England must be fed (page 17)

BY

BERTA RUCK

Author of "His Official Fiancée," "In Another
Girl's Shoes," "The Three of Hearts," etc.

With Illustrations by
EDWARD C. CASWELL

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1919

COPYRIGHT, 1919
BY MRS. GEORGE OLIVER

TO
ALL THE GIRLS I MET
IN FARM, FIELD AND FOREST
WISHING THEM THE BEST OF LUCK,
AND LIFE, AND LOVE
FROM BERTA RUCK

Wales, 1918

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I  "Man Made the Town"
II  Two Voices Call
III  The Toss-Up
IV  The First Night in Camp
V  The First Job
VI  The Farmhouse Meal
VII  After-Effects
VIII  The Plunge
IX  Our Mess-Mates
X  The Milking-Lesson
XI  The Land-Girls' Letter-Bag
XII  We "Get Used to It"
XIII  An Invitation
XIV  The Hen-Wife
XV  Mostly Conversation
XVI  Curious Conduct of the Man-Hater
XVII  Land-Girls go Shopping
XVIII  The Night of the Concert
XIX  The Surprise Turn
XX  Land Army Tests
XXI  The Man-Hater Discusses Men
XXII  Hay-Harvest
XXIII  Colonel Fielding Discusses "Enjoyment"
XXIV  Storm
XXV  After the Rain
XXVI  Colonel Fielding Discusses "Love and the Like"
XXVII  A Kitchen Courtship
XXVIII  The Onlooker
XXIX  Love—After the Interval
XXX  Colonel Fielding Discusses "The Mystery-Girl"
XXXI  A Few Facts about Richard Wynn
XXXII  Butter-Making—With Accompaniment
XXXIII  "Our" Germans
XXXIV  Harvest, Nineteen-Eighteen
XXXV  "Fire, Fire!"
XXXVI  The Harvest-Moon
Postscript—The Victory-Dance

ILLUSTRATIONS

England must be fed ... Frontispiece

"I was going to ask you to join up for the Land Army"

We agreed that we were simply loving the life and the people, the work and the play

Still leaning on the gate, Captain Holiday said: "I'm glad the country won that toss"

A LAND-GIRL'S LOVE STORY

A LAND-GIRL'S LOVE STORY

        "What's this dull town to me?
            Robin's not near.
        What was't I wished to see?
            What wished to hear?
Where's all the joy and mirth made this town a Heav'n on earth?
Oh, they are all fled with thee, Robin Adair!"
                                                                                            —SCOTS SONG.

"There! I told you what kind of a young man he was, Joan."

I only groaned; my elbows on the breakfast-table and my head buried in my hands. What does it matter what "kind" of young man he is, when you're in love with him?

"He's a beauty," declared my chum Elizabeth. She pushed back the letter which had come as such a knockout to me. "Who's this 'Muriel' who writes to tell you that she's just seen Harry Markham off to Salonika, when you didn't even know he'd got his orders?"

"It's Muriel Elvey; I introduced him to her myself at the theatre about a fortnight ago," I explained, stunned. "That very pretty girl who was at school in Germany with me. I didn't know they'd met again.... He didn't say good-bye to me! ..."

"Rotter," snorted Elizabeth boyishly.

But some of us would rather be happy with a charming "rotter" than be bored for life by one of those prigs who never do anything wrong.

Haggardly I stared at that letter with its gold-printed "Muriel" at the top, its whiff of Chaminade. Little Elizabeth scowled sympathetically. She always had had a grimace for the name of Captain Harry Markham, who had been my idol for the last year.

(A rotter! What difference does that make!)

For that year life was a whirl of thrills and pangs because of one young soldier-man's black eyes and red tabs. At first it was all thrill. That's bound to be when the Harry-type—a born fighter and philanderer—leader of men and misleader of women—fills up a girl's horizon with his telephone-calls, his invitations, his flatteries—and himself.

Feverishly happy, I blessed the job that kept me where he was.

(And now this! This!)

My job was one of those that are described as "thundering good for a girl." It brought me in nearly three pounds a week, for I was secretary to a quite important official in one of those big rabbit-warren buildings in Whitehall that we call Ministries. It kept me indoors from ten A.M. until half-past six or seven or—if we'd a rush of work—eight o'clock at night.

It kept nerve and brain on the stretch, too! My chief insisted upon taking the last ounce out of his under-strappers. Also, he had a horrible temper. But I accepted that as cheerfully as I accepted the stuffiness of that rabbit-warren, and the rushed lunches, and the work that was draining all the go-stuff out of me.

You see, my people lived in the country, and—because of Harry—I simply had to live in town. It would have killed me, I thought, to tear myself away from London and from our flat near Golder's Green. This had been let, furnished, by an officer, now at the front, to me and my old school-chum, Elizabeth Weare, who was clerk at my rabbit-warren. We did our own housework and marketing and cooking, tired as we were, after our office-day was done. Sounds rather like all work and no play? But it wasn't.

There was play, to take it out of me more than work. Play turned my days into a succession of wild jumps across stepping-stones. The stones, of course, were the times when Harry took me out. I would have worked underground and consented never to see the light of day, provided that I still saw him. Ah, I'm not the first girl who has made Paradise out of bricks and mortar, just because they hold a Harry!

I thought I was growing to mean to him as much as he meant to me. Elizabeth did warn me, but who ever takes any notice of these warnings from the looker-on who sees the game? And Elizabeth was by way of being a Man-Hater anyhow, so how put any trust in her opinion of my Prince Charming?

Gradually there slipped through the thrill of it all the first pang of doubt. Surely he meant to propose? No? Yes? No?

The pangs came oftener. Could he mean nothing? Just the flirtation that camouflages itself under the name of being great pals? Or would he presently say something? This was a wearing time, I can tell you. Presently the thrills grew fewer, the pangs more frequent. This is also bound to be when the Harry-type cools off again. Was he cooling? Wasn't he? A see-saw of agony!

Slowly zest and colour began to fade out of the life that saw less and less of the young staff officer whose fancy I had amused for some months.

Hope dies hard.

Then a whole fortnight—this last one—went by without a sign from him. I hoped on, wildly, that something would happen, and, finally, this very morning, something had happened with a vengeance! It had killed hope with a sledge-hammer.

Devastating news came from that girl to whom I'd introduced him myself! I might have known that Harry the Susceptible would fall to Muriel's lovely little Lily-Elsie-like face! At that German school they had all raved about it, I remember; walking down Unter den Linden, Muriel had always been put between the two severest governesses, and even so the tightly-uniformed Prussian officers had followed and had jostled us in passing to try to steal one glance from "die bild-hübsche Engländerin's" demure big eyes.

So those eyes had been the last into which Harry had smiled before he left Blighty again! I had never had another look; I who adored him, who had been given to suppose that he returned it.

Harry had gone. Gone! Without a good-bye. Well—it was all over—finished—na poo!

I was left to make what I could of the situation.

What could I do?

Apparently nothing but gulp down my sugarless tea, push aside the stale war-bread with its one scrape of margarine that represented my breakfast, and set off for my day's work, leaving Elizabeth to wash up. She had a day off from the rabbit-warren. I wished I had; I scarcely felt like coping with the office.

"Poor old kid! Such is men," grunted Elizabeth. "You look absolutely played out."

"Do I? I needn't ever bother again about how I look. That's one comfort," I sighed, as I crammed on my hat.

This had an impertinent little wreath of coloured buds, and was lined with rose, because Harry said pink next to my face always suited me. I'd bought it to wear up the river with him.

Oh, the pathos of these hats, these pretty frocks that have been specially bought for "some" man! Long after that man has ceased to care a button what one wears the hat is still fresh, the frock seems to go on and on. Things remain. It's the people who change. I must have changed, too, after a blow in the face like that! What had it done to me? I gave one deliberate and searching glance at myself in the sitting-room looking-glass.

It showed me a plain and weary girl, with ten years added to her actual age. A slim, stooping figure that moved without zest. Eyes without brightness. Hair ditto—where were "the goldy lights" that Harry once praised in my hair? It was as drab and dull as the whole of my outlook had grown in the last half-hour.

I'd had what is called a ripping time, you see. Here was the bill I had to pay—low, secret misery, dark heaviness of heart, looks and girlishness lost—as I thought—for ever!

I stuffed into my bag the fateful letter that had knocked the bottom out of my world for me.

