But Sherbrand was occupied less by thoughts of his angry love than by Raymond’s story of the boy in the German warplane. He telephoned to Sir Roland and to Saxham before he drove back to the Club thinking: "Bawne!—It must be Bawne!—out there in the midst of all those horrors. If I could only meet that fellow von Herrnung! ... I’ve owed him no grudge because he robbed me.... But—for this—I could kill him now!" *CHAPTER LVI* *LA BRABANÇONNE* "You saint, Pat!" Margot, amidst Raymond’s polite excuses, had recognised Sherbrand’s hatchet-face under the khaki cap. "You’ve stolen a whole morning for me from your Flying Man. Why didn’t you tell me he’d come back to town? How perfectly tophole he looks in tea-leaves! Franky and I came across that French officer who was with him, last June, in Paris. We’re been rubbing noses on the strength of having met before. Is Alan going to the Front? My poor Pattums, it’ll be your turn to be haunted. Here’s Rhona Helvellyn. Cheer, Rhona! Do tell us why you look so smudgy? Have you been hiding up the chimney of the House of Commons, or bombarding a Minister’s front door with coal?" She beckoned, and Rhona came stalking through the crush of marvellously got-up members, the round, fair, freckled boy-face that topped her long swan-neck and deceptively sloping shoulders pinched with weariness under the wreck of a Heath hat, her usually immaculate tailor-mades covered with the dust of what might have been a Claxton Hall conflict or a Downing Street Demonstration, and strange fires burning in her light-lashed eyes. "Am I such a sweep? I feel one! But so’d you be grubby if you’d done the crossing from Folkestone to Ostend and back again to London without a dab of a puff. I’d an appointment here at three-thirty." Beyond anything in life Rhona plumed herself on her punctuality. "Mrs. Saxham—_the_ Mrs. Saxham, had promised to meet me in the Chintz Room." The Chintz Room is the first-floor drawing-room securable for private teas and interviews. "We got in too ravenous even to wash for lunch. You should have seen us eat. My hat! the scrum on those boats. And the dirt. Nothing but a Turkish bath will get me clean again. As for Brenda, she’s a nigger." Thus Rhona in her loud young accents. "Nobody’d believe she’d been born a white girl!" "Is she here?"