That was how they spoke of her story in the duchy's drawing-rooms; for what had Loveday been, at the most charitable count, but a young female-less humanly speaking, even a young person? And what was the spring of her mad crimes but folly, mere weak, feminine folly? Even an improper motive-one of those over-powering passions one reads about rather surreptitiously in the delightful works of that dear, naughty, departed Lord Byron-would have been somehow more ... more ... satisfactory.

Archie Lethbridge arrived in Provence thoroughly satisfied with life. He had just sold a big picture; was contemplating, with every prospect of success, giving a "one-man-show" in London of the work he would do in Provence; and the girl he loved had accepted him.

This world of initials ... in which the members of the British Expeditionary Force live and move-it is a bewildering place for the outsider. Particularly to one who, like the writer, has never been able to think in initials, any more than in dates or figures. The members of the B.E.F.-and that at least is a set of letters that conveys something to all of us-not only live amidst initials, but are themselves embodied initials.

There was silence in the room where James Ruan lay in the great bed, awaiting his marriage and his death-a silence so hushed that it was not broken, only faintly stirred, by the knocking of a fitful wind at the casement, and the occasional collapse of the glowing embers on the hearth. The firelight flickered over the whitewashed walls, which were dimmed to a pearly greyness by the stronger light without; the sick man's face was deep in shadow under the bed canopy, but one full-veined hand showed dark upon the blue and white check of the counterpane. All life, both without and within, was...