Little more was heard of Randall Holmes.  He corresponded with his mother through a firm of London solicitors, and his address and his doings remained a mystery.  He was alive, he professed robust health, and in reply to Mrs. Holmes’s frantically expressed hope that he was adopting no course that might discredit his father’s name, he twitted her with intellectual volte-face to the views of Philistia, but at the same time assured her that he was doing nothing which the most self-righteous bourgeois would consider discreditable.

“But it is discreditable for him to go away like this and not let his own mother know where he is,” cried the poor woman.

And of course I agreed with her.  I find it best always to agree with mothers; also with wives.

After her own lapse from what Mrs. Boyce would have called “Spartianism,” Betty kept up her brave face.  When Willie Connor’s kit came home she told me tearlessly about the heartrending consignment.  Now and then she spoke of him—­with a proud look in her eyes.  She was one of the women of England who had the privilege of being the wife of a hero.  In this world one must pay for everything worth having.  Her widowhood was the price.  All the tears of a lifetime could not bring him back.  All the storms of fate could not destroy the glory of those few wonderful months.  He was laughing, so she heard, when he met his death.  So would she, in honour of him, go on laughing till she met hers.

“And that silly little fool, Phyllis, is still crying her eyes out over Randall,” she said.  “Don’t I think she was wrong in sending him away?  If she had married him she might have influenced him, made him get a commission in the army.  I’ve threatened to beat her if she talks such nonsense.  Why can’t people take a line and stick to it?”

“This isn’t a world of Bettys, my dear,” said I.

“Rubbish!  The outrageous Mrs. Tufton’s doing it.”

Apparently she was.  She followed Betty about as the lamb followed Mary.  Tufton, after a week or two at Wellington Barracks, had been given sergeant’s stripes and sent off with a draft to the front.  Betty’s dramatic announcement of her widowhood seemed to have put the fear of death into the woman’s soul.  As soon as her husband landed in France she went scrupulously through the closely printed casualty lists of non-commissioned officers and men in The Daily Mail, in awful dread lest she should see her husband’s name.  Betty vainly assured her that, in the first place, she would hear from the War Office weeks before anything could appear in the papers, and that, in the second, his name would occur under the heading “Grenadier Guards,” and not under “Royal Field Artillery,” “Royal Engineers,” “Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry,” “R.A.M.C.,” or Australian and Canadian contingents.  Mrs. Tufton went through the lot from start to finish.  Once, indeed, she came across the name, in big print, and made a bee-line through the wards for Betty—­an