"Temper!" thought Margaret to herself. "I suppose I was rather cross--but really Isobel's enough to try a saint sometimes. She must have gone off pretty quickly, too. However...." Margaret was quite undisturbed--even a little amused at her friend's departure. She and Isobel often had fierce little quarrels, but these never had any lasting effect on their friendship. She would see Isobel to-morrow, and the whole thing would be forgotten. For the present, she continued her walk alone. An old gentleman sitting on a seat near by, who had chanced to be looking at Isobel at the moment when Eustace (having awarded her the prize in his private beauty competition) swooped down and carried her off, was the only actual spectator of her disappearance. Doubting the evidence of his senses, he waited anxiously until Margaret should find out what had happened; he looked for her to scream or faint, or show her horror by some emotional upheaval; when she simply walked on as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, he was smitten with panic. He dashed home and went straight to bed. * * * * * * * Isobel's surprise and alarm when she found herself unexpectedly face to face with two tinhatted and unwashed Tommies in a subterranean cavern, lit only by a feeble gleam of daylight from the roof, was obvious; but she was too well bred to allow her emotions to master her. For a moment, conscious thought seemed to be suspended in her. Then, as the objects about her took shape, she decided that she must be dreaming. At once all sense of fear left her. If it was only a dream, she argued to herself, it could not matter what happened to her. She waited with a kind of amused expectancy to see what turn events would take. Alf and Bill, on the other hand, were not a little disturbed. They had realized at once that Eustace, in his ignorance, had committed an awful social solecism. Even the resourceful Bill's imagination boggled at the idea of explaining to this dainty vision how she came to be in her present surroundings. They stood before her, embarrassed and tongue-tied. Alf thought of recalling the djinn and telling him to take her straight back; but his very real and increasing fear of offending his familiar forbade. Besides, his visitor was very lovely, and filled his jaded masculine eye with a lively sense of satisfaction. After a while the silence became oppressive and Isobel spoke. "Where am I?" she asked. "Who are you?" Bill, who had been making a surreptitious and feline toilet in the gloomy recesses of the dug-out, stepped forward and saluted. "Don't be frightened, miss," he said soothingly, "but this 'ere's a dug-out in France, on the Western Front." "That proves it," said Isobel to herself, with a certain satisfaction. "It _is_ just a vivid dream. Perhaps it's telepathy or levitation or something. Anyway, the great point to remember is that I'm not really here at all."