“We had a muzzled press during the war,” she said, “and now we’ve got free speech.  And one’s as bad as the other.  She must love him terribly, mother,” she added.

But Grace harked back to Suzette, and the last of the Cardews harked with her.  Later on people dropped in, and Lily made a real attempt to get back into her old groove, but that night, when she went upstairs to her bedroom, with its bright fire, its bed neatly turned down, her dressing gown and slippers laid out, the shaded lamps shining on the gold and ivory of her dressing table, she was conscious of a sudden homesickness.  Homesickness for her bare little room in the camp barracks, for other young lives, noisy, chattering, often rather silly, occasionally unpleasant, but young.  Radiantly, vitally young.  The great house, with its stillness and decorum, oppressed her.  There was no youth in it, save hers.

She went to her window and looked out.  Years ago, like Elinor, she had watched the penitentiary walls from that window, with their endlessly pacing sentries, and had grieved for those men who might look up at the sky, or down at the earth, but never out and across, to see the spring trees, for instance, or the children playing on the grass.  She remembered the story about Jim Doyle’s escape, too.  He had dug a perilous way to freedom.  Vaguely she wondered if he were not again digging a perilous way to freedom.

Men seemed always to be wanting freedom, only they had so many different ideas of what freedom was.  At the camp it had meant breaking bounds, balking the Military Police, doing forbidden things generally.  Was that, after all, what freedom meant, to do the forbidden thing?  Those people in Russia, for instance, who stole and burned and appropriated women, in the name of freedom.  Were law and order, then, irreconcilable with freedom?

After she had undressed she rang her bell, and Castle answered it.

“Please find out if Ellen has gone to bed,” she said.  “If she has not, I would like to talk to her.”

The maid looked slightly surprised.

“If it’s your hair, Miss Lily, Mrs. Cardew has asked me to look after you until she has engaged a maid for you.”

“Not my hair,” said Lily, cheerfully.  “I rather like doing it myself.  I just want to talk to Ellen.”

It was a bewildered and rather scandalized Castle who conveyed the message to Ellen.

CHAPTER VII

“I wish you’d stop whistling that thing,” said Miss Boyd, irritably.  “It makes me low in my mind.”

“Sorry,” said Willy Cameron.  “I do it because I’m low in my mind.”

“What are you low about?” Miss Boyd had turned toward the rear of the counter, where a mirror was pasted to a card above a box of chewing gum, and was carefully adjusting her hair net.  “Lady friend turned you down?”

Willy Cameron glanced at her.