'Thank you, Chicksands--but no brass hats need apply! Many thanks--but you're too smart!' He pointed, panting, to the red tabs and to the bit of variegated ribbon on Chicksands' broad chest. 'Go and help Pamela bring in the dinner.' The Captain obeyed with alacrity. 'All the servants left on Monday,' said Pamela. 'We had a charwoman this morning, but she's gone to-night, because there's a new moon.' 'What--raids?' Pamela nodded as she gave him the soup, with instructions to carry it carefully and put it by the fire. She seemed to be in her gayest mood, and Chicksands' eyes followed her perpetually as she went backwards and forwards on her household tasks. Presently Mrs. Strang appeared, crimson from the fire, bearing the fishpie and vegetables that were to provide the rationed meal. 'To think,' said Mr. Strang, when they were at last at table, 'that there was a time when we were proud of our "little dinners," and that I never made myself unpleasant unless Margaret spent more than five pounds on the food alone. Shall I ever eat a good dinner again?' He looked wistfully at the bare table. 'Will you ever want to?' said Arthur, quietly. A momentary silence fell upon the little party. Bernard Strang had lost two brothers in the war, and Chicksands had no sooner spoken than he reproached himself for a tactless brute. But, suddenly, the bells of the Abbey rang: out above their heads, playing with every stroke on the nerves of the listeners. For the voice of England was in them, speaking to that under-consciousness which the war has developed in us all. 'Any news?' said Strang, looking at Arthur. 'No. The Eastern business gets a little worse every day.' 'And the "Offensive"? 'Let them! Our men want nothing better.' On which the dinner resolved itself into a device for making the Captain talk. The War Office crisis, the men gathered in conclave at Versailles, and that perpetual friction between the politician and the soldier, which every war, big or little, brings to the front, and which will only end when war ends--those were the topics of it, with other talk such as women like to listen to of men about individual men, shrewd, careless, critical, strangely damning here, strangely indulgent there, constant only in one quality--that it is the talk of men and even if one heard it behind a curtain and strained through distance, could never by any chance be mistaken for the talk of women. At intervals Pamela got up to change the plates and the dishes, quieting with a peremptory gesture the two males, who would spring to their feet. 'Haven't I done parlour-work for six months?--no amateurs, please!' And again, even while he talked on, Arthur's eyes would stray after the young full figure, the white neck and throat, the head with the soft hair folded close around it in wavy bands that followed all its lines--as it might have been the head of one of those terra-cottas that her father had stolen from the Greek tombs in his youth.