and complete and final, had been thrust aside like a mask.  Cissie no longer knew her sister’s eyes.  Letty’s hand had become thin and unfamiliar and a little wrinkled; she was sharp-featured and thin-lipped; her acts, which had once been predictable, were incomprehensible, and Cissie was thrown back upon speculations.  In their schooldays Letty had had a streak of intense sensibility; she had been easily moved to tears.  But never once had she wept or given any sign of weeping since Teddy’s name had appeared in the casualty list....  What was the strength of this tragic tension?  How far would it carry her?  Was Letty really capable of becoming a Charlotte Corday?  Of carrying out a scheme of far-seeing vengeance, of making her way through long months and years nearer and nearer to revenge?

Were such revenges possible?

Would people presently begin to murder the makers of the Great War?  What a strange thing it would be in history if so there came a punishment and end to the folly of kings!

Only a little while ago Cissie’s imagination might have been captured by so romantic a dream.  She was still but a year or so out of the stage of melodrama.  But she was out of it.  She was growing up now to a subtler wisdom.  People, she was beginning to realise, do not do these simple things.  They make vows of devotion and they are not real vows of devotion; they love—­quite honestly—­and qualify.  There are no great revenges but only little mean ones; no life-long vindications except the unrelenting vengeance of the law.  There is no real concentration of people’s lives anywhere such as romance demands.  There is change, there is forgetfulness.  Everywhere there is dispersal.  Even to the tragic story of Teddy would come the modifications of time.  Even to the wickedness of the German princes would presently be added some conflicting aspects.  Could Letty keep things for years in her mind, hard and terrible, as they were now?  Surely they would soften; other things would overlay them....

There came a rush of memories of Letty in a dozen schoolgirl adventures, times when she had ventured, and times when she had failed; Letty frightened, Letty vexed, Letty launching out to great enterprises, going high and hard and well for a time, and then failing.  She had seen Letty snivelling and dirty; Letty shamed and humiliated.  She knew her Letty to the soul.  Poor Letty!  Poor dear Letty!  With a sudden clearness of vision Cissie realised what was happening in her sister’s mind.  All this tense scheming of revenges was the imaginative play with which Letty warded off the black alternative to her hope; it was not strength, it was weakness.  It was a form of giving way.  She could not face starkly the simple fact of Teddy’s death.  That was too much for her.  So she was building up this dream of a mission of judgment against the day when she could resist the facts no longer.  She was already persuaded, only she would not be persuaded until her dream was ready.  If this state of suspense went on she might establish her dream so firmly that it would at last take complete possession of her mind.  And by that time also she would have squared her existence at Matching’s Easy with the elaboration of her reverie.