“Don’t overdo things.  There’s a limit to the power of bearing strain.  As soon as you feel you’re likely to go FUT, throw it all up and come and see me and let us lay our heads together.”

“I despise people who go FUT,” said Betty.

“I don’t,” said I.

We nodded a mutual farewell.  She opened the Committee Room door for me and walked down the corridor with a swinging step, as though she would show me how fully she had made herself mistress of circumstance.

Some evenings later she came in, as usual, unheralded, and established herself by my chair.

The scents of midsummer came in through the open windows, and there was a great full moon staring in at us from a cloudless sky.  Letters from the War Office, from brother-officers, from the Colonel, from the Brigadier General himself, had broken her down.  She gave me the letters to read.  Everyone loved him, admired him, trusted him.  “As brave as a lion,” wrote one.  “Perhaps the most brilliant company officer in my brigade,” wrote the General.  And his death—­the tragic common story.  A trench; a high-explosive shell; the fate of young Etherington; and no possible little wooden cross to mark his grave.

And Betty, on the floor by my side, gave way.

The proud will bent.  She surrendered herself to a paroxysm of sorrow.

She was not in a fit state to return to the hospital, where, I learned, she shared a bedroom with Phyllis Gedge.  I shrank from sending her home to the tactless comforting of her aunts.  They were excellent, God-fearing ladies, but they had never understood Betty.  All her life they had worried her with genteel admonitions.  They had regarded her marriage with disfavour, as an act of foolhardiness—­I even think they looked on her attitude as unmaidenly; and now in her frozen widowhood they fretted her past endurance.  On the night when the news came they sent for the vicar of their parish—­not my good friend who christened Hosea—­a very worthy, very serious, very evangelistically religious fellow, to administer spiritual consolation.  If Betty had sat devoutly under him on Sundays, there might have been some reason in the summons.  But Betty, holding her own religious views, had only once been inside the church—­on the occasion of her wedding—­and had but the most formal acquaintance with the good man....  No, I could not send Betty home, unexpectedly, to have her wounds mauled about by unskilful fingers.  Nothing remained but to telephone to the hospital and put her in Mrs. Marigold’s charge for the night.  So broken was my dear Betty, that she allowed herself to be carried off without a word. ...  Once before, years ago, she had behaved with the same piteous docility; and that was when, a short-frocked hoiden, she had fallen from an apple tree and badly hurt herself, and Marigold had carried her into the house and Mrs. Marigold had put her to bed. ...

In the morning I found her calm and sedate at the breakfast table.