It was something that she had thought, deep in her heart, would never happen.  Godfrey Radmore was coming back—­coming back into her life, and into all their lives.  Though everything seemed just the same as when he had left Old Place, everything was different, both in a spiritual and material sense.  The War had made a deep wound, nay, far more than one wound, in the spiritual body politic of Old Place.  And it was of a very material thing that Betty Tosswill thought first, and most painfully, this morning.  This was the fact that from having been in easy circumstances they were now very poor.

When Godfrey Radmore had gone out of their lives there had been a great, perhaps even then a false, air of prosperity over them all.  John Tosswill was a man who had always made bad investments; but in that far-off time, “before the War,” living was so cheap, wages were so low, the children were all still so young, that he and Janet had managed very well.

Only Betty knew the scrimping and the saving Jack, at Oxford, and Tom, at Winchester, now entailed on the part of those who lived at Old Place.  Why, she herself counted every penny with anxious care, and the stupid, kindly folk who asked, just a trifle censoriously, why she wasn’t “doing something,” now that “every career is open to a girl, especially to one who did so well in the War,” would perhaps have felt a little ashamed had they discovered that she was housemaid, parlourmaid, often cook, to a large and not always easily pleased family.  They never had a visitor to stay now—­they simply couldn’t afford it—­and she hated the thought of Godfrey, himself now so unnaturally prosperous, coming back to such an altered state of things.

Besides, that was not all.  Betty covered her face with her hands, and slow, bitter, reluctant tears began to ooze through her fingers.  She had tried not to think of Godfrey and of his coming, these last two or three days.  She had put the knowledge of what was going to happen from her, with a kind of hard, defiant determination.  But now she was sorry—­sorry, that she had not taken her step-mother’s advice, and gone away for a long week-end.  Betty Tosswill felt like a man who, having suffered intolerably from a wound which has at last healed, learns with sick apprehension that his wound is to be torn open.

Although not even Janet, her one real close friend and confidant, was aware of it, Godfrey had not been the only man in Betty’s life.  There had been two men, out in France, who had loved her, and lost no time in telling her so.  One had been killed; the other still wrote to her at intervals, begging her earnestly, pathetically, to marry him, and sometimes she half thought she would.