as he might want a pleasant touch of half sentimental, half sexless comradeship, there was his agreeable friendship with Mrs. Crofton.

Enid Crofton?  The thought of how well he had come to know her in the last three weeks surprised him.  When he had first met her in Egypt she had been the young, very pretty wife of Colonel Crofton, an elderly “dug-out,” odd and saturnine, whose manner to his wife was not always over-kindly.  No one out there had been much surprised when she had decided to brave the submarine peril and return to England.

Radmore had not been the only man who had felt sorry for her, and who had made friends with her.  But unlike the other men, who were all more or less in love with her, he had liked Colonel Crofton.  During his visit to Fildy Fe Manor, the liking had hardened into serious regard.  He had been surprised, rather distressed, to find how much less well-off they had appeared here, at home, than when the Colonel had been on so-called active service.  It had also become plain to him—­though he was not a man to look out for such things—­that the husband and wife were now on very indifferent terms, the one with the other, and, on the whole, he blamed the wife—­and then, just before he had started for home again, had come the surprising news of Colonel Crofton’s death!

In her letter to one who was, after all, only an acquaintance, the young widow had gone into no details.  But, just by chance, Radmore had seen a paragraph in a week-old London paper containing an account of the inquest.  Colonel Crofton had committed suicide, a result, it was stated, of depression owing to shell-shock.  “Shell-shock” gave Radmore pause.  He felt quite sure that Colonel Crofton had never—­to use a now familiar paraphrase—­heard a shot fired in anger.  The fact that his war service had been far from the Front had always been a subject of bitter complaint on the old soldier’s part.

Radmore had written a sympathetic note to Mrs. Crofton, telling her the date of his return, and now—­almost without his knowing how and why—­they had become intimate, meeting almost daily, lunching or dining together incessantly, Radmore naturally gratified at the admiration his lovely companion—­she had grown even prettier since he had last seen her—­obviously excited.