"It seems miserable," he said; "I hate these partings. Life hurts a lot." His mother assented.

"Yes, but one has so many pleasures, little daily joys. Not to be ill or very unhappy is such a comfort. Do, my son, look out your house and consult Lucilla and Lucilla only."

The truth of his mother's words had impressed the young man. These facts of life were sad but inevitable. Of course it was better that he and Lucilla should start alone, and they would all be happier a little bit apart, but the realization saddened him.

"Well, it is not my wish," he declared.

"No, dear, God bless you, I know it. But I shall be so near and see you so often. For you are my great, my only local interest, now that Rosa is so far away."

The flat was chosen in Upper Westhampton and Laurence busied himself about the furnishing and decoration. Once more Uncle Edmund was generous, and a check for one hundred pounds expressed his kindness, though not his approval, for he did not like the connection and dismissed his nephew's affairs in family conclave with the verdict, "The boy's an ass an unpractical would-be Don Quixote."

The dun days of November had come and the evenings were misty and chilly, and the early darkness made life seem an enclosed and threatened fortress among menacing terrors. Lucilla had chosen her wedding-day in early December. She was living with some friends, for her mother had set sail for Jamaica, leaving her daughter to fend for herself. A very quiet wedding was all that could be afforded, and under the Warwick Brown cloud quietness seemed necessary. Chris

tina, from sympathy, divined something of the girl's sullen resentment against Fate. But she did not fathom the full bitterness Lucilla felt in being cheated, so she put it, of her due, a fashionable and pretty wedding. The wedding-day was to her the crown of a girl's life-time, and now she was given the mere husk of the day, robbed both of its inward and outward glory.

Christina was cognizant from the first that the engagement was a time of stress and strain to the affianced. But it had been so with her, and the state seemed normal. Laurence was dreamy, melancholy, or spasmodically gay; Lucilla was petulant.

The furnishing of the flat produced a new Laurence hardly realized by his mother. The professional has often a personality that he shows only in his profession, an authoritative, dogmatic personality conscious of power. Laurence, nebulous in religion, tolerant in all things, vague in money matters, became self-assertive in art. He took the matter of furnishing into his hands and showed a profound unconsciousness of any other point of view.

Christina, a little Victorian still, was not sure about the patternless monotone of the wall papers. She looked around her doubtfully. "I'm sure it's very artistic," she said vaguely.

"My dear mother, it's right. I really do understand houses. This is my chance and I'm taking it. It will be beautiful, the best flat in the town. Just you be a darling; don't criticise, but thread your machine and do these curtains for me."

Christina acquiesced cheerfully. After all it was not her house, and she was sure that Laurence was an incipient genius and knew best. She loved to work half the day for Laurence sitting at the machine, sewing on curtain rings, clinging always to that

"But what, Lucilla?"

"It's Laurence. The whole house is Laurence."

The girl appealed to that feminine freemasonry which in certain matters unites women in bonds of sympathy against men.

"I thought," she went on, "that the house at least was the woman's affair."

"But Laurence is an architect, so houses interest him, and he has taste, Lucilla."

"Oh! yes, but such stiff, solemn sort of taste!"

Lucilla pulled off her hat and went through the curtains that divided the room. Christina heard her moving about and hammering. The winter darkness fell and the two women lighted the gas and went on with their own occupations and their thoughts. Christina's were apprehensive and melancholy.

own

Presently Laurence came in. Christina heard him open the drawing-room

"But, Lucilla darling, you don't like framed photographs hung just under the water-color landscapes?" "Yes, I do. I like my photographs." "But, my child, that aggressivelooking man doesn't match with that old Gothic archway, does he?”

"You needn't be rude about my friends."

"I beg your pardon, I thought he was your father's friend."

"So he is and mine too. I knew him before I knew you. He is very kind; he has sent me a gold bracelet for a wedding present."

"H'm! has he? Who is he by the way?"

"Tom Armstrong is his name. He's fine sport, a great cricketer and boxer, a real man if he's not artistic and æsthetic."

She

Christina winced for her son. could feel the words cut Laurence. Was he not a real man, her sensitive, artistic son with his chivalry and his dreams?

"Oh!" Laurence's voice answered slowly. "Yes, he looks virile enough. Still, photographs among water-colors don't look well, and, Lucilla, need we have cushions with bows on them? I was going to suggest you and the mater making a set of cushion covers; a good old rose color would look well."

