"I demand that half-hour also." "I am afraid that I could not allow anything to interfere with one brief call which I must pay." "In Downing Street ?" "Precisely!" "You go to visit your friend at the Foreign Office ?" "Immediately I have called at my rooms." She looked away from him out of the window.

Beneath her veil her eyes were a little misty.

She saw nothing of the trimly partitioned fields, the rolling pastoral country.

Before her vision tragedies seemed to pass,--the blood-stained paraphernalia of the battlefield, the empty, stricken homes, the sobbing women in black, striving to comfort their children whilst their own hearts were breaking.

When she turned away from the window, her face was hardened.