“Aw! Wot’s the hodds? Dahn at Copenhagen, ’e flew abaht same as ’e’s doin’ now.” Bill paused. “And what happened?” “You’ll ’ave to arsk Sir John abaht that, me son,” finished the other dryly. “We was drillin’ rear-guard actions, wasn’t we, Bill?” “Aye. We was drilled, right, left, an’ a bit in the middle.” Bill rose and spat down the wind. “Tyke it from me,” he finished, with a glance aloft through the mist, “there’ll be somethin’ happen between ’ere an’ Wipers afore the week is hout----” “Aye--the ’earse, Bill.” “Wot ’earse?” asked the newcomer again. “The larst time ’e kyme--down Wipers-way. There was a lull in the firin’ an’ ’tween the lines o’ trenches where the dead Dutchies was, comes a ’earse--a real ’earse with black ’orses, plumes an’ all. We thought ’twas some general they’d come to fetch and hup we stands hout o’ the trenches, comp’ny after comp’ny, caps off, all respec’ful-like. This ’ere ’earse comes along slow an’ mournful, black curt’ins an’ all flappin’ in the wind an’ six of the blighters a-marchin’ heads down behind it. They wheels up abreast of our comp’ny near a mound o’ earth and stops, an’ while we was lookin’--the front side of that there b----y vee-Hicle drops out an’ a machine-gun begins slippin’ it into us pretty as you please. ’Earse--that’s wot it was--a ’earse! an’ it jolly well made a funeral out o’ B Company.” “Gawd!” said the newcomer. “And Yaller-belly----?” “I ayn’t sayin’ nothin’ abaht _’im_. You wait, that’s all.” The sounds of firing rose and fell again. The fog thickened and the last crashes of the high-angle guns echoed out to sea, but the rush of the flying planes continued. Three machines there were by the sound of them, but one grew ever more distinct until the sounds of the three were merged into one. Closer it came, until like the blast of a storm down a mountainside, a huge shadow fell across the dunes and was gone amid a scattering of futile shots into the fog which might as well have been aimed at the moon. Bill, the prescient, straightened and peered through the fog toward the flying plane. “A ’earse,” he muttered. “That’s wot it was--a ’earse.” CHAPTER I SHELTERED PEOPLE Lady Betty Heathcote had a reputation in which she took pride for giving successful dinners in a neighborhood where successful dinners were a rule rather than an exception. Her prescription was simple and consisted solely in compounding her social elements by strenuous mixing. She had a faculty for discovering cubs with incipient manes and saw them safely grown without mishap. At her house in Park Lane, politics, art, literature, and science rubbed elbows. Here pictures had been born, plays had had their real _premières_, novels had been devised, and poems without number, not a few of which were indited to My Lady Betty’s eyebrow, here first saw the light of day.