"You're forgetting these," Elizabeth reminded me, handing me a couple of other envelopes that lay unopened by my plate. I hadn't even noticed them.

"Haven't time," I said, pocketing them as I dashed down the four flights of brass-bound steps from our flat to the entrance.

There was no sign that either of those unopened letters held anything out of the ordinary. In my own mind I had no presentiment of wonder to come. I thought I knew my fate, thanks.

Let this be a lesson to any young woman who thinks the like. For when she is quite, quite sure that "all is over" for her, that is the moment when "All" is preparing to begin.

* * * * * * *

Here I've given you my picture as I was all those weeks ago. Now skip those weeks and see the contrast; the picture of me as I am today. A straight and supple body, all conscious of the Jest of living. Limbs rounded and firm. Face joyous, glowing, and clean-skinned under the tan. Hair glossy and full of gleams; eyes bright as the morning, with the atmosphere of sunshine and clean airs all round me. A new self, in fact, made by a new life. Thousands of girls all over the country at this moment can show the same miracle.

I am going to tell you the story of how it happened to me.

* * * * * * *

I had to rush for my Tube train, only in time to be held up by that exasperating wooden barrier, while the corncrake voice of the official rasped out: "Stand back, there!" And the train did not move out for another good half-minute.

Fuming, I waited on the platform, squashed against that barrier by the crowd who pressed behind me—a crowd who looked nervy and strained, and who—to put it mildly—smelt. Well, any business girl who glances at her light blouse after a day's work in town will know what I mean. I myself must have looked about as cheery as that face one sometimes catches sight of at the small square window of a black prison-van.

The only air and exercise I ever got in those days were in the three hundred yards' walk from our Mansions to the Tube, and in the two minutes' scurry at the other end from the Tube station to the rabbit-warren.

I hung on to a strap all the way to Charing Cross, hating everything. That letter seemed to have laid open all my nerves; they were jarred by the jostling passengers, by the conductor's raucous shouts, by the very advertisements of patent medicines and boot polish on the Tube walls, by the steps, the lift, in fact, everything to do with the loathsome journey.

At the office I got a black look from my chief, Mr. Winter, and a stinging comment on my lateness. I'd had them before, but then I'd scarcely noticed them. Now the daily round seemed unbearable.

When I had Harry to look forward to in the evening, it scarcely mattered how my day was spent. But now—ye gods! I suddenly found everything rankling—the look of the rabbit-warren's dingy corridors and annexes, the click of the typewriters, the whir of the telephone bells, and the Cockney accents of some of the workers!

And worst of all was the inevitable office smell, made up of so many horrors. I put them in their order of unpleasantness:—

The hot iron of the water pipes.

Ink.

Dust.

Common yellow soap.

The sink.

Stale office towels.

Cigars.

All this sounds an unmitigated grouse! But I have to get it over, showing you the perfectly revolting time I had. Sunlight and sweet air have since streamed into my days. But how can I forget the stuffiness of Mr. Winter's room?

"Can't we keep that window shut?" was my chief's motto.

The one extremely grimy window gave on to Whitehall, and to open even a crack of it let in all the noise of the traffic.

"Can't we have that window kept SHUT?"

The last word rang out like the crack of a whip almost before I got in, on this particular morning.

I shut the window and got to work, suddenly wondering, "Shall I go on like this until I'm eighty?" My job for that beastly morning was to check long columns of figures on blue paper, with a form-number at the top, from duplicate lists.

Thrilling!

My eyes swam and my head throbbed as I muttered to myself over the table: "Nine thousand three hundred and sixty-five pounds nineteen shillings and a penny. Nine thousand three hundred and sixty-five pounds nineteen and a penny. (Tick off.) Two thousand four hundred and ten pounds eleven shillings," and so on. The lists almost invariably tallied, but one dared not risk an error. "Nine thousand three hundred and——!"

What a life! I saw it now as it was. That letter had opened my eyes. Oh, to get away from it all!

At lunch-time I went out, avoiding the chattering throng of girls. It was one of those sultry early-Spring days that seem hotter than July. All the luncheon-places were as full up as the Tube had been. I could not wait for a seat in that atmosphere of not-too-cheap but nasty food.

Eggs that were "fresh in places," badly poached, on toast limp with water, and never a suspicion of butter—fish that had said good-bye to the sea many days ago; or burnt pieces of bacon swimming in thin fat—all these presented unpalatable realities which I felt absolutely unable to face that day of days.

Sickened, I turned back into the glare of Trafalgar Square. I sat down listlessly in the only patch of shade that I could find, on the steps of the National Gallery. I looked across the bone-dry fountains where wounded soldiers were swinging their bluer-trousered legs. I gazed gloomily past the Nelson Column, down Whitehall, with its 'buses and people.

Ants on a human ant-heap, struggling for life—but was it worth living? Deep in my heart the thought persisted, "I must get out of this. I can't stand it. How can I get away?"

Half-consciously my hand went to my bag to feel for the letter that had blackened existence. I hadn't looked at it again since Elizabeth had indignantly pushed it back to me. My fingers met the two other letters, not yet opened.

"May as well see what they are," I thought, drearily.

One was a rather terrifying bill for shoes. Well, it would be the last of its kind—it's love that comes so ruinously expensive in nice shoes and stockings!

The other was in a clear, strong hand-writing that I didn't know, and it had been forwarded on from my home.

I opened it.

Picture me, a speck of navy-blue and white on the grey steps. London glaring and blaring beyond me, and in my hand the scrap of paper—the second letter that was to fall upon me like a thunderbolt. First, Muriel's about Harry. Now this. I'd been actually carrying it about with me all the morning unopened, cheek-by-jowl with that other letter!

Listen to it!

Except that it was dated from some barracks, I didn't notice the address. My eye had at once caught the first sentence:

"My dear Joan,—They say a woman never forgets the first man who has kissed her——"

Wouldn't those words give any girl a jolt? They, startled me, even in my stricken state. "The first man who'd ever kissed me"—but the first and only man had been Harry himself! What on earth was the meaning of this, in a stranger's handwriting? It went on:

"That is why I have the cheek to write to you. Now you'll turn to the end of this letter to see who I am."

Exactly what I found myself doing, breathlessly!

"Do you remember that day in November
    Long, long ago; long ago?"
                                                        —OLD SONG.

        "Who'll grow the bread of Victory?
            Who'll keep the country clean?
        Who'll reap Old England golden?
            Who'll sow her thick and green?
Carry on, carry on! for the men and boys are gone,
But the furrow shan't lie fallow while the women carry on."
                                                                                            —JANET BEGBIE.

The signature of the letter was—

"Yours,
    "RICHARD WYNN."

Now, who in the world might he be? Richard Wynn? Wynn?

Ah! Suddenly I realized why the surname at least was familiar. Mr. Wynn! Of course! I placed him, now. I did remember. Sitting there, wan, on this the most miserable morning of my life, my thoughts were switched back just seven years.

Seven mortal years ago! A gap between a disillusioned young woman of twenty-two and a gawky eager child of fifteen, as I then was.

That had been in the days when we lived on the borders of Wales. My father had farmed, in a scrambling sort of way, the small estate that he owned there, and as he had to make ends meet somehow, he had taken in a trio of hobbledehoys as farm pupils—what they'd learnt from dear old Dad's antiquated methods goodness only knows.

Mr. Wynn was the eldest of these pupils. I don't think I'd ever taken as much interest in him as I had in the fox terrier puppy that he gave me just before he sailed for the ranch of an uncle in Canada. But I had hated his going away. I always did hate partings, even from the succession of mountain-bred cooks who stayed their six months with us. On that gloomy autumn morning, with the mountains blotted out by mist and the rain coming down in a steady drip-drip-drip on the slate roof, when we had all gathered in the veranda to say good-bye to the departing pupil I had suddenly felt like bursting into tears.

Mr. Wynn, the leggy, dark-haired Welsh lad of nineteen, had turned with his brand-new suit-case all ready labelled in his hand, had seen my blank look, had stared down upon me and had clutched me by the pig-tail as I turned to flee.

"Nice kid, ripping kid," he'd muttered in a brusque, touched young voice. "Give us a kiss for good-bye, Joan."

And he'd drawn my head back by its plait and kissed me under the eyes of my amused family. They had ragged me about it for months. How should I, at that age, have guessed the difference between that and a real kiss? Years later Harry had slipped the real kisses into my life, in the course of conversation, so to speak, and by imperceptible degrees, which was Harry's insidious way of making love—none the less fatal!

