'I could hold my own,' she thought bitterly, 'but he never gives me the chance! I suppose he despises girls.' As the hall clock struck half-past five, however, Elizabeth rose from her seat, gathering up the papers she had brought in from the office, and disappeared.
Arthur Chicksands looked at his watch.

Beryl exclaimed: 'Oh, no, Arthur, not yet! Let's wait for Desmond!' Pamela said perfunctorily--'No, please don't go! He'll be here directly.' But as they gathered round the fire, expecting the young gunner, she hardly opened her lips again.

Arthur Chicksands was quite conscious that he had wounded her.

She appeared to him, as she sat there in the firelight, in all the first fairness and freshness of her youth, as an embodied temptation.

Again he said to himself that other men might love and marry on the threshold of battle; he could not bring himself to think it justifiable--whether for the woman or the man.
In a few weeks' time he would be back in France and in the very thick, perhaps, of the final struggle--of its preparatory stages, at any rate.