“Don’t trouble about me, dear,” she said meekly. “I do not mind discomfort; but promise me you will not go again into the marrow bed yourself?” “Oh, why?” asked Elise remorsefully choosing the next most uncomfortable chair she could find, because it looked so awful to lounge in the face of a full-fledged invalid determined on discomfort. “There are adders there,” said Hermione impressively. “It would not be safe. I have heard that the sting of an adder can easily prove fatal.” “Oh, but Hermione!” cried Elise. “You oughtn’t to have gone there yourself. But are you sure there are adders? I thought—” Hermione interrupted her smilingly. “Dear,” she said, “I don’t grudge a personal risk to serve our splendid men. Think what they do for us!” Elise bit her lips and looked into the laurel bush. John had investigated the marrow bed himself that morning and he had found there were no adders there, but one panic-stricken slow worm, which gave up its taste for marrows from that hour. But Elise was a generous soul. She saw that for dramatic reasons Hermione wanted adders and she forbore to replace them by a slow worm. “Demster can easily take the marrow down to the hospital to-night,” she said gently. “Forgive me,” said Hermione bitterly, “if I have been officious. You sometimes make me feel as if I were a little in the way.” Elise winced as if she had been struck. “Oh, Hermione!” was all she said. “Do not be distressed, dear,” said Hermione kindly. “Young married people like to feel their new authority, I know; it is a punishment I deserve. “I stepped out of my path to come here. I must now step back again.” Hermione looked at the house and let her eyes wander across the garden to the hills. She would have liked a country house to be larger than Mambles. “It is all too simple and happy and peaceful for me here,” she added. “You do not feel so deeply about it I know. Why should you? John is safe—and for you the cataclysm of nations is but a humming in the air. I cannot take it so calmly. I feel as if a knife were pressing against me every hour.” Elise looked conscience-stricken: she could not truthfully say she felt the war every hour. She felt it regularly after breakfast when the newspaper came, and from time to time during the day when there was something she could do about it; but it did not haunt her like the possibility of John’s wet feet. Hermione looked haunted. She was suffering from severe indigestion caused by carrying a heavy marrow after an ordinary meal. “I came to you,” Hermione said gravely, “because you called me.” Elise did not deny this fact, but she wore a guilty air. She had called Hermione, but she remembered that she had felt she ought to. “I cannot say that I am sorry that I came,” Hermione continued kindly. “I have seen your life for myself. Perhaps I have been able to remove from your path a few of the stumbling blocks of marriage.”