"If you hear any more of the Zepps--just dash in and tell me!--Don't lose a minute! Just dash!" When the front door was heard to close upon him, Coombe remarked casually: "I will ask you to put an immediate stop to that sort of thing." He observed that Feather fluttered--though she had lightly moved to a table as if to rearrange a flower in a group. "Put a stop to letting Mr. Delamore go over his scene here?" "Put a stop to Mr. Delamore, if you please." It was at this moment more than ever true that her light being was overstrung and that her light head whirled too fast. This one particular also overstrung young man had shared all her amusements with her and had ended by pleasing her immensely--perhaps to the verge of inspiring a touch of fevered sentiment she had previously never known. She told herself that it was the War when she thought of it. She had however not been clever enough to realise that she was a little losing her head in a way which might not be to her advantage. For the moment she lost it completely. She almost whirled around as she came to Coombe. "I won't," she exclaimed. "I won't!" It was a sort of shock to him. She had never done anything like it before. It struck him that he had never before seen her look as she looked at the moment. She was a shade too dazzlingly made up--she had crossed the line on one side of which lies the art which is perfect. Even her dress had a suggestion of wartime lack of restraint in its style and colours. It was of a strange green and a very long scarf of an intensely vivid violet spangled with silver paillettes was swathed around her bare shoulders and floated from her arms. One of the signs of her excitement was that she kept twisting its ends without knowing that she was touching it. He noted that she wore a big purple amethyst ring--the amethyst too big. Her very voice was less fine in its inflections and as he swiftly took in these points Coombe recognised that they were the actual result of the slight tone of raffishness he had observed as denoting the character of her increasingly mixed circle. She threw herself into a chair palpitating in one of her rages of a little cat--wreathing her scarf round and round her wrist and singularly striking him with the effect of almost spitting and hissing out her words. "I won't give up everything I like and that likes me," she flung out. "The War has done something to us all. It's made us let ourselves go. It's done something to me too. It's made me less frightened. I won't be bullied into--into things." "Do I seem to bully you? I am sorry." The fact that she had let herself go with the rest of the world got the better of her. "You have not been near me for weeks and now you turn up with your air of a grand Bashawe and order people out of my house. You have not been near me." The next instant it was as though she tore off some last shred of mental veiling and threw it aside in her reckless mounting heat of temper.