Violet Riversley looked at the pretty friendly scene with her beautiful gold brown eyes, and the misery in them was like a devouring fire. She was one of the tragedies of the war. She could neither endure nor forget. With her mother’s good looks, pleasure-loving temperament, and quick temper, she had much of her father’s ability. Spoilt from her cradle, she had gone her own way and taken greedily of the good things of this world with both hands, until Dick Carey’s death had smitten her life into ruins. She was twenty-four, and she had never before known pain, sorrow or trouble. Always she had had everything she wanted. Other people’s griefs passed her by. She simply had no understanding of them. She was not generous, because she never realized what it was to go without. And yet everyone liked and many loved her. She was so gay and glad and beautiful a thing. When she said good-bye to Dick Carey, she was simply unable to grasp that he could be taken from her, and when the news of his death came she had passionately and vehemently fought against the agony and pain and desolation that came with it. She had genuinely and really loved him, and nothing, absolutely nothing, seemed left. There was no pleasure any more in anything. That was what she could not understand, could not cope with. Her conventional faith fell from her, and she let it go without a struggle. But her happiness she refused to let go. She clung to it, or to the mirage of it, savagely, desperately. Dick was dead, yes, and she wanted him with a devouring hunger. But all the other things were left. Things she had loved. Things that had made her happy. She would not let them go. After a brief space, in which the devils of bitterness and resentment and impotent wrath rent her in pieces, she took up her old life again, with apparently added zest. Her friends said “Violet was very plucky,” and no one was astonished when after a year she accepted and married Fred Riversley. It was altogether a more suitable match than one with poor Dick Carey. Riversley was of more suitable age, rich, devoted, and a good fellow, and as North said to her best friends, “Violet was never suited for the wife of a poor man.” Only Roger North watched her anxiously at times. She had been her mother’s child before, but since Dick’s death she had turned more and more to her father. Something of his dogged patient strength of mind seemed to become clear to her. Something of the courage with which he faced life. She remembered a saying of his one day when her mother had been flagrantly unjust and bitter to him on some matter of expenditure, so that even she had felt ashamed. Whatever her father’s faults, his generosity was past question. She had gone into the study and striven to make amends, and he had looked at her with those tired humorous eyes of his and said: “My dear, nothing can hurt you if you don’t let it.”