"Do tell me what are Boches?" Margot begged, kindling to interest. He answered with an intensity that dug deep lines at the angles of his nostrils, and puckered the corners of the eyes that burned under his frowning brows: "They are a nation of beings, Madame, that are no longer men!" "Germans you mean, don’t you?" she asked after a little pause of bewilderment, staring with shocked, dilated eyes at the left side of d’Asnay’s close-cropped head, now revealed to her as he removed his shako, and standing a little in advance of the two women, held back with the thrust of his broad shoulders a leaf of the drawing-room swing-doors. The four-inch square of white surgical plaster adhering to a place whence the chestnut-brown hair had been shaven, showed the outline of a deep, jagged gash. "You are hurt! You have had some awful accident! ... Was it a motor-smash? Doesn’t it pain you?" Kittums asked breathlessly. For d’Asnay had touched the surgical strapping with his gloved hand, and his smiling face had winced. "It is nothing, Madame," he assured her, "and it was not caused by an accident. It is merely a whiff of _schrapnel_—a love-gift from _Messieurs les Boches_." "You are _wounded_?" "Madame, that is what one calls it, when one suffers _à coup d’obus_. They are common, these little tokens, on our side of the North Sea. Mine has procured me a visit to London, and the pleasure of meeting you." She looked at him like a grieved child, and her lips so quivered that he softened to her behind the crinkles of his smiling bearded mask. "You speak like this because you think I am heartless and indifferent. Perhaps I have been—until to-day! We are so far from things. We see nothing. And we hear so little about the War!" "Alas, Madame!" came the answer. "Forgive the cruel prophecy, that the moment approaches when you will hear too much!" The swing-doors thudded behind them like guns at a great distance. The capacious ground-floor drawing-room, not usually crowded before luncheon, was thronged nearly to the walls. A vacant space in the centre presumably accommodated the Distinguished Visitors. But between these and Margot’s quickening curiosity intervened a solid wall of backs. The Distinguished Visitors must be Royalties, decided Margot, as she skirted the barrier, looking right and left for a peephole, recognising the vast back of Sir Thomas Brayham, the skeleton back of the Goblin, the willowy back of Trixie Wastwood, the backs of Lady Beauvayse, Cynthia Charterhouse, Tota Stannus, and Patrine Saxham with other backs pertaining to divers dear friends, consolidated into the rampart of humanity over which the towering feathers of Vanity Fair nodded and bobbed and waved.