Now, on the very day when love had left me in a way so very far from being imperceptible, here was this reminder from that other, forgotten young man, that went on:

"Plenty of things have happened since we said good-bye; but I've often wondered what became of the pretty kid with the thick brown pigtail. You'd a blue bow on it that day, and you never noticed that I walked off with that. I suppose there's just an off-chance that you are not married yet. Are you? If you aren't, would you care to marry me?"

I gasped as I came to this. Who wouldn't have been petrified?

"Would you care to marry me?"

But how—how fantastic! At breakfast-time upon this very day I'd had conveyed to me the devastating news that the one young man on whom my thoughts had hung wished to see no more of me. Now, at midday, here was shock No. 2. Another young man, of whom I hadn't thought since I was grown up, was actually proposing to me.

Both on one day!

Was I living in some wild dream of coincidences? But no. The Harry-wound went on aching steadily beyond this flash in the pan even as I read on.

"It sounds mad, I know."

The writer actually admitted it.

"I'd explain details and things better if I saw you. May I come and see you? If so, please write to me here, where I shall be for the next ten days. I could get over to your father's place. This needn't commit you to anything. But if it is all off, don't write. If I don't hear from you within a week I shall know it was good-bye for good.—Yours, RICHARD WYNN."

Stupefied, I sat staring at his letter.

Now a proposal of marriage from almost any young man in this world would bring its special thrill to almost any girl. This, quite apart from whether she accepts it or refuses. Isn't that true, girls?

So it shows what a stupor of despair I was in that morning, when I tell you that only for a fleeting moment did I forget my troubles in the excitement of this Mr. Wynn's letter.

I sighed as I got up, feeling a little dizzy from my perch on the National Gallery steps, for St. Martin's Church clock showed half-past one, and it was time I started walking slowly back to that revolting office. I'd had no lunch, but lunch-time would be considered over by the time I had crawled down Whitehall again. Heavens! How I hated Whitehall, and wished that I never need set eyes upon ...

Here the quite wild idea sprang into my mind.

"What about this way out of it? What if this were what I was longing for, the chance of a completely new life? Something to whisk me right away out of everything that I knew in the days of Harry! Here's this Mr. Richard Wynn—who was quite a nice young man, if I could only remember his face a little bit more distinctly—asking to marry me. What if I said 'Yes'? Since I was not to marry Harry, what did it matter what sort of a man I did marry? But what was he like?"

Frowning, I tried to remember. Dark, tall, Norfolk jacket, loved dogs—that was as far as I got. Not a detail of his face could I recall! An unawakened girl-child, as I was seven years ago, takes scant notice of masculine faces. All she thinks of them is "How ugly they are; how very unlike the people in books that the beautiful ladies are always falling in love with"—and that's the summing-up of it for her, until she is seventeen or so. (Unless she's of the type of my little chum Elizabeth, who at twenty-one continued to hold this view.)

But what about this Richard Wynn, who at nineteen had seemed a century older than I?

Nowadays, I should not consider as a grown-up man that youth who'd devoured such platefuls of cold mutton and bread and cheese at my father's table. I wondered listlessly how he'd grown up. Quite cold-bloodedly—for remember what I was going through—I began to debate whether I'd say I would see him. It might be better than the office; better than living exactly the same life day after day, without Harry. And Harry would hear if I got engaged.

How many engagements, I wonder, are entered into in the mood in which I was at that darkest of moments?

I thought, "If I write——"

Then my thoughts were broken into by something very different.

I'd already noticed, while only half-seeing it, that a little crowd had collected down in Trafalgar Square about the spot where the Tank Bank stood in the spring, a crowd composed of Colonial soldiers, of bare-headed factory girls from Charing Cross Road, of girl clerks from the countless Government offices round about.

Without much interest I glanced over the stone coping. Above the heads of the thickening crowd I saw a banner. It was white, with the scarlet-lettered motto:

"England Must Be Fed."

There was a group on the small raised platform beneath it, an elderly man in a frock-coat, some ladies, and the gleam of a light smock. Some one was speaking underneath that flag. In the sultry midday air I suddenly heard, fresh and clear, a girlish voice. These were the scraps that came to me:

"I appeal to you girls in this crowd. Some of you are country-born girls, like me. I'm from Wales. My county was a green county. It is now a red county—ploughed up to help carry on the war. But must we look at these fields full of crops and think, 'These will rot in the ground because there will never be hands enough to carry them in'?"

Ah! Land Army!

I'd heard of this before, and now Trafalgar Square saw girls being recruited as, three years ago, it saw young men being asked why they were not in khaki.

Then the speaker's young voice rose earnestly to my listless ears:

"I have put before you the disadvantages of this life. Long hours. Hard work. Poor pay. After you get your board and lodging a shilling a day, perhaps. Very poor pay. But, girls—our boys at the Front are offering their lives for just that. Won't you offer your services for that—and for them?"

The voice attracted me, the Welsh voice that holds the secret of being clear, yet soft, with the ends of its words pronounced as crisply as by a well-trained singer. It held me, that voice, while the speaker touched on the urgent need of workers to fill the places of men, who had gone from farm, field, dairy and byre.

Ah, the charming picture that she made! A bright, sturdy flower of girlhood set against-the parched stone-work of Town! She wore the Land Girl's uniform that sets off a woman's shape as no other costume has done yet. Under her slouch-hat her face was vividly brown and rose-coloured, with dark eyes alight. Her fresh, light belted smock, with its green armlet and scarlet crown, looked cool as well as trim.

The sight of her, I thought, should bring in as many recruits as the speech. She looked as if she'd never dreamt of such things as unventilated offices, typewriters that clicked mechanically all day, nervous headaches, lives soured and blighted at twenty-two! Enviously I glanced at her. Suddenly—was it my imagination?—she looked straight back at me over the heads of the crowd. It was to me she seemed to be speaking now.

"You are offered some good things in this new life, girls. Good health. Good sleep——"

Here I smiled bitterly. Good sleep.... I'd had a whole fortnight of hideously broken nights.

"There's no sleep like that of the worker on the land!" declared the recruiting land girl.

"Another thing you're offered is a good conscience with which to meet those lads when they return from fighting for you. Lastly—though I don't know if it's worth mentioning, really"—here her white teeth flashed in a merry smile across her rosy face—"you are offered a good complexion!"

Then something else unexpected happened. She jumped lightly down, and it was first of all to me—me!—that she made her way.

Straight up to me she came. She looked me full in the face, smiled prettily, and in that clear voice that sounded home-like to me because my home had been where she, too, came from, she said:

"I've been watching you all the time I've been speaking. I want to say something to you."

"You want to speak to me?" I said, surprised.

"I noticed you at once," said the Land Girl. "You looked—well, not very pleased with life."

Here a passer-by glanced at the contrast we made standing there: Government office clerk and Land Girl. She, in smock and breeches, radiated rosy health; I, wearing my blue costume, Frenchy blouse, flower-wreathed hat and Louis-heeled shoes, wilted in limpness and pallor.

She said prettily:

"Are you on war-work of any kind?"

"Yes, I am. I work at——" I gave her the rabbit-warren's real name.

Her bright face fell.

"What a pity. We're told not to try for recruits who are engaged in other departments. I was going to ask you to join up for the Land Army."

"I was going to ask you to join up for the Land Army"

"I! Oh, I should be no earthly good at that sort of thing," I assured her pettishly, I'm afraid. "I must get back to the office."

"A pity," remarked the fair recruiter regretfully. "Perhaps you've a friend who's not so busy. Would you pass these on?"

I took the leaflets she offered.

"Good-bye," she said. Once out of sight of that energetic young worker, I rolled her papers into a ball and tossed them into a county council waste-paper bin.

That is, I thought I did.

My head ached so desperately that I hardly knew what I was doing by the time I got out of the glare of Whitehall and into the gloom of the office.

I was before Mr. Winter, the chief who disliked me as much as he disliked open windows. Here was my chance to let in an apology for a breath of air. I tugged at the window. It was stiff. Down it came at last. But the effort had been too much for me in my run-down state; it made me feel positively sick.

Then came the last straw.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Mr. Winter rasped out behind me:

"Can't you keep that window shut?"

I jumped violently—think of the morning I'd had. I forgot myself.

"Don't shout at——" I began. But all in an instant the office became dark as night. I threw out my hands. Then I pitched forward on my face, knowing no more.

