She countered me with the incredulous scorn bred of our familiarity. "You haven't been made a General?" "I haven't," I replied serenely. "But Colonel Lackaday has." She looked wide-eyed up into Lackaday's face. "Is that true?" I swear he blushed through his red sun-glaze. "Since Captain Hylton says so----" She held out her hand with perfect manners and said: "I'm so glad. My congratulations." Then, before the bewildered Lackaday could reply, she tossed his hand to the winds. "There'll be champagne for dinner and I'm coming down," she cried and fled like a doe to the house. At the threshold of the drawing-room she turned. "Does Cousin Auriol know?" "Nobody knows," I said. She shouted: "Good egg!" and disappeared. I turned to the frowning and embarrassed Lackaday. "Your modesty doesn't appreciate the pleasure that news will give all those dear people. They've shown you in the most single-hearted way that they're your friends, haven't they?" "They have," he admitted. "But it's very extraordinary. I don't belong to their world. I feel a sort of impostor." "With this--and all these?" I flourished the letter which I still held, and with it touched the rainbow on his tunic. His features relaxed into his childish ear-to-ear grin. "It's all so incomprehensible--here--in this old place--among these English aristocrats--the social position I step into. I don't know whether you can quite follow me." "As a distinguished soldier," said I, "apart from your charming personal qualities, you command that position." He screwed up his mobile face. "I can't understand it. It's like a nightmare and a fairy-tale jumbled up together. On the outbreak of war I came to England and joined up. In a few months I had a commission. I don't know..." he spread out his ungainly arm--"I fell into the métier--the business of soldiering. It came easy to me. Except that it absorbed me body and soul, I can't see that I had any particular merit. Whatever I have done, it would have been impossible, in the circumstances, not to do. Out there I'm too busy to think of anything but my day's work. As for these things"--he touched his ribbons--"I put them up because I'm ordered to. A matter of discipline. But away from the Army I feel as though I were made up for a part which I'm expected to play without any notion of the words. I feel just as I would have done five years ago if I had been dressed like this and planted here. To go about now disguised as a General only adds to the feeling." "If you'll pardon me for saying so," said I, "I think you're super-sensitive. You imagine yourself to be the same man that you were five years ago. You're not. You're a different human being altogether. Men with characters like yours must suffer a sea-change in this universal tempest." "I hope not," said he, "for what will become of me when it's all over? Everything must come to an end some day--even the war."