Wastwood’s engagement to the girl had been announced only the week previously in the Society Columns of the leading dailies. Now, while Wastwood’s younger brother Jerry anguished in the throes of a final Exam, at Sandhurst, the said Jerry being set upon getting a Commission in time to go to the Front with one of the First Divisions—his elder sat on a Club sofa and made love to the girl Jerry was subsequently to marry. For not only Wastwood’s title, but his vacant Commission as a Lieutenant in the Dapple Greys and his sweetheart went to his junior after Mons. There was a lot of family and regimental re-shuffling and re-dealing, you will remember, after Mons. The leaven of the Great Awakening was working in the souls of these worldly-minded, ultra-modern men and women, even as the crowd in the rooms grew denser, as the buzz of talk became almost solid, and khaki mingled with the brilliant toilettes. Hardly a man but wore dead-leaf brown. Wives were entertaining their husbands, mothers were lunching their sons, that day, at the multitudinous little tables in the great and lesser dining-rooms,—there was a revival of old code-words, an interchange of almost forgotten pet-names, a resurrection of ancient jokes, when the atmosphere seemed dangerously charged with emotion. How many Last Sacraments of renewed love were eaten and drunk by husbands and wives who, estranged for years, were to be reunited by the War, and parted by the War until the Day when Wars shall be no more. That a tall young man in grey tweed with a crape armlet should sit opposite Patrine that day at Margot’s special table was one of the thousand miracles already wrought. Sherbrand had shelved all recollection of that June adventure in the Bois de Boulogne, when a flushed young husband in immaculate top-hat and frock-coat had thanked an angry young man in waterproof overalls and gabardine for not chopping his wife into kedgeree. Could one be angry any more when this little human dragon-fly was what Patrine called "a frightful pal" of hers. Thank Heaven! Patrine had known nothing of the cousinship when she had answered Sherbrand’s plain question, "Will you marry me?" with an assent: "_Sooner than not!_" "Then—it is settled?" "Yes, you poor dear! If you think me worth having!" _Worth having_! Sherbrand’s glorious Patrine. Whom to be near was heaven on earth. Whom to obey was a lover’s luxury, even when she had issued the mandate: "Now, you must come to the Club and lunch with me, and meet my friends. Do be decent to them!" Perhaps you can see Sherbrand bowing rather stiffly to Margot and accepting with the briefest hesitation the smallest of offered hands.