I had fainted dead away.

Half an hour later I was sent home, after Mr. Winter had leapt at his chance of telling me that I was obviously not strong enough for war-work, and that I need not present myself at these offices any more. Perhaps he was scarcely justified. Perhaps he wanted to frighten me into an appeal. But I didn't say a word, I was too dazed.

Sacked!

Well, after that, I thought, there was only one thing for me to do.

"And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss."—KIPLING.

"Elizabeth! What should you say if I were to accept an offer of marriage?" I demanded abruptly.

This was after I'd got back to the flat, had flung myself down on my bed with the announcement that I'd been sacked from the rabbit-warren, and had turned thirstily to the tea that my chum had brought in at once.

Washed-out, I lay against the pillow, while Elizabeth did the ministering angel in a boyish shirt, and with thick black locks "bobbed" about her square-chinned little face.

Elizabeth is the most loyal pal who ever barked out home-truths at a chum, waiting on her hand and foot the while ... Oh, girl-friends! What would life be without them when men forsake us by desertion and death, when other men overwork us and harry us, and when all men (as it sometimes seems) misunderstand us! Men don't believe in loyal and lasting friendships between women. Elizabeth, in return, never believed much in men.

"Offer of marriage?" she retorted. "What are you raving about?"

Between sips of tea I gave her the story of the letter that I had taken away unopened that morning.

"Asks me to write within the week, unless it was to be good-bye for good!" I concluded. "What do you think of it?"

"Shell-shock," Elizabeth promptly suggested. "Poor fellow! Must be quite off his head. How long was he out at the Front, Joan?"

"How should I know? I only know he wrote from those barracks."

"You don't know his regiment or anything?"

"Not a thing. Not the colour of his eyes, or why he never wrote to me before, or where he's been for the last seven years, or what doing. Absolutely nothing do I know about him. Except that he wants me to be his wife!"

My stupor of the morning had given way to a reaction of bravado; I laughed into Elizabeth's little steady face.

"Knew you weren't serious," she said. "I'm glad you're bucking up, though. It's quite a mercy that you have got the sack. You'd have had to go home and take things easy for a bit in any case, so——"

Here I interrupted her with more vigour than I'd felt capable of all day.

"Go home?" I echoed, really nettled. "D'you imagine that I'm going home after this? Not much! Go home! Go back to——" I took a long breath to underline the words—"to Agatha?"

Now, Agatha was my young stepmother.

Nobody could find fault with Agatha. She was sensible, quiet, admirably domesticated, a splendid needlewoman and parish worker, an excellent wife to Dad, and always tactful towards his grown-up children. Only—well, Agatha was a person who never made a mistake in her life. And the people who do make headstrong, passionate, idiotic mistakes—well, is it to that sort of person that they turn when they're in trouble? I ask you.

Elizabeth shook her cropped head. She had to see it.

"What will you do, then? Try for another job in town, I suppose?"

"Oh, I don't care what I do!" I said wearily. "There aren't many things I can do. Marrying this young man is one of them, anyway. Why shouldn't I? All marriage is a ghastly risk. Especially when a girl knows she can never, never care for anybody."

It was here that Elizabeth, that good chum, took me fairly in hand.

"I'll talk now," she said. "You listen." And she began to talk coolly and helpfully and like a dose of bromide, which was what I needed at that point.

"You said there weren't many things you could do. Home's off. You're not rich enough to do nothing, so you must do something. That means you either marry for a job—lots of girls do, poor wretches—or take one. I suppose your precious Winter isn't too chilly to give you a reference?"

"I daresay he's warmer now he's got that window shut!" I answered languidly.

"Then you're left with the choice of doing a sensible thing or a silly one," Elizabeth declared. "You go into another Government office, or you marry this man, who may drink or squint or have a beard for all you know."

"He used not to," I murmured with my eyes closed.

"Oh, you do remember so much about him? I say, could I see his letter?"

"Of course. Rummage in my bag for it, will you?—but I've told you all that was in it."

"I'd like to see the writing," said Elizabeth, rummaging. Presently I heard her say "Hullo!" in a more alert voice. I opened my eyes interested—Elizabeth was scanning a paper. It was headed:—

"Women's Land Army."

"I thought I threw those things away," said I. "Can't you find the letter?"

"No," said Elizabeth. "No other letter here."

Instantly I realized what I had done.

"It was Mr. Wynn's letter that I threw away," I exclaimed dismayed. "Address and all. I thought it was those pamphlets. How silly of me! Now I can't write to Mr. Wynn!"

"That settles that," said the practical Elizabeth, "and leaves you to take another Government office job or——"

She paused for emphasis, looked straight at me. "Or this!"

Here she waved the paper she'd been studying. It showed pictures of smiling girls in smocks and breeches, busy. They were making butter, they were stacking fodder, they were feeding baby calves out of buckets. Underneath the photographs was written:

"Will YOU do this?"

I stared at Elizabeth.

"Join the Land Army! Me!"

"Yes, you. Do your bit. They say England wants feeding. It looks like it"—she glanced at the comfortless tray—"so go and help, Joan."

"Would you like to, yourself?" I retorted.

"Me?" cried Elizabeth in turn. "Nothing would induce me, thanks. I should loathe it!"

"Yet you think I ought to join up!"

"Best thing for you," declared my chum briskly. "Help your country, work in the open, get fit, and forget there are such things as men!"

"All very well for you to talk in that gay and airy way about 'forgetting,'" I retorted, nettled again. "You wait——! If ever your time comes——"

"Ha!" jeered Elizabeth, putting back her bonnie little head of a page, and squaring her shoulders. "If——!"

She looked like the Princess of that fairy-tale on whom the fairies laid a curse that she should never marry a man she loved because, on her bridal night, she herself would be turned into a lad.

"Stranger things have happened," I threatened her, "than a girl like you falling in love in the end."

"Yes. A girl like you getting over it. That's happened before now," retorted the downright little Man-hater. "Now, what about this Land Army idea?"

"But—but I should hate every minute of it!" I objected.

"Worse than marrying the wrong person?" murmured Elizabeth.

Here an odd thing happened. At those words "the wrong person" there flashed into my mind for the first time the thought that has visited it, ah! how often since then, in spite of Harry, in spite of my not caring what happened now. In spite of everything, it struck me, "If I never hear anything more about this Mr. Wynn, it will be a pity." Yes, at the time I felt that.

"What a toss-up everything is," I said recklessly. "Shall I go to work in breeches and a smock? Or shall I get married? Heads or tails? Have you a penny, Elizabeth?"

"Don't be silly."

"I mean it. Have you a penny?"

"Put my last into the gas meter!"

"Then I'll try this." I took up the remaining dry biscuit from the bread platter. "England must be fed," I quoted. "Heads I go and help to feed her. Tails I marry for a job. Heads is the side with the maker's name on. Now!"

I spun the biscuit into the air. Gambling with England's food!

It came down, spun on the empty platter, fell flat.

With quite a thrill I bent to see the result of my toss.

"Heads!"

"Land Army!" cried Elizabeth, throwing up her head. "We're for it!"

I turned to her.

"We?"

"Looks like it! Suppose I've got to join up with you," grumbled my chum, who was always better than her word, "and see what comes!"

* * * * * * *

A fortnight later we were both glancing at the set of our new Land Army hats in the narrow strip of mirror of a railway carriage, bound for the countryside.

"Why did I leave my little back-room in Bloomsbury?"—VICTORIAN SONG.

Transformation scene.

From a London office to a Land Girls' Camp in Mid-Wales. From a cramped, sixth-story flat looking down on slums to that big light hut set among the woods that peeped a green "welcome" in at the many windows.

Every window was wide open on that first evening when Elizabeth and I got down to the camp.

Our first impressions of it? Well! I can only say we were not "out" to be encouraged, or to like anything at all at that moment! Tired, stiff from our journey, awkward in our unfamiliar uniform and heavy boots, we followed the young forewoman who'd met us at the tiny station called "Careg," and had piloted us up and down what seemed interminable miles of lanes to this hut.

A queer, surprisingly ugly place, this long bare building! Corrugated iron without, matchboarding within, with bare floors, trestle tables, and kitchen-chairs. It had been intended for a parish hall for meetings and sales of work; but the platform had been taken away, and the whole building turned into a barracks for girl-workers. Land Army slouch hats and brown raincoats hung from the pegs, gay-coloured prints were pinned upon the unvarnished walls, and flowers stood about in glass jam-jars.

