“But you do love him,” cried Gedge.  “Either you’re just a wanton little hussy or you must care for the fellow.”

“I don’t.  I hate him.  And I don’t want to have anything more to do with him.”  The tears came.  “He’s a pro-German and I won’t have anything to do with pro-Germans.”

She fled precipitately from the office into the street and made a blind course to the hospital; feeling, in dumb misery, that she had committed the unforgivable sin of casting off her father and, at the same time, that she had made stalwart proclamation of her faith.  If ever a good, loyal little heart was torn into piteous shreds, that little heart was Phyllis’s.

In the bare X-ray room of the hospital, which happened to be vacant, Betty sat on the one straight-backed wooden chair, while a weeping damsel on the uncarpeted floor sobbed in her lap and confessed her sins and sought absolution.

Of course Gedge was a fool.  If I, or any wise, diplomatic, tactful person like myself, had found it necessary to tackle a young woman on the subject of a matrimonial alliance, we should have gone about the business in quite a different way.  But what could you expect from an anarchical Turk like Gedge?

Phyllis, not knowing whether she were outcast and disinherited or not, found, of course, a champion in Betty, who, in her spacious manner, guaranteed her freedom from pecuniary worries for the rest of her life.  But Phyllis was none the less profoundly unhappy, and it took a whole convoy of wounded to restore her to cheerfulness.  You can’t attend to a poor brave devil grinning with pain, while a surgeon pokes a six-inch probe down a sinus in search of bits of bone or shrapnel, and be acutely conscious of your own two-penny-half-penny little miseries.  Many a heartache, in this wise, has been cured in the Houses of Pain.

Now, nothing much would have happened, I suppose, if Phyllis, driven from the hospital by superior decree that she should take fresh air and exercise, had not been walking some days afterwards across the common by the canal.  Bordering the latter, Wellingsford has an avenue of secular chestnuts of which it is inordinately proud.  Dispersed here and there are wooden benches sanctified by generations of lovers.  Carven thereon are the presentments, often interlaced, of hearts that have long since ceased to beat; lonely hearts transfixed by arrows, which in all probability survived the wound and inspired the owner to the parentage of a dozen children; initials once, individually, the record of many a romance, but now, collectively, merely an alphabet run mad.