number of people killed every day during the war would produce---- Mary paused. She could not help feeling that the picture of a crowded railway junction which her ideas of the confines of eternity implied was rather absurd. Perhaps the Sicilian crystal-gazer would throw some light upon the problem this evening. She would make a great effort to put out of her mind the notion of being given the guardianship of Geoffrey's little girl. She would concentrate upon something entirely different. Pierre for instance. He too had been killed out in West Africa early in the war. It was the end he would have chosen for himself. It was a fine death for a man over sixty to be killed in action, a fine death for the boy who fifty years ago had followed the drum-taps along that white road of France. It had given her a thrill of pride to read of his career since he and she parted forty years ago. He was one of those who had helped to prepare his country for the effort she had to make to save herself from the ancient enemy. Thus had they written of him who had loved herself as well as his country forty years ago. Such a little time ago really. If she shut her eyes and thought for a moment, she could reconjure every moment of that last meeting in the drawing-room of the King's Gate house. "I wonder what you would have thought of Mac?" she asked, stroking Pierrette, who accepted the caress with a purr that showed how far she was from grasping the insult of such a question. "Mac was a dog, you know. And you don't much care for dogs, do you, my dear?" Pierrette continued to purr when Mary patted her, laughing. "Conceited little cat!" And then once more her consciousness was flooded with the apprehension of how much Pierrette meant to her. Those fragile paws soft as flower-buds with thorns for the unwary, that foolish tail not much bigger than a small cigar and of the same color, and most of all those big blue eyes indifferent as chalcedony, supercilious as a prince of Siam, and for a ball of wool sent rolling across the floor wild as a leopard that waits to spring upon a sheep, how much they represented in her lonely existence. "Pierrette, would you like to be married?" The little cat put out her claws with the air of an affronted virgin. "Wouldn't you like to have a nice husband to play with when I'm too busy to play with you? Wouldn't you like to have dear little snow-white kittens? Because your kittens would be snow-white when they were born, you know. Would you be a good mother?"