The place resounded with laughter and talk. It was clustered with Camp-ites, who wore the same rig as our own. We still felt as if we were in fancy-dress. But these other light smocks and laced-up leggings and hobnailed boots all bore the signs of honest wear and tear from the work for which they were designed.

These girls had "worked themselves and their clothes in" to the new job. On that first evening they looked to us a race apart. They made me feel a nervous and apologetic weed! They were a bewildering crowd.

"Now, you girls! Make a bit of room at this end of the table," ordered the forewoman cheerily. "Here are the two new workers for the training depot. They're to live here."

Faces turned from each side of the long mess-table towards us. The babel of talk died down. There was a scraping of chairs on the scrubbed floor. A girl jumped up and fetched cups; another pushed aside one of the glass gallipots that held sheaves of blue-bells and marsh-yellows all down the table.

"That's right. You sit here, will you? Room for a little one!"—the little one being Elizabeth, who seemed to have shrunk since she put on breeches, into some small, shock-headed, pale and defensive boy. "And you, Vic, look after this other one."

"What's your name?" from the forewoman.

"Matthews? Joan Matthews! Sit down, Joan; have your tea. There's plenty more milk in the big jug; and pass up that bit of rhubarb pie for them. They're all the way from London."

"London!" chorused the girls at the table in a variety of voices.

"London, fancy!"

"Eustern! All change! Stand clear o' the gates!" sang out one, in gruff imitation. "Air-raid shelter this way! Full up, full up! Pass along there."

"Piccadilly, theatres and shops!"

"Bond-street!"

"'Igh-street!"

"Dear old giddy London!"

"Bit of a change to Careg Camp, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is," I admitted, and in the breezy laughter my voice was drowned, also my heartfelt sigh.

For a sudden wave of regret swept over the whole of my tired being. I wondered what had possessed me to leave London. It was going to be awful! Why had I been so mad as to fill up those forms which that girl had given me in Trafalgar Square, and to make those inquiries, and to attend that Selection Committee and that Medical Board?

Why had I let Elizabeth—who was looking gloomy enough on her side of the table—persuade me to take this silly step? Why on earth did I join the Land Army for twelve months, agreeing to go wherever I was sent? Here they'd sent us into the wilds of the country—hundreds of miles away from every soul we knew, into this bare barn of a place and this mob of strange girls!

There! Now one of them who'd finished tea sprang up—sprang as if it were the beginning instead of the end of a working day—went to the piano at the other end of the hall, and began to rattle out gay music; and then two others were jumping up, too, taking each other by the hands in a clear space of the room and swinging into a two-step—dancing! After they'd been working on a farm-course all day!

They were all so bursting with "go" and chattering spirits that I felt I could never cope with them. Never should I make friends! Never should I attain to anything they could do! Never accustom myself to the strangeness of all this!

Here I was, a fish out of water. Even if I were miserable in London, it's better to be wretched in a place that you're used to, and where you're not expected to make any unwonted efforts, or to be bothered by fresh people. Yes! Would to goodness I'd stuck it in London, instead of rushing out of that frying-pan into this fire.

Absolutely "out of it all" and miserable, I expect my thoughts showed in my face as I sat there. For a bright-eyed girl opposite, with riotous red hair and a rounded throat starred with freckles, leaned across, smiled, and remarked in the deep, soft contralto of Southern Wales:

"Sure to feel strange at first! Longing for home. I was the first ten days. Oh, I would have bought myself out and packed up. I would, indeed——" she paused, and turned to the girl sitting beside me. "But they won't want to get back to town after they've been here a bit, will they, Vic?"

The big dark Land Girl "Vic," who sat next to me, showed all her white teeth in a large and friendly grin.

"Ah, you'll be all right. You wait till you've stopped down here a couple of weeks, Celery-face, and your own boy won't know you again!" she assured me in a ringing Cockney accent that set all the others laughing delightedly.

How popular she seemed! Good-natured, too. Presently I found her taking Elizabeth and me under her wing while the other girls went on with their various occupations.

None of them seemed to want to fling herself down and rest, doing absolutely nothing—which was all I should feel fit for, I thought gloomily. From the scullery-shed outside the hut came the sound of clinking crockery and of laughter, as two of the girls washed up. Overpoweringly cheery young women! I thought, peevish with fatigue.

Vic's Cockney voice rose above the rest of the chatter, proffering encouragement and information.

"You'll be surprised!" she declared. "You won't want to leave, ever——"

Chill silence from us.

"You'll see it's a fine life when you get your hand in at the work," she continued, undaunted by our silence. "Tomorrow morning you start. I'll take you along to Mr. Price; he's the farmer at the Practice place. Oh, he's all right, Mr. Price is; and her, too. They won't be hard on you, seeing you've never worked before.... Oh! You have worked? ... Oh, in business. Ah! that's a lady's job. This other's all right, though. Don't you go telling 'em you know all about farming just because you've made hay once or twice on your holidays——"

"I wouldn't," I assured her.

"Oh! Well, I did. Talk about laugh ever since!" chuckled Vic. "Why, you don't know how much you don't know until you start in the Land Army! Why, one of the wounded Tommies from the hospital here says to me on the road just now, 'Are you on the land, miss?' I said, 'Well, I'm not on the sea!'"

Much appreciative laughter from her friends greeted this repartee, which, I believe, was then new.

"'No,' he says to me, 'but I bet you was all at sea the first time you tried to milk the cow!' I says, 'You're right!' I was, too! You see how you get on with it," to me. "Seven o'clock they milk."

"Seven!" I murmured, dismayed. In London I was never out of bed before the postman knocked.

"And where," asked Elizabeth, speaking for the first time, "where is this farm we've got to go to in the morning?"

"Mr. Holiday's? Oh, a lovely place! Great big dairy farm that they've turned into this training centre for us. Only about a mile off from here."

"A mile!" I echoed blankly. "How do we get there, please?"

"Get there? Well, how d'you think?" retorted Vic gaily. "We walk, of course."

Walk! I wondered how long it was since I'd walked a whole mile before today. Walk! A mile before the day's work began? Oh! I was not the sort of girl who ought to dream of attempting this sort of life! All these others were overwhelmingly fit and healthy. You could see they were strong as horses, gay as larks! They must have been picked girls for the job.

Well, £2 would buy me out!

The girl in the sweater and breeches, who had been ironing out her smock, now put it on, all crisp. She also pinned a pink rose to the breast of it with a regimental brooch.

"Boys to meet, Peggy!" called the girl at the piano. Now, her voice was neither Cockney nor Welsh, but that of what was once called "the governing class." What a queer mixture they were here!

Peggy looked demure and remarked:

"I'm astonished at you," and strolled forth into the evening sunlight.

"Her young gentleman's in the hospital here," Vic informed us. "There's some real nice wounded boys there now. But for those, we girls might forget what a young man looked like."

Here Elizabeth spoke for the second time, looking, for the first time, a shade happier. She inquired "Ah, don't they allow men here?"

Chorus of variously accented "No's." With cheerful resignation Vic added, "Young men's very strictly rationed in this camp. Only our Mr. Price from the farm (o' course he's big enough to count for three!) and Mr. Rhys—the—Forestry, as they call him. Not another man is allowed to set his foot inside this place, so——"

She broke off as if she caught sight of something.

"Whoever's this?" she ejaculated. I, nearest the open window, followed her look.

Two men, a little one and a tall one in khaki, were walking quickly up the path to the camp.

A young man in khaki, wearing a Sam Browne!

This sight was hardly a rarity to Elizabeth and me, fresh from London. So we were fairly taken aback at the reception of the phenomenon here, in this far-away rural camp of Land Girls.

Excitedly Vic at the window reported.

"Here's our Mr. Rhys, bringing in an officer!"

Sensation!

"An officer?" cried twenty voices at once.

"An officer?"

"Sure it is an officer?"

"Some one from the hospital——"

"No officers there! Who can it be?"

"Friend of yours, Sybil!"—this to the girl who had been playing the piano.

"Somebody's boy got a commission—don't all rush——"

But already they all had made a rush to the window, where Vic was lifting up a corner of the white casement curtain to peep.

They crowded five deep behind her.

"It is an officer too!" announced the red-haired girl. "Captain!"

"I say, isn't he tall!"

"Doesn't he make carroty little Rhys look a shrimp?"

