Mrs. Cloud, you see, was hampered by being fond of Laura. She missed her, for Laura did not come as often as in the old days: and Laura, as more than Mrs. Cloud had discovered, had her insidious, disconcerting way of becoming indispensable. You tolerated the harmless creature, acknowledging even a pleasant quality in it, as of unobtrusive furniture, and then, one day, when you felt yourself most free, it would turn on you, not a chair, not a table, but a laughing woman, who challenged you, with a twinkle, to try and do without her. But Mrs. Cloud did not go into that. She only knew that of all possible daughters-in-law she would have objected least to Laura Valentine. For she and Laura had always shared, though they did not know it, their prophetic dread of the Minx, rouged, gilded, and irresistible, who, if they were not extremely careful, would one day carry off Justin and make him miserable. Justin’s deportment at garden-parties, his invincible indifference to musical comedies and mixed tennis, might reassure them momentarily, but they never really believed that he could be trusted by himself. And now he was in uniform——For they knew, the worldly twain, cynically they knew What Women Were! There was that girl, for instance, that much advertised friend of Rhoda’s—with the ear-rings—who had openly announced herself as dying to meet Captain Cloud. Hussy! Impassive Laura, handing tea-cakes, had been so grateful to Mrs. Cloud for sniffing. But then, in spite of their differences, Mrs. Cloud and Laura always did understand each other. Laura said good-bye at last, and went away, leaving Mrs. Cloud in a happy fever of activity, bewildering herself with Bradshaw, interviewing the coachman, and in defiance of her half a dozen servants, airing sheets at the drawing-room fire. Master Justin—Captain Cloud, I mean—is coming home! Justin—Captain Cloud, I mean—is coming home. The theme was Mrs. Cloud’s, rang in her head in Mrs. Cloud’s voice, but the intricacies of its variations were Laura’s own. She was utterly unable to force her mind from the subject. Her brain was a like a keyboard at which her soul sat fingering out the Harmonious Justin, till she was ready to scream. Her share of what the village called war-work had not been light, and she was besides so wearied out by the strain and the pain and the unlifting terror of the past months, that her thoughts were often able to escape her control, to weaken her still further by their irresponsibility. There were times when she could not think consecutively at all: and yet she could never stop thinking, and at a furious rate, till her mind seemed a cosmos bereft of gravity. Into that chaos, which even Mrs. Cloud could never have connected with Laura of the trim blue serges, and the Refugee Committee, and the restful, smiling ways—into that chaos of dead hopes and living fears, Mrs. Cloud’s news flashed like a comet, brilliant, portentous. Justin was coming home.