"I haven't time. I like that bow one, it's a present too, and it's got to stay, Laurence; yes, and those china cats, put them down please. This is my drawing-room, and I have a right to have china cats if I want them."

"Very well! They're simply bad taste. You've spoiled the room."

There was a sound of quick movement. "Have it your own way then, Laurence. I didn't know that you were such an ardent upholsterer. Yes, I have left a hole where the nail was. I don't care. I'll keep my things in my own drawer as nowhere else in the house belongs to me. Go away! Please don't try to wheedle. Be an upholsterer if you choose, and have your drawing-room as you like it. I hate the place."

Laurence's voice spoke sharply. "You are very unkind and unreasonable. I think I'd better go." The door closed and silence succeeded. Then suddenly, with a rattle of curtain rings, Lucilla stood before Christina. Her face was pale and anger smouldered in her eyes.

"I'm sorry you had to overhear our little dispute," she said.

"You knew I was here, Lucilla." "I did. Of course you take Laurence's part."

"No, I don't. I think the drawingroom is the wife's business."

Lucilla softened a little.

"The house is all Laurence," she said, "not a bit me. I'm sure it's artistic... but it's severe; it's not my style, it freezes me."

Christina put down her work with trembling fingers. She was flushed and agitated. Her heart palpitated. For once she laid aside her passivity and tried to resist the current of Fate. She wanted to thrust herself between Laurence and disaster.

"But" she began.

"But what?" asked Lucilla. She too was braced for some battle of spirit between herself and the elder

Christina stood confronting the girl. Lucilla's eyes wavered.

"Oh! of course I do. Dear old Laurie! What makes you think that, Mrs. Travis?"

"Because, Lucilla, I do love him and I know. Every sign of Laurence in a house, everything characteristic of him warms my heart. Even his old shoes are so dear to me that I hate to give them away. Laurence is the core of life to me. To you he is nothing. Oh! Lucilla, give him up. I'll tell him, I'll help you, I'll do anything to avert the disaster of a loveless marriage."

Lucilla looked at her with eyes wherein the cold critical judgment of youth considered her.

"Were you in love with Mr. Travis?" Christina winced.

"No, I was not. I loved him very

much after we were married."

"Then why shouldn't I love Laurence very much after we're married?"

"Because we are different-you and I. I am ordinary, conscientious, not very passionate, but devoted to children. I married for duty and for children, and I was happy as millions of women are who marry for just the same reasons. But you are different, Lucilla, you have a capacity for enjoyment, for passion, far beyond mine or Rosa's or Hermione's. You'll be disappointed if you don't get it, and you'll be resentful, and Laurence will have to pay. You are beautiful, yes . . . I think it, and you are exotic and fascinating, you want what the women of your kind do want, perpetual admiration, excitement, perpetual youth. Oh! though you are so different I understand you. I am sorry for you here, cramped and numbed by our little provincial life and its little dull duties and pleasures. I know what you think of Laurence too; you think him womanish and tiresome, his chivalry and sensitiveness bore you. You two have nothing in

common. Lucilla, for God's sake, give him up."

Before Lucilla answered the door opened and Laurence came in.

"Who is Lucilla to give up?" he asked quickly. His face was set in pale indignation.

"You," Lucilla answered laughing. "So you're quarreling about me?" the young man asked, looking from one to the other of the two women who were his nearest and dearest.

"We were not quarreling," Christina answered. She spoke with difficulty, for her voice trembled. "I warned Lucilla not to marry you unless she loves you. I spoke for your happiness and for hers."

Laurence looked at his mother with hard resentful eyes.

"Dear mother," he said, "do remember that I'm not a child still. If I choose to muddle my life you must let me. I know you mean well, but the old must not interfere with the young. Now, Lucilla, do you want to marry me or do you not?"

This severe angry man with his resolute speech appealed to Lucilla as the gentle tolerant Laurence never did. Fires of excitement smouldered in her eyes.

"Yes, I want to marry you," was her reply.

Laurence turned to his mother. "You hear, mother? Please be satisfied and let us have no more of these very painful scenes."

Christina sat down by the sewing

machine.

All her limbs were shaking. A moral earthquake had befallen her.

"I meant well," she stammered.

