“We must put him up comfortably.  That’s quite simple.  The only thing that worries me is this—­supposing his wife comes around here raising Cain—?”

Marigold held me with his one glittering eye—­an eye glittering with the pride of the gunner and the pride (more chastened) of the husband.

“You can leave all that, sir, to Mrs. Marigold.  If she isn’t more than a match for any Grenadier Guardsman’s wife, then I haven’t been married to her for the last twenty years.”

Nothing more was to be said.  Marigold marched the man off, leaving me alone with Betty.

“I’m going to get in before Mrs. Marigold,” she remarked, with a smile.  “I’m off now to interview Madam Tufton and bring back her husband’s kit.”

In some ways it is a pity Betty isn’t a man.  She would make a splendid soldier.  I don’t think such a thing as fear, physical, moral, or spiritual, lurks in any recess of Betty’s nature.  Not every young woman would brave, without trepidation, a virago who had cracked a hard-bitten warrior’s head with a poker.

“Marigold and I will come with you,” I said.

She protested.  It was nonsense.  Suppose Mrs. Tufton went for Marigold and spoiled his beauty?  No.  It was too dangerous.  No place for men.  We argued.  At last I blew the police-whistle which I wear on the end of my watch-chain.  Marigold came hurrying out of the house.

“Mrs. Connor is going to take us for a run,” said I.

“Very good, sir.”

“Your blood be on your own heads,” said Betty.

We talked a while of what had happened.  Vague stories of the demoralization of wives left alone with a far greater weekly income than they had ever handled before had reached our ears.  We had read them in the newspapers.  But till now we had never come across an example.  The woman in question belonged to a bad type.  Various dregs from large cities drift into the mills around little country towns and are the despair of Mayors, curates, and other local authorities.  We genteel folk regarded them as a plague-spot in the midst of us.

I remember the scandal when the troops first came in August, 1914, to Wellingsford—­a scandal put a summary end to, after a fortnight’s grinning amazement at our country morals, by the troops themselves.  Tufton had married into an undesirable community.

“We’re wasting time,” said Betty.

So Marigold put me into the back of the car and mounted into the front seat by Betty, and we started.

Flowery End was the poetic name of the mean little row of red-brick houses inhabited exclusively by Mrs. Tufton and her colleagues at the mills.  To get to it you turn off the High Street by the Post Office, turn to the right down Avonmore Avenue, and then to the left.  There you find Flowery End, and, fifty yards further on, the main road to Godbury crosses it at right angles.  Betty, who lived on the Godbury Road, was quite familiar with Flowery