Providence is kind in great batches! She heard, mounting the steps, the blessed word Transport! "They," so Mark said: he and she--the family feeling again--were going to get Christopher into the Transport. . . . By the kindness of God the First Line Transport was the only branch of the services of which Valentine knew anything. Their charwoman, who could not read and write, had a son, a sergeant in a line regiment. "Hooray!" he had written to his mother, "I've been off my feed; recommended for the D.C.M. too. So they're putting me senior N.C.O. of First Line Transport for a rest; the safest soft job of the whole bally front line caboodle!" Valentine had had to read this letter in the scullery amongst black-beetles. Aloud! She had hated reading it as she had hated reading anything that gave details of the front line. But charity begins surely with the char! She had had to. Now she could thank God. The sergeant, in direct, perfectly sincere language, to comfort his mother, had described his daily work, detailing horses and G.S. limber wagons for jobs and superintending the horse-standings. "Why," one sentence ran, "our O.C. Transport is one of those fishing lunatics. Wherever we go he has a space of grass cleared out and pegged and b----y hell to the man who walks across it!" There the O.C. practised casting with trout and salmon rods by the hour together. "That'll show you what a soft job it is!" the sergeant had finished triumphantly. . . . So that there she, Valentine Wannop, sat on a hard bench against a wall; downright, healthy middle-class--or perhaps upper middle-class--for the Wannops were, if impoverished, yet of ancient family! Over her sensible, mocassined shoes the tide of humanity flowed before her hard bench. There were two commissionaires, the one always benevolent, the other perpetually querulous, in a pulpit on one side of her; on the other, a brown-visaged sort of brother-in-law with bulging eyes, who in his shy efforts to conciliate her was continually trying to thrust into his mouth the crook of his umbrella. As if it had been a knob. She could not, at the moment, imagine why he should want to conciliate her; but she knew she would know in a minute. For just then she was occupied with a curious pattern; almost mathematically symmetrical. _Now_ she was an English middle-class girl--whose mother had a sufficient income--in blue cloth, a wideawake hat, a black silk tie; without a thought in her head that she shouldn't have. And with a man who loved her: of crystal purity. Not ten, not five minutes ago, she had been . . . She could not even remember what she had been! And he had been, he had assuredly appeared a town . . . No, she could not think the words. . . . A raging stallion then! If now he should approach her, by the mere movement of a hand along the table, she would retreat.