"We know that," Laurence answered from his lofty eminence of judgment, "but please never take my part against Lucilla."

Then with a certain justice that is more common in women than most of us believe, Lucilla spoke.

"Mrs. Travis took my part about the drawing-room," she said; "all that she has said is very true, and she is very wise, far wiser than you or I, Laurie. I know it."

Laurence sighed. A painful domestic scene had closed. He determined with cheerful bustle to push it out of sigh.

"Come, baby," he said, "of course I give way about your cushions and photographs and china cats. Here, I'll nail up Mr. Tom Armstrong under the Gothic Archway, and we'll restore the cats among the Cantigalli ware."

He turned to look at Lucilla. She was sitting on the Chesterfield, her hands round her knees, rocking with laughter. "Laurence, Laurence, what a fool you are," she whispered. "Why?"

"You are just like the king of France with forty thousand men, who first marched up the hill and then marched down again." But the saying was beyond Laurence, only Christina, tremulous and tearful at the sewing-machine heard and understood.

Whether these reminiscences will ever reach the eye of a discriminating public depends in the main upon whether ink can be manufactured from permanganate of potash and water.

We have long passed the region where ink in the ordinary commercial sense is procurable, the longest fountain pen has long since run dry, but permanganate of potash in neat little wooden box

es, we have, by a curious freak of fortune, almost in plenty. There are certain good ladies in East Africa, who periodically send us bags of comforts. Very few, unfortunately, reach us, but a few weeks ago a small consignment did turn up, and contained besides soap, tobacco, cigarettes, and acid drops the aforementioned boxes of permanganate, It is said to be a useful remedy for sore feet; it is also a cure for snake bites. It may possibly make ink, and it looks as though it would; a little brown perhaps, but distinctly inky in appearance; but, on the other hand, it may fade if the rains catch us before we get under cover, and if it does these reminiscences fade with it. Strictly speaking they are not reminiscences, but rather records of actualities. Looked at from another point of view they are an attempt to escape from the boredom consequent on being confined all day (in the tropics) to a dug-out and its immediate vicinity. The Germanis, as we call them here, are only a few hundred yards away as I write, machine-gun "hates" may and do start at any moment day or night, and on such occasions it is unwise to be caught far from home.

We had long ago exhausted the last fragment of everything readable; the fruits of our deal with the Intelligence Office (a school copy of Daudet's "Le petit Chose," very much abbreviated, and with maddening connecting passages in German, in return for a very ancient Royal Magazine) has been read and reread, and there is really nothing else to do except write reminiscences; at least nothing else for the chaplain. The other members of the mess can draw maps and quarrel about them. The chaplain by his profession is denied even that relaxation. And so he writes reminiscences; no one can blame him, for no one is actually obliged to read them.

There is plenty to reminisce about,

for the war out here, though only one of the side-shows, is a very peculiar war indeed and fruitful in unrehearsed effects. The army to begin with is peculiar; its General is a lawyer by profession and writes K. C. among the letters after his name. The troops are the last word in heterogeneity. A walk through one of the camps is a study in ethnology, or might be if any of us had time or energy to make it. In a short excursion I made lately in search of the Madrasi Pioneers I passed from the lines of the South African Infantry, skirted Canadian M. T. section, asked my way at the Housas (West African Native Regiment), was smothered in dust by a passing squadron of Dutch South African Horse (Z. A. R. they bear on their shoulders, it stands for Zuid Afrikaanse Ruiters), admired from a distance two enormous naval guns in charge of a section of Marines, and arrived by way of the Baluchis at my destination. Even this list far from exhausts the peculiarities of even this particular camp. There were Rhodesians across the river, also some Royal Fusiliers, and a detachment of the Loyal North Lancs. There were several detachments of the King's African Rifles (native troops whose praise is in all men's mouths), and at least half a dozen units of the Indian army; truly an Imperial force if ever there was one.

The M. T. Company whose headquarters were at Kajiado were most of them Canadians; it really looked as if the War Office had determined that the whole Empire should be represented in the East African Army. I saw a good deal of them, as many of the men were members of my flock, and on one occasion made a trip to Longido under their guidance. I must say they had a pretty stiff time, living most of the day in choking dust, and piloting huge lorries over roads with which an English ploughed field would compare favorably as a thoroughfare. They are