But when he smiled it was as if someone had flashed a torch on lowering cliffs, and lit them into extraordinary and elf-like beauty. Kitty knew already that he could be witty; she suddenly perceived now that he could be sweet--a bad word, but there seemed no other. He ate another rock bun, and another. But they were small. His eyes fell on Kitty, eating a jam sandwich. But his thoughts were elsewhere. "Yes, it was me that had to tie it up for him," Ivy Delmer was saying to another typist. "Luckily I've done First Aid. But I felt like fainting.... The _blood_.... I don't _like_ him, you know; his manners are so funny and his dictating is so difficult; but I must say I did admire his pluck.... He never thanked me or anything--he wouldn't, of course. Not that I minded a scrap about that...." 5 When Kitty got home to her flat that evening, she found the Boomerang on the floor. (It was on the floor owing to the lack of a letter-box.) The Boomerang was a letter from herself, addressed to Neil Desmond, Esq., and she wrote it and despatched it every few months or so, whenever, in fact, she had, at the moment, nothing better to do. On such days as Bank Holidays, when she spent them at the office but official work did not press, Kitty tidied the drawers of her table and wrote to break off her engagement. The drawers got tidied all right, but it is doubtful whether the engagement could ever be considered to have got broken off, owing to the letter breaking it being a boomerang. It was a boomerang because Neil Desmond, Esq. was a person of no fixed address. He wrote long and thrilling letters to Kitty (which, if her correspondence had been raided by the police, would probably have subjected her to arrest--he had himself for long been liable to almost every species of arrest, so could hardly be further incriminated), but when she wrote to the address he gave he was no longer ever there, and so her letters returned to her like homing pigeons. So the position was that Neil was engaged to Kitty, and Kitty had so far failed to disengage herself from Neil. Neil was that friend who has been already referred to as one whose revolutions always went under. Kitty had met him first in Greece, in April, 1914. She had since decided that he was probably at his best in Greece. In July he had been arming to fight Carson's rebels when the outbreak of the European War disappointed him. The parts played by him in the European War were many and various, and, from the British point of view, mostly regrettable. He followed Sir Roger Casement through many adventures, and only just escaped sharing in the last of all. He partook in the Sinn Fein rising of Easter, 1916 (muffed, as usual, Kitty had commented), and had then disappeared, and had mysteriously emerged again in Petrograd a year later, to help with the Russian revolution. Wherever, in fact, a revolution was, Neil Desmond was sure to be. He had had, as may be imagined, a busy and satisfactory summer and autumn