He drafted a telegram to the tailoring firm in the cathedral city, instructing them to supply Mr. Ho with essential raiment, and then, continuing his epistle to his pupil, gave him safe counsel and his blessing, and enclosed a cheque to meet necessary expenses. After which he lunched in the coffee-room with the appetite of the healthy man, lounged for a while with a pipe on the tranquil pavement outside the inn, and then went upstairs again, threw himself contentedly into an arm-chair with a German war publication lent him by Weatherley, and waited for Marcelle. * * * * * It was her afternoon of freedom. She had looked forward to the interview with mingled longing and apprehension. He had been the only man in her life, and it was all such a long time ago. The jealous grip of her nurse’s work had fastened upon neck and shoulders, and bent the concentration of her being within a succession of little horizons. Men she had met and known intimately, men in thousands; but they were all suffering men, men whose sole appeal to her womanhood was their helplessness, their dependence. If there crossed her path a man with strong protective arm and compelling eyes, he was whisked away sound and whole beyond her horizon’s misty rim. Now and then, but rarely, in haggard faces shone eyes of desire. Her sex revolted until experience taught her the nurse’s cynical indifference. Of course there are the romances of nursing. In her long career she had known of many; of many, too, in which the resultant marriages had been all that is adumbrated by the ends of the fairy tales. But no ghost of such a romance had ever come her way. And no romance had come her way in her restricted social life. Her holidays had been too rare and fleeting. Here and there, perhaps, a man had been attracted by her good looks and her graciousness, but before these had had time to consolidate a first effect, she was miles away, back again in uniform between the eternal rows of beds. She had worked hard and seriously, the perfect nurse, accepting, without question, the hospital ward as the sphere ordained for her by destiny. Yet to soften the rigid life, she had fostered in her heart the memory of the brief and throbbing love of long ago.