"Dark, isn't he? I do like dark men. A fair man always looks so quiet."

"Huh! 'Looks'! This one looks 'quiet' enough, but I daresay——"

"Whatever's he coming here for?"

"He's not coming in; no such luck."

"Sssssh!" hissed Vic, with the noise of an engine letting off steam. "He's coming in now!"

Instantly the crowd about the window scattered like flies before a switch. The crochet, the ironing, the book, the washing-up, all were resumed. It was indeed a model camp-room, full of silently-industrious young women, that met the eyes of the two visitors.

First the small, pink-faced man in leggings and loud checks, with an orange moustache and a plume of amber hair that seemed to spring up off his forehead as he took off his hat, smiled, and nodded about to the sedate assembly of girls.

"Good evening, young ladies. Good evening, Miss Easton. Brought you a caller," said Mr. Rhys.

Miss Easton, the forewoman, said "Good evening, Mr. Rhys," as demurely as if she had no curiosity at all about this caller. The tall man's shape that was darkening the doorway behind Mr. Rhys gave a sudden abrupt movement forward.

"This," said Mr. Rhys in his pleasant Welshy voice, "is Captain Holiday."

Mr. Rhys, putting his hat and twisty stick down on a chair, added without further explanation, "I told Captain Holiday I thought you wouldn't mind letting him have a bit of a look round the place."

"That's all right, Mr. Rhys," said the forewoman, with a little bow to acknowledge the salute of the strange officer, who had now come right into the room.

* * * * * * *

Here I would like to give my first impression of him, though every one knows how difficult it is to recall an impression taken when one is too dog-tired to notice clearly, or to care what any fresh person is like.

I suppose I must have seen mechanically that this young man was of a light and active build, and that he had what people call a "nice" face, open, friendly, and sunburnt.

I didn't take in then the resolute set of the mouth under the closely-hogged russet moustache, or even see what sort of eyes he'd got. I know now that they are handsome, grey-blue eyes, set deep behind a thick fringe of brown. Sweet eyes, with that look in them that means, "Do like me!" A look so often contradicted in a man's face by the obdurate line and tilt of the jaw, which would try to proclaim, "I don't care a dash whether people like me or not."

* * * * * * *

All this was lost on me that first moment. I just noticed the gay ribbon on Captain Holiday's well-worn khaki jacket, with two gold stripes at the cuff.

Then I could not help noticing something rather odd about the young man—namely, the quick, searching glance that he sent all round the big room, taking in every Land Girl there. Was he looking for some one? But no. After passing every girl, that searchlight glance found me—and it held me! Yes; it was at me, who'd never seen him in my life before, that he seemed to stare hardest of all! Why?

Then I thought it must be my imagination that this stranger was staring at all. Possibly he was just shortsighted, and saw nothing but what was just under his nose. I turned what attention I had to the golden-and-white collie who trailed in behind him.

Led by the instinct these creatures have for an admirer, she sidled up to me.

Her master was not too shortsighted, then, to see this! For he took two hasty strides right across the room, bringing him up to where I sat with Elizabeth; he gave a little quick soft whistle, and instantly the collie sidled away again to her master's riding-booted heel.

I had just time to suppose that this Captain Holiday—whoever he might be—was about to say something friendly and pleasant when he spoke.

The voice that came out of that nice, friendly face was brusque and deep and carrying. The words that were set to that perfectly charming smile were unexpected enough.

He demanded, still without taking his eyes from my face:

"You're new, aren't you? How long do you imagine that you're going to stick this?"

I looked up. For a moment I scarcely knew whether I had understood. Had he really asked that blunt, uncivil question?

"Were you speaking to me?" I said.

He nodded.

"To you? Yes, of course I was."

Indignantly surprised, I met his look again—steady, measuring, disconcerting. Then I felt a perfect fool, in that stiff, new-smelling uniform for which I felt—in both senses—so unfitted. Then I blushed. After which, naturally, I felt I should hate him for ever.

He waited; for some reason he was obviously determined that I should speak again. I don't know what I should have answered; I think I just meant to reply, "I don't know," but at that moment little Mr. Rhys came up to call his attention to the time.

"If you want to get on to the farm, Captain Holiday——"

"Righto," said this odd Captain Holiday.

He gave a last half-smiling glance at me, and something that might have been a little gesture of taking leave.

Then he turned to say "Good-bye" to the forewoman.

A moment later I realized that he and Mr. Rhys had left the hut.

For immediately the normal noise of the place burst out afresh, like a stream released from the dam. Down, with a bang, went the iron on the stand. Away into corners flew the book, the blouse-mending, the crochet, the letter-writing pad. Chattering and laughing, the Land Girls rushed five deep to the window again.

"There they go!"

"Fancy a man about this place! First thing you could call a man that's been in here since we started!"

"What a shame," from the deep-voiced Welsh girl. "Why couldn't you call our nice little Mr. Rhys 'a man'?"

"Oh, him! He's in and out every day. Can't call that 'a man' about the place. More like a husband!" from another. "Miss Easton, whoever was the officer?"

"Couldn't tell you. You heard Mr. Rhys say he was Captain Holiday, and that's all I know."

"'Holiday.' Wonder if that's got anything to do with the farm?"

Here, as the men passed by my window, I caught a few words, uttered by that carrying voice. The stranger was saying: "What was the name of that girl I spoke to?"

What, I thought, irritably, had my name got to do with him? Again I felt the stab of anger with which I'd heard him ask me how long I thought I was going to stand "this"—the Land Army and roughing it in camp. Impertinence! Anyhow, I was at the end of my tether for tonight. Aching with fatigue, I got up and approached the laughing Vic.

"Please," I asked her, "could you show us where the bedrooms are?"

"Bedrooms?" echoed the big Land Girl, and then burst into a fresh peal of laughter. "Bedrooms? Hear that, girls? Celery-face wants to know where the bedrooms are!" General laughter. "No luxuries of that sort here, dear. As you were! Here's where we all sleep."

Blankly Elizabeth and I gazed about that bleak hall.

"On the floor," added Vic cheerfully.

"Floor!" I repeated, giving an appalled glance down at those hard scrubbed boards.

But here our Cockney friend relented.

"Ah, it's not come to that yet, even in the Land Army," she said. "Here, I'll show you." She put a large brown hand on the arm of each of us, led us to the further end of the hall and pulled aside a curtain.

Behind it an alcove was piled with rolled-up mattresses.

"We drag these out, d'you see," explained Vic. "Lay 'em in a line along the wall here. Here's two for you—here's your blankets. I'll tuck you up in your little byes. Sleep like tops here, see if you don't."

I was amazed to find how cosily I curled up, presently on that mattress without sheets or pillows, set on the floor near that open window through which the air swept sweet with the breath of growing things. Vic tucked the khaki blankets round me with a gesture that I hadn't seen so near me since I lost my mother.

"Sleep well," she said comfortably. "Dream of 'him'!"

And it was into the profoundest sleep that I'd known since Harry sailed that I presently sank.

My last waking thoughts were a jumble of the train journey, the unfamiliar country, the laughing, rosy faces of the Land Girls. Then clearly there stood out, in front of all, the face of that strange young man who had walked into the camp, looking as if he were searching for somebody. That searching, disconcerting stare of his at me—why at me?—that brusque demand: "How long d'you imagine you'll stick this?" Why did he say that to me?

"Something attempted, something done."—LONGFELLOW.

Next morning at two o'clock—or such the unearthly hour seemed to me—I was awakened by a resonant girlish voice.

"Tumble up! It's late! I left you girls till the last minute. You were so dead asleep you never heard a sound. Up with you!"

Deeply-drowsy, bewildered, but refreshed, I scrambled out of my blankets and blinked about. Where was——

Ah! The hut!

Every mattress but Elizabeth's and mine was rolled up and stowed away. Every "Campite" had disappeared but big Vic and two who were on fatigue. Vic was hooking scarlet stripes to the sleeve of her clean smock. The others cleared breakfast away from the mess-table.

"You buck up and dress," Vic advised us. "The Timber-Girls and Miss Easton are all off to the woods already"—this was the first I'd heard of so many of the girls here being in the Forestry Corps—"and the other two farm-pupils have gone on.

"It's no use you asking for any bathrooms, Celery-face," he added good-humouredly. "Here's a basin. Young Sybil always takes a dip in the pool just outside, but you've no time today."

