She went down at last, and found them both in the drawing-room already; Noel in a frilly evening frock, sitting by the fire with her chin on her hand, while her father was reading out the war news from the evening paper.  At sight of that cool, dainty, girlish figure brooding over the fire, and of her father’s worn face, the tragedy of this business thrust itself on her with redoubled force.  Poor Dad!  Poor Nollie!  Awful!  Then Noel turned, and gave a little shake of her head, and her eyes said, almost as plainly as lips could have said it:  ‘Silence!’ Gratian nodded, and came forward to the fire.  And so began one of those calm, domestic evenings, which cover sometimes such depths of heartache.

2

Noel stayed up until her father went to bed, then went upstairs at once.  She had evidently determined that they should not talk about her.  Gratian sat on alone, waiting for her husband!  It was nearly midnight when he came, and she did not tell him the family news till next morning.  He received it with a curious little grunt.  Gratian saw his eyes contract, as they might have, perhaps, looking at some bad and complicated wound, and then stare steadily at the ceiling.  Though they had been married over a year, she did not yet know what he thought about many things, and she waited with a queer sinking at her heart.  This skeleton in the family cupboard was a test of his affection for herself, a test of the quality of the man she had married.  He did not speak for a little, and her anxiety grew.  Then his hand sought hers, and gave it a hard squeeze.

“Poor little Nollie!  This is a case for Mark Tapleyism.  But cheer up, Gracie!  We’ll get her through somehow.”

“But father!  It’s impossible to keep it from him, and impossible to tell him!  Oh George!  I never knew what family pride was till now.  It’s incredible.  That wretched boy!”

“‘De mortuis.’  Come, Gracie!  In the midst of death we are in life!  Nollie was a plumb little idiot.  But it’s the war—­the war!  Your father must get used to it; it’s a rare chance for his Christianity.”

“Dad will be as sweet as anything—­that’s what makes it so horrible!”

George Laird redoubled his squeeze.  “Quite right!  The old-fashioned father could let himself go.  But need he know?  We can get her away from London, and later on, we must manage somehow.  If he does hear, we must make him feel that Nollie was ‘doing her bit.’”

Gratian withdrew her hand.  “Don’t!” she said in a muffled voice.

George Laird turned and looked at her.  He was greatly upset himself, realising perhaps more truly than his young wife the violence of this disaster; he was quite capable, too, of feeling how deeply she was stirred and hurt; but, a born pragmatist, confronting life always in the experimental spirit, he was impatient of the:  “How awful!” attitude.  And this streak of her father’s ascetic traditionalism