love and my manhood under her heel—and I wanted to hit back."

"And I afforded you the opportunity," I said very quietly.

He looked out over the downs, his eyes were worried and troubled and his face was white.

"I wouldn't hurt you for the world, Pam; I have been thinking over this make-believe engagement of ours, wondering if it could possibly hurt you in any single way. The only thing I can see is that it might keep off another man who might want to marry you—and there isn't one about. It simply amounts to this: I give you a good time, and you wear a ring I gave you. I wouldn't hurt you, Pam. Sometimes I could almost fancy you're not like other women—you're not a beastly little actress. I suppose I seem an awful cad sometimes. We can't cry off just now, kid; the Service makes prisoners of us all. I can't leave here, whatever happens, until I go to France with my battery in five weeks' time; and if we pretended things were broken off now our position would be intolerable. We've got to carry on. I'll make the next five weeks as pleasant as ever I can for you."

Mother came out as we reached our gate, and Cheneston said good-bye.

She looked at me curiously as we went inside.

"You funny cold little thing," she said, "never a kiss."

One of the things that makes me feel frightfully sick is the amount mother and father are spending on clothes for me.

It's rather like an Arabian Nights dream to have a wardrobe full of perfectly adorable frocks, but I feel it's so unfair to let them spend all this money to get me settled when being settled is as remote as it ever has been.

I try to accept the light and airy "take what the good gods give" philosophy, but I am too aware that it isn't the good gods, it's mother and father who give, on a Major's pay, fully believing their reward will be made concrete in "The Voice that breathed o'er Eden," and the disposing of a singularly plain and unexciting daughter to a handsome young man with pots of money.

I would so like to be angry with someone for being plain, but I did it absolutely on my own, because mother is quite a beautiful person and father is frightfully aristocratic and romanish—they are both rather splendidly beaky, but mine is a pure and unadulterated snub.

I suppose I have a petty, shallow nature, but I pine to be romantic and wonderful like Grace Gilpin, and simply draw people to me; no one but deaf old ladies who think I look kind and good ever ask to be introduced to me; and only chivalrous men who think I look tired and anæmic and work for my living ever offer me seats in buses or tubes.

Grace Gilpin takes her surroundings and uses them as a background—she is always to the fore. I sink into the background and become part of them.

Yesterday we took out lunch on the links, caviare sandwiches and stuff, and Grace sat down by a flaming gorse-bush in a grey frock and a grey jersey. She just used that glorious bit of flame as an "effect." I sat on the other side, and they all nearly forgot me and went off without me.

"I didn't see you," Walter Markham said.

It's true; there are heaps of people in this life you don't see because of the more ornamental people.

I would have given almost anything to have been born showy, so that people would look at me. I want Cheneston to look at me as he, and other men, look at Grace, as if she were a splendid vision vouchsafed to them for five minutes.

I do love that man, and love isn't one bit what I thought it was. I always imagined it was a mixture of bubble and scorch, but it isn't—it's so sweet to love. I could be good! It makes me feel good right to my finger-nails, and full of that after-church-on-a-summer-Sunday evening-in-peace-time feeling; that's why I think that my love for the man isn't anything to be ashamed of or humiliated about. He doesn't love me, I know; but I have a conviction you can't grow unless you love, and I feel so much more use in the world since I've started growing.

Loving Cheneston has made life perfectly wonderful for me. He doesn't know it and he never will, but he's shown me all the dear beauty of the world—and it is beautiful.

Walter Markham is awfully nice to me; sometimes he leaves Grace Gilpin to Cheneston and walks with me, and he is teaching me tennis in the mornings before breakfast. He is much older than Cheneston, Grace, or I—he must be forty—and he is very rich.

I wonder if Grace will marry him—or if she will marry Cheneston. Sometimes I think he will forget he is angry with her, and he will tell her how the mistaken idea of our "engagement" arose, and why he let it prosper—there is a frightful lot of the open-hearted, impetuous schoolboy about Cheneston.

I don't think he is happy.

If he made a clean breast of it to Grace we should have to break off our supposed "engagement," and mother would have to take me away—father couldn't leave.

I can imagine what my life would be!

I think they would pack me off as governess or companion to someone.

I know if I don't marry by a certain age that will be my fate. Mother was perfectly honest about it—before Cheneston came along; now I am her dear little daughter, she looks at me in pleased bewilderment sometimes, as if wondering how so homely a hunter could have achieved such a sensational capture.

They have never tried to equip me in any way. I was never given the opportunity to acquire any accomplishments. Old Giovanni taught me to sing—for love of his art.

Mother laughed when she heard he was teaching me—she laughed because he was a funny, broken-down old Italian singer, and the boys used to pay him five shillings a night out of mess funds to come up and play to them in the evening when the regiment was stationed at Gilesworth and there was nothing on earth to do.

Giovanni was a great teacher, and to him I owe to-night.

I don't think I'll ever forget to-night.

It was lovely!

I wish I could tell Giovanni all about it, he would so understand. Once he was furious; he told mother I had an extraordinary voice, and mother laughed and said she did not doubt it.

Cheneston used the words at the Gilpins' to-night.

"You have an extraordinary voice, Pam!" he said, "amazing."

Grace sings. Cheterton and Pouiluex of the Paris Conservatoire trained her voice.

To-night we all went over to the Gilpins' for coffee—mother, father, Cheneston, and I—and when we arrived Grace was singing "Jeunesse," that funny little song about "taking your picture out of its frame, and out of my heart I have taken your name"—it wasn't very effective. It needs a lot of sorrow in the voice, and Grace's voice is full of light laughter; it was rather like a tom-tit trying to dance a minuet.

I was feeling stirred up and rebellious. It seemed so hard that I had only a funny little face and homely little ways in which to express all the beautiful big, swishy feelings that were eating me up inside, and Grace was so lovely that she could express things she didn't