I also had no wish, at that moment, to go and dip into any ice-cold, fresh-water pools, out of doors and in the chill grey dawn. Brrr!

"No time for you to sit down for your breakfast either," Vic pursued, as we huddled on our unfamiliar garments and struggled with the lacings of our leggings. "Lil! Just pour these girls out their tea, and butter 'em some bread—they must eat as they go along."

In the early sunshine on the road Elizabeth and I devoured the country bread and the real farm-butter. Our guide and mentor, Vic, strode along between us in the slouch hat, holland overall, breeches, and leggings that looked so natural and becoming on her, though my chum and I, glancing at each other, could not yet grow accustomed to our own appearances.

My feet seemed to belong to somebody else, in these boots! They were so very different from the feet in the shoes that had pattered down streets and along corridors on my daily tube scramble in town!

Harry had always "noticed" what shoes I wore, more than any other part of my get-up. But now——

"'Let us go hence, my shoes, he will not see,'" I parodied gloomily to myself as I tramped along that lane.

Meanwhile Vic, cheerful as the morning, was pointing out to us what she considered the objects of interest as we went along.

"See that big white place over there in the trees? That's the hospital," Vic told us, pointing. "There's two o' the boys coming out now—see? This is the turning off to the town—at least, what they call a town. Mouldy! No pictures, nothing; still, why go to theatres when you can see life?

"You ought to have been here for the concert at the hospital last week. It was all right. They wanted to give it again at our hut; but Miss Easton and Mr. Rhys said 'No fear.' A shame, wasn't it? Never mind; they are going to have another, some time. See that hill to the right where that smoke's going up? That's where our girls work at the trees. And those corrugated iron roofs you can just see over there—that's the camp for the German prisoners, and——"

Vic broke off to ask if she were running us off our legs. Certainly she was a quicker walker than either of us. But I enjoyed the tramp through this heavenly air as much as I ever could enjoy anything again, I thought, in this Harry-less world.

So far, I thought "going on the land" was not so bad after all. Eating delicious bread and butter out-of-doors on a glorious morning at an hour when, in London, I should still have been a-bed! Not at all bad. It might even do a little to take my thoughts off the wound that could not help aching for ever.

And besides this, I was conscious that in the whole air of the place there was something as distinctive, as familiar as in the taste of the farmhouse bread and butter. It was a something that I had not savoured since I was a growing girl....

Other country landscapes that I had since seen had always made me feel the lack of this "something." ...

That these others were often, in a different way, as beautiful, I did admit. I appreciated their dignity, the prosperity of their wide, flat lands. They had so much that was to be admired, but not——

Ah! Not the "flavour" of Wales!

That wild charm one can no more describe than one could photograph the skylark's song. But, with that in one's blood, other charms leave one temperate. Once tasted, never to be forgotten.... I found myself sniffing it up now as if it were some rich and definite perfume, instead of some atmosphere made up of a thousand elusive things ... the dreams of youth included!

And I was glad—that is, as glad as I could allow myself to feel in the circumstances—that, to take up my new venture, Fate had sent me back to the Land of my Fathers.

"There!" exclaimed Vic presently. "There's the farm!"

She pointed to a square building of apricot red, backed by trees and a gently-sloping green hill. It had a flat slate roof, and its many windows glittered in the sun.

With interested curiosity I gazed upon it as we came nearer—the farm where my chum and I were to receive our training for this new life which we'd chosen for ourselves—on a toss-up! That farm—stacked with such memories for me now! On that first morning I wondered what it would mean for me.

"Here's our way, round by the back," Vic piloted us. Up a short lane we went, through a big, red wooden gate, and into the farmyard. It was the first farmyard I'd been into since Dad gave up that farm of his that had swallowed, sovereign by sovereign, all his capital. This other place looked—ah, how much larger and more prosperous!

The big, oblong yard was bordered by buildings that gave the place the air of a homely monastery with cloisters.

By a shed door to the left a labourer in shirt-sleeves and wearing a soldier's cap was holding a horse, and talking to a very big man in tweeds. As this man turned his face I saw it was the kindest-looking one that I had ever seen.

Vic led us up to him.

"Here's our two new pupils, Mr. Price," she introduced us. "This little one's Elizabeth Weare. This other young lady with the white face is Joan Matthews."

A very kindly smile was sent down upon us from the top reaches of that farmer's six-foot-four. He was indeed a gentle giant.

"You will soon get rosy cheeks here," he assured me. "Yes, yes. Vic, now, wasn't so much to look at when she came here first, a twelvemonth ago. Didn't like it at first!" This with a twinkle. "Couldn't get rid of her afterwards. Shows she likes it here now, doesn't it, for her to want to stay on as instructor?"

"Instructor!" murmured Elizabeth and I together. For the first time we realized this big, laughing Cockney-voiced Campite was also an official.

The farmer turned away with a friendly nod to us; and to Vic he added:

"You will put them on to their jobs of work, then, won't you—same as I told you yesterday?"

"Right you are, Mr. Price," returned Vic briskly. "Now, then, dear," to Elizabeth, "you'd better come along with me. Picking up stones for you. I'll show you the field that's got to be cleared."

I saw an indescribable mingling of expressions cross Elizabeth's small face under that brand-new Land Army hat. Pick up stones! The thing any child at the seaside can do! Was it for this that she had given up her post as an efficient clerk and had joined the Land Army? Such, I know, was her thought. But she only said "Right!" and stood by for our instructor's orders.

Vic turned to me.

"Now you," she went on, with a gesture towards the shed near which that labourer had been standing. "Here's your little job."

Now, I appeal to all you girls who joined up as I did, ignorant and "townified," to work on the Land! Had you any clear idea of what you thought would be the first task to which you would be set?

I hadn't.

But Elizabeth mischievously declares that I had already pictured my first job thus:

Scene, a shining, fragrant dairy, with roses framing the open lattice. Myself, in a lilac sun-bonnet, looking like a lady land-worker out of some revue, and wielding a snowy, carved wooden implement with which I printed a clover-blossom design off on to innumerable pats of golden butter.

If this was "The Ideal," how different was "The Real" to which Vic pointed now!

My "little job"!

I had smelt it the moment that I'd entered the farmyard. As a child I'd seen Dad's roughest farm-lad engaged upon a similar "little job," and I'd been sorry for him—it had seemed not only such hard work, but so disgusting!

It involved spade work and a pitchfork, a wheelbarrow and the midden in the centre of the yard, on which a speckled hen and her brood were peering and running about. It also involved a dive into dark and very evil-smelling recesses, with noisome straw underfoot and festoons of grey cobwebs overhead. Never had I thought I should set foot—or nose—in such a place.

But it was in tones of the cheeriest matter-of-course that Vic concluded:

"Yes, you start cleaning out that cow-house."

That cow-house! Start cleaning it out! I——!

Vic gave me my tools, bore off Elizabeth, and left me to it.

There I stood in the farmyard—I, the would-be farm-worker, to whom "work" had always meant sitting indoors and checking papers and clicking a typewriter!

Well, I must make a beginning.

I made the beginning that beginners do make—namely, I went at it like a bull at a gate.

With my hands that had not held any tool heavier than a fountain-pen, I grasped, I clutched the spade-handle, that felt so huge and so unwieldy. Violently I drove that spade into that brown and malodorous mass at my feet. Ugh! Violently I tried to raise the heavy spadeful of that horror. It was too heavy to lift. I struggled.

At the third or fourth effort I heaved the load up. Wildly I cast the foul burden into the wheelbarrow. I missed it by half, though; half that spadeful fell upon my boots and upon my immaculate gaiters. How revolting. I stamped myself free, shuddering.

Savagely I stooped to my loathsome task. I dug, heaved, threw. In ten minutes I was hot, dripping, exhausted. My arms shook and twitched with over-exertion.

And with a sudden more violent lunge than any of the others, I thrust my spade into the half-heaped barrow and left it.

I'd made up my mind. I wasn't going to stick this. I'd buy myself out. Going back to London offices and tightly-shut windows would be anyhow better than this.

I'd go! Yes! Now!

Hurriedly I began pulling down the sleeves of the smock that I'd rolled up above my elbows. I'd got one sleeve down, when the shed-door was suddenly darkened. A man's shape shut out the glimpse of farmyard. A man's eyes were upon me with an amused and curious stare.

I recognized him.

Yes! He was that young officer who had taken it upon himself, last night at the hut, to ask me how long I thought I should stick this.

