A shadow fell across the strip of sunlight coming in from the window. A gay voice broke the sequence of her complaint. “Oh, _here_ you are!” it said. Both of them looked up hastily, almost guiltily. Violet Riversley stood on the gravel pathway outside. A gay and gallant figure, slim and straight in her favourite white. The sun shone on the smooth coiled satin of her dark hair, on the whiteness of her wonderful skin. Her golden eyes danced as she crossed the step of the French window. “I felt in my bones you would be having a party this afternoon,” she said. “So I put Fred and myself into the car, and here we are!” She looked from one to the other and they looked at her, momentarily bereft of speech. For here was the old Violet, gay with over-brimming life and mirth, the beautiful irresistible hoyden of the days before the war, before Dick Carey had died, suddenly back again as it were. And now, and now only, did either of them realize to the full the difference between her and the Violet they had just been discussing. “What is the matter with you both?” she cried. “You look as if you were plotting dark and desperate deeds! And Mansfield is nearly in tears under the beech-tree because he can’t arrange the chairs to his satisfaction without you.” She looked at her mother. “He says”—she looked at her father and bubbled with mirth—“the trenches have spoilt his sense of the artistic! And he says he is a champion at croquet now himself. He won all the competitions at V.A.D. hospital. Do you think we ought to ask him to play this afternoon?” “My dear Violet——” began Mrs. North, smitten by the horror of the suggestion. “Look here, Vi,” said North. On a sudden impulse he put his long legs down from his deck-chair, sat erect, and swept her gay badinage aside. “We were talking about you.” “Me!” She bent her straight black brows at him, a shadow swept over her brilliance, she shivered a little. “I suppose I have been pretty poisonous to you lately.” She meditated for a moment. Then her old irresistible mischievous smile shone out. “But it’s nothing to what I’ve been to poor Fred.” She ran her lithe fingers through North’s grizzled hair and became serious again. “Dad and Mums, darlings, I don’t know what’s been the matter with me—but I’ve been in hell. I woke up this morning and felt like Shuna-something’s daughter when the devil was driven out of her. And I got up and danced round the room in my nighty, because the old world was beautiful again and I didn’t hate everything and everybody. And don’t talk to me about what I’ve been like, darlings—I don’t want to think of it. All I know is, it’s gone, and if it ever comes back——” She stopped and repeated slowly: “If it ever comes back——” Her slim erect figure shivered, as a rod of steel shivers driven by electric force.