Marcelle tried to console. After all, he was very young, not yet one-and-twenty. It would be years before he could marry. He flared up at the suggestion. That was what Dorothy, a month older than he, had the cool cheek to say. What did age matter? He was as old as Hell. He had all his life behind him. In the trenches alone he had spent twenty years. As for marrying, he was perfectly able to support a wife, not being, through God’s grace, one of those unhappy devils of new army officers who were wondering what the deuce they would do to earn their living when the war was over. . . . She had treated him damnably. A decent girl would have been kind and sorry and let him down easily. But she! “She treated me as though I were a lout of a schoolboy, and she a woman of thirty. Only the woman of thirty would at least have had manners. Well, she’s going to marry Leopold. I wish her joy of him. She’ll have a hell of a time.” Decidedly it had not been a lucky day for the House of Baltazar. Marcelle was oppressed by a sense of guilt for her share in the family disaster, and felt tragically unable to administer comfort. Yesterday she would have poured healing sympathy over the hurts of the evilly entreated youth, and her wrath would have flamed out upon the heartless minx who had spurned the love of a gallant gentleman. But to-day how could she? Had not some horrible freak of chance put her in the same dock as Dorothy, worthless criminals both? “I suppose you were very angry with her,” she said timidly. He flung out a hand. Oh, that inherited gesture! Angry? Who wouldn’t have been angry? He would never see her, speak to her, think of her again. He had told her so. As for receiving favours from General Mackworth, she was not to dare insult him by dreaming of it. Marcelle pictured a very pretty rumpus. Godfrey was not John Baltazar’s son for nothing. And she, in the modern idiom, had turned down John Baltazar; with less ostensible reason, for, after all, she had not engaged herself to another man. Was he, too, like his son, hurling anathema at the head of a faithless woman? Outwardly he had been very courteous, astonishingly gentle; but he was older and had learned self-restraint. How was he taking it now? She was very glad when they reached Churton Towers and when she stripped from herself the unfamiliar trappings of Marcelle Baring and put on the comforting impersonal uniform of the nurse. * * * * *