Of course, he would—he would choose this moment to come upon me again!

Angry was not the word for my feelings towards the young man!

This was unfair. But it didn't affect him. He looked at me, and at the one sleeve that I had rolled down again. He gave the honeyed smile that every Land Girl at the camp had noticed for its sweetness. And then, in the brusque voice that was such a contrast to the smile, he said—without even a "good morning":

"Any one could see that you had never set foot on a farm before."

"How d'you know I haven't? As it happens I have!" I retorted crossly, and again I caught up the spade that I'd flung into the barrow.

"Anyhow, you don't know how to handle those things," he said, moving forward. "That's not the way to hold a spade."

Without more ado he took the spade out of my hands, holding it lightly. He drove it without violence into the foul mess that heaped the floor, taking up about half the quantity that I had done.

"You'll find," he remarked, "that if you don't overload the spade it will balance itself. Same with the pitchfork. Let the work do itself. Look."

He let that spade swing back, and the weight on it swung forward to the barrow with almost no exertion at all.

"Let weight weigh on your side," he said, driving in the spade. "Let force force. Let gravity grav. You see what I mean."

He gave me a little nod as I watched.

"You'll find," he said again, "that you can't fight nature. You can make her work for you, though."

Turning to the wheelbarrow, he picked up the handles of it and trundled it out into the sunny farmyard. Not quite knowing what he would be at, I followed the light figure in khaki towards that mound of unspeakableness, where the grey hen clucked to her young. A board slanted up the side of it. The young man turned to speak to me as he trundled.

"The same with the barrow," Captain Holiday went on. "You don't let it stand still at the foot of that plank and then heave it up. You heave it along the level here, where it's easiest. Then it'll go halfway up by itself. Like this."

Easily he ran the barrow halfway up the plank. Then, when I thought he was going to tip it over, he let it run down again, and wheeled it back with its noisome load to the cowshed.

"D'ye see?"

"Yes. But you might have emptied it for me," I suggested, "while you'd got it there."

"Oh, no," he said coolly, "that's not the idea." Then, quickly: "Won't you roll that sleeve of yours up again?"

This with a twinkle?

I bit my lip.

Of course he had caught me out in the very act of "chucking it." This made me all the more furious because I couldn't show it. Who was this Captain Holiday who permeated this district, asking leading questions of land-workers, and, without encouragement, showing them how and how not to do their work? Surely it was hardly any business of his, after all?

In what I meant to be a crushing tone, I asked him:

"Do you wheel many barrows in the Army?"

He replied cheerfully, and in a disarmingly boyish manner:

"It's just the same principle if you're swinging a bayonet. They're both weights. Now, you try again."

And I actually found myself rolling up my sleeves again and—obeying orders!

Yes! I did as I was told by this incredible young man, as I called him inwardly at the time.

I see now what he meant. Any other man would have gone on doing my work while I leaned against the edge of the stall. He made me do it myself, and at the exact moment when I'd decided I'd had enough of it!

"Take a rest now," broke in this Captain Holiday after he'd watched me critically for some minutes. "Resting is just as important as thrusting."

He drew up a long wooden crate near the cow-house door.

"Sit down," he ordered.

I did, still wondering half-exasperatedly who this tall young captain was.

Did he think that just because I was on the land I was to be spoken to by any stranger who drifted along? If so—well!

I was just wondering how I had better show him very plainly that he'd made a big mistake, when again I was disarmed by the sight of that charming smile. No man with a smile like that could make that kind of mistake. But again the smile was accompanied by the bluntest remark.

"You were jacking up just now, weren't you? Thinking you'd chuck the whole show?"

This nettled me exceedingly.

"No! I was doing nothing of the kind," I replied hotly.

"You know quite well that you were," he retorted quickly. "But you will always contradict me, and I shall never admit what you say. That's understood."

Evidently he meant that our acquaintance was to go on, whatever I intended.

He crossed his legs and pulled a loose nail out of the side of the crate on which we sat. I hadn't asked him to sit down by me. That, too, he'd taken as a matter of course.

Was this young soldier some relation of Mr. Price? Had he anything to do with this farm? Or did he just appoint himself instructor to any Land Girl he happened to meet?

Hoping to find out what his position was, I asked vaguely, but more politely than I had spoken before:

"Are you stationed here?"

"Here in this cowshed?" Captain Holiday asked blandly.

At this I told him, quite shortly, not to be silly.

Whereupon he laughed.

"Well, then, if you mean for a mile or two round here"—he gave a little circular jerk of his head—"I suppose I am. My house is here. You haven't seen my house yet, but you'd pass it coming from the camp. It's that white place in the trees beyond the hill."

"But—that's the hospital. Then you're wounded,"—I glanced at his gold stripes—"or still sick?"

"That doesn't follow. What I mean is that it's my house."

"Then you turned it into a hospital?"

"No," replied this puzzling young man quietly. Then added, as if he were speaking to one of his own soldiers: "Come along. Time's up! Take a turn with the spade again. And see if you can make the wheelbarrow go up easily next journey."

As I took up the spade again he strolled out of the shed. I thought he was not even going to have the manners to bid me good morning. But he turned his face, and said laughingly over his shoulder:

"Au revoir—unless you mean to jack up before I see you again?"

Without waiting for a reply, he crossed the yard towards the farmhouse.

I went on with my so-far-from-romantic task, a little surprised to find that there did seem to be something in what this Captain Holiday had said about handling spades and wheeling barrows. His was the better way, after all. I tried to follow it. I still found the unusual exercise was labour; but it was not altogether the struggle that it had been at my first ignorant and violent efforts.

I worked, getting more flushed and moist and dishevelled as the cleared space on the slate floor grew—very gradually—larger.

There—I'd managed to tip the barrow over quite neatly that time. I wished I could turn through that cow-house the canal of which I saw the silver blink between meadows beyond the stack-roofs. That would be "making Nature work for one" with a vengeance!

Now! This time the spade seemed ever so much lighter, and yet I'd managed to get quite a good load on to it.

Presently I was startled to hear a bell clanging noisily across the yard. A woman's voice called to some one "Dinner!"

"Thank God and the Land Army for my good dinner; Amen."—GRACE (revised).

Dinner! At the word there invaded me an extraordinary feeling, to which I'd been a stranger for months in town. What was it?—hunger, ravenous and primitive—fervently I hoped that this summons meant dinner for everybody!

I glanced at my filthy forearms and hands. Remembering my "blunder" about the bedrooms in camp, I did not look for anybody to tell me where the bathroom was.

I made for the pump in the yard. And then, as I dried my arms and face as well as I could on a comparatively clean piece of my smock, I heard a good-natured Cockney voice behind me say:

"Oh, look at Celery Face sluicing herself in a young cataract!"

Turning, I found big Vic coming up with Elizabeth. My chum's small face was redder than I had ever seen it. It wore an "in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound" expression, and her uniform (though not filthy like mine) was no longer the immaculate fancy dress that it had seemed on the road to work.

Vic grinned.

"This little 'un is going to shape fine, only for breaking her back nearly," she told me. "How've you been getting on, young Joan? Let's have a look at your shed. Yes, that's the style. This 'ere job will be part of your cowman's test, you know. Cleaning out shed, maximum 10 marks. Seventy-five per cent. marks you've got to get in the tests before you pass out of here and get a swanky post somewhere, and be a credit to your instructress, don't you forget it!"

I couldn't help laughing as we followed her up to the farmhouse.

"Instructress, indeed!" I exclaimed. "I was expecting some 'instruction,' and you never came! You never even showed me how to hold the spade."

Vic flashed upon me her most teasing grin.

"I did come," she said with a nod. "Only you weren't wanting any 'instruction,' I noticed, from little Me. Went away again, I did—hooked it. You were all right. Never even saw me. You and your landowner!"

Before I could ask what Vic meant by "my landowner" we were all in the big front kitchen, with its dresser, its tridarn (or three-decker oaken chest), its grandfather clock, and its long table set for seven.

This was the first time Elizabeth or I had sat down to dinner in a kitchen. Much we should have cared had it been in the scullery, the barn, or the hen-house! There is no appetite like that which comes from physical toil!

Glorious greed was a delicious sauce—if any sauce had been needed—to the plentiful and savoury farm-house meal that was provided for us of boiled bacon, potatoes, greens, butter, bread, buttermilk, fruit tart, and cheese.

At