She was Yvonne Yale’s stepmother, being the second wife of the gallant colonel who had long since passed over to the majority. Mrs. Smith’s poetical way of putting it, was that he had taken his sword to heaven; but as to this, it is impossible to speak with authority. She was one of those women who have a den--half study, half boudoir, all roll-top desks and Liberty knick-knacks. She prided herself upon being a thorough business woman, with a head for figures, which meant periodical disputes between her and her broker, which induced piles of tragic correspondence between herself and her bank, and explained to a very large extent the domestic cataclysms which were of such frequent occurrence in her household. To this den she led Talham, and in the hour he spent with her he learnt as much of her private history, and much more of her financial standing, than she knew herself. He came back and rescued Tillizinni at a period where he was bored to the point of tears. Talham was very important and very mysterious. He plunged into the crowd again to find Yvonne Yale. She may have seen him coming; at any rate Tillizinni saw her look helplessly round, then face him with a scared look. “Must you really go, Captain Talham?” Talham said that he really must go; he said why he had to go, what he had to do--the hours of anxious work which lay ahead of him--and he hinted of the destinies of people which would be affected by any longer abstention from their interest. He spoke of generations yet unborn whose fates were trembling in the balance; he laid down the well-worn thesis that social obligations should be subservient to stern economic realities. If she thought she had seen the last of him after he had so unmistakably expressed his intention of retiring, she was mistaken. She did not know Talham. She felt foolish and resented the cause. People at whom speeches are made in public invariably feel foolish. Yet for all the exhaustive character of his farewell, Talham remembered on his way home several things he had intended to say, and was half inclined to go back to say them. All the way to the hotel he could think of nothing else but her wonderful eyes, her refinement, her glorious voice. She was, he then told me, the daughter of an army officer who had died suddenly a few years before, leaving the second wife and his daughter the most meagre of incomes. This was the text on which he delivered an address, dealing with the duty of the state and the grudging gratitude of the nation. So far as Tillizinni was able to trace, Yvonne’s father was a colonel of infantry, who had spent some twenty years in various parts of the globe, missing active service the whole of his life, and finishing up with the command of a militia depôt. Under these circumstances, Talham’s heroics about the “children of England’s battle-scarred defenders” were beside the point.