They ought all to be able to forget the past, which was
done with, anyhow. He showed the first genuine interest she had
found in her work at the camp, and before his unexpected geniality
the girl opened like a flower.
And all the time he was watching her with calculating eyes. He was
a gambler with life, and he rather suspected that he had just drawn
a valuable card.
"Thank you," he said gravely, when she had finished. "You have done
a lot to bridge the gulf that lies--I am sure you have noticed it
--between the people who saw service in this war and those who
stayed at home."
Suddenly Lily saw that the gulf between her family and herself was
just that, which was what he had intended.
When Elinor came in they were absorbed in conversation, Lily flushed
and eager, and her husband smiling, urbane, and genial.
To Lily, Elinor Doyle had been for years a figure of mystery. She
had not seen her for many years, and she had, remembered a thin,
girlish figure, tragic-eyed, which eternally stood by a window in
her room, looking out. But here was a matronly woman, her face
framed with soft, dark hair, with eyes like her father's, with
Howard Cardew's ease of manner, too, but with a strange passivity,
either of repression or of fires early burned out and never renewed.
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