She was sufficiently versed in affairs to know that a major-general does not speak of a third-grade staff officer, and at the very tail of the grade at that, in eulogistic terms, even to Lady Edna Donnithorpe, without good reason. She hugged the word “brilliant” to her heart. And while Godfrey talked that May afternoon, she felt that she was justified in all that she had done, was doing, and was going to do. Yet, though what she had done gave her perfect satisfaction, and what she was doing was blatantly obvious, what she was going to do lay dimly hidden behind a rosy veil. For the moment this handsome, clean run boy to whom she had given her heart, much to her own amazement, was contented with platonic adoration in a punt. How long, she wondered, would his contentment last? How long, indeed, would her own? Well, well, _Vogue la galère_. Pole the spring-tide punt. Let her drain to its full the unprecedented glory of the day. The cares of her crowded, youth-consuming life fell from her, and she became young again, younger than she had been before her loveless marriage. As she responded laughing to his eager, boyish foolishness, she felt that she had never known till then what it was to be young. She felt an infinite craving for all she had missed. . . . And Godfrey, standing there in careless grace, punt-pole in hand, alert, confident, radiant in promise, was the incarnation of it all: of all the youth and laughter and love that she had passed by, scornfully unheeding. She feasted her hungry eyes on him. Not only was he good to look at, in his physical perfection. He was good to think upon. He had faced death a thousand times, no doubt as debonairly as he faced the current of the mild river. He, that boy whom a whisper could compel to her bidding, had led men through mazes of unimagined blood and slaughter. If he had one worm gnawing at his heart, it was the desire to get back again to this defiant comradeship with death. She had looked up the record of the achievement that had won for him the Military Cross. What a man he was! And as she watched him, there floated across her vision the figure of a thin, dry, self-seeking politician, and she shivered in the sunshine. And, as there chanced to be a pause in the boyish talk, she let her thoughts wander on. No one had ever called her thin, dry husband a brilliant man, not even the most sycophantic place hunter who had intrigued for a seat at her table. But in such terms had the first Authority to whom she had spoken characterized Godfrey. Not only was he the ordinary heroic young officer; he was a brilliant man, who would make his mark as part of the brain that controlled the destinies of the British Army. And all the sex in her humbled itself deliciously in the knowledge that this paragon of all Bayards, or this Bayard of all paragons, loved her with all his youth and manhood.