Cissie Boscobel, Hugh, another young man, and I had been playing tennis one September morning on Mrs. Rossiter's courts. The other young man having left for Bailey's Beach, the remaining three of us were sauntering back toward the house when a lad, whom Cissie recognized as belonging to the Burkes' establishment, came running up with a telegram. As it was for Cissie she stood still to read it, while Hugh and I strolled on. Once or twice I glanced back toward her; but she still held the brief lines up before her as if she couldn't make out their meaning. When she rejoined us, as she presently did, I noticed that her color had died out, though there was otherwise no change in her unless it was in stillness. The question was as to whether we should go to Bailey's or not. I didn't want to go and Hugh declared he wouldn't go without me. "We'll put it up to Cissie," he said, as we reached the house. "If she goes we'll all go." "I think I won't go," she answered, quietly; adding, without much change of tone, "Leatherhead's been killed in action." So there really was a war! Hugh's deep "Oh!" was in Itself like the distant rumble of guns. CHAPTER XXIV There was nothing to be done for Lady Cecilia because she took her bereavement with so little fuss. She asked for no sympathy; so far as I ever saw, she shed no tears. If on that particular spot in the neighborhood of Ypres a man had had to fall for his country, she was proud that it had been a Boscobel. She put on a black frock and ordered her maid to take the jade-green plume out of a black hat; but, except that she declined invitations, she went about as usual. As the first person we knew to be touched by the strange new calamity of war, we made a kind of heroine of her, treating her with an almost romantic reverence; but she herself never seemed aware of it. It was my first glimpse of that unflinching British heroism of which I have since seen much, and it impressed me. We began to dream together of being useful; our difficulty was that we didn't see the way. War had not yet made its definite claims on women and girls, and knitting till our muscles ached was not a sufficient outlet for our energies. Had I been in Cissie's place, I should have gone home at once; but I suspected that, in spite of all her brave words to me, she couldn't quite kill the hope that kept her lingering on. My own ambitions being distasteful to Hugh, I was obliged to repress them, doing so with the greater regret because some of the courses I suggested would have done him good. They would have utilized the physical strength with which he was blessed, and delivered him from that material well-being to which he returned with the more child-like rejoicing because of having been without it. "Hugh, dear," I said to him once, "couldn't we be married soon and go over to France or England? Then we should see whether there wasn't something we could do."