“I couldn’t take money from you, if that’s what you mean. Oh, it’s not your fault, it’s nothing in you yourself. But you’re a Rillington.” “Isn’t that, again, rather fanciful?” “You seem to call all my deepest instincts fanciful!” she protested, smiling. “But that one’s very deep. Goodness, I could almost as soon conceive of myself accepting Nina Frost’s cast-off frocks!” We smiled together over that monstrous freak of the imagination. And so, still smiling, we parted—she to go back to Madame Chose and her _lingerie_, I to my wanderings and nosing about. I did from time to time send her an address that would probably find me; but, as her words had foreshadowed, I got no answers. So it was still Madame Chose—or worse? I had to suppose that; and I was sorrowful. She had been much to blame, but somewhat to be pitied; the root feeling under which she had in the end acted—fidelity to the man to whom she had first belonged—might be primitive, as she herself suggested; it did not seem to me ignoble. At all events, she had not in the end been worldly; she had not sold herself. No, not yet. For a while I thought a good deal about her; she had made a vivid impression on me in those three days; her face haunted my eyes sometimes. But—well, we were all very busy; there was a lot to think about—plenty of food both for thought and for emotion, immediate interests too strong for memories and speculations to fight against. The echo of her voice was drowned by the clamor of war. The vision of her face faded. CHAPTER IX LIKE TO LIKE IT was in May, 1916, that Waldo got a severe wound in the right shoulder, which put him out of action for the rest of the war and sent him, after two or three months in a hospital, back to Cragsfoot. He had done very well, indeed distinguished himself rather notably; had fortune been kinder, he might have expected to rise to high rank. The letters which I received—I was far away, and was not at the time able to get leave, even had I felt justified in asking for it—reflected the mingled disappointment, anxiety, and relief, which the end of his military career, the severity of his wound, and his return home—alive, at all events!—naturally produced at Cragsfoot. Sir Paget wrote seldom and briefly, but with a quiet humor and an incisive touch. Aunt Bertha’s letters—especially now that she had only me to write to, and no longer spent the larger part of her epistolary energy on Waldo—were frequent, full, vivid, and chatty. But she was also very discursive; she would sandwich in the Kaiser between the cook and the cabbages, Waldo’s wound between Bethmann-Hollweg and Mr. Winston Churchill. It was, however, possible to gather from her, aided by Sir Paget, a pretty complete picture of what was going on both at Cragsfoot and at Briarmount.