Part 27 (1/2)

This man, to his eternal honour, made no attempt to check them or to enquire into them. He sat there, supporting her, clasping her with the arm of a brother--this man whom she had not before regarded as any particular friend of hers. She wept, taking his handkerchief, large and scented with cigarettes, that he presently stuffed into her hands. She knew that she must be making him feel miserably uncomfortable and upset; she cried on, unashamed in the silence of the wood, telling herself that it would be for the one and only time that she would give herself this relief. Presently she sobbed out, ”I loved him----”

Captain Ross's ”Is that so?” was entirely unstartled and matter-of-fact.

Actually he had been too pole-axed with amazement to do anything but the natural thing; but a finer judge of women might have been less of a comfort to her. He sat holding her stolidly until she gave the long-drawn breath and the apology that mark the ebbing of the storm.

”Thank you so much,” she was able to say presently, almost as lightly as if he had put a coffee-cup down for it. ”You'll forget it, I know. I must just tell you that it was in my own hands. I refused him. I shall be glad, presently. But----”

She paused, and the man muttered awkwardly something about wis.h.i.+ng there were anything he could do----

She spoke softly but gravely now. ”Captain Ross! Be very gentle, won't you, with that little, young girl?”

Captain Ross did not ask what young girl she meant.

PART II

CHAPTER I

THE CHARM NEGLECTED

”Few people realize that Love is a hybernating animal.”

Extract from Private Letter.

Olwen Howel-jones sat at her War work in room 0369 on the sixth floor of some Government offices called----

We will call them The Honeycomb.

The entrance to this hive of activity was near Charing Cross, and its courtyard was one continual procession of cars, cyclists, motor-cyclists, dispatch cycles with little side-car mail vans, also of men in every conceivable uniform; most of them (as befitted a swarm of such bees!) were decorated with wings.... Goodness knows how many telephone extensions The Honeycomb possessed! Lifts carried you up to floor after floor. Each floor was packed with cells that had been bedrooms and private sitting-rooms, each cell with workers making Victory-honey (and perhaps with odd drones watching them do it). The whole place with its come-and-go of clerks, messengers, telephone girls, civilians, typists, switchboard girls, and their khakied male superiors, was in a never-ending buzz.

The small cell marked 0369 had big windows that looked up and down the Strand: it held three workers.

Olwen's roll-top desk stood back to back with another; the two backs screening off her colleague of the other desk. This other desk had an unusual feature. From behind it there came a stream of comments in different voices, so that it seemed as if several unseen people were sitting there. These voices were:

FIRST VOICE--A natural girlish treble that slightly rolled its R's; being the voice of one Mrs. Newton, in charge of cell 0369, who possessed the gift of mimicry.

SECOND VOICE--A masculine drawl that died away of sheer superiority in the roof of the mouth, after the fas.h.i.+on of one Major Leefe of that Department.

THIRD VOICE--Rollicking and boyish, intersected by loud ”Ha's”

and ”Bai Jove's” in the manner of Lieutenant Harold Ellerton, also of The Honeycomb.

Mingling with the click of the typewriter, at which the third girl sat in a further corner, came the sound of one or other of these voices.

Thus:

FIRST VOICE--”Miss Howel-Jones, what is the French for 'land'?

Aeroplanes, I mean?”

A murmured ”_atterrir_” came from Olwen, immersed in her work, which meant dividing the morning's correspondence into four batches: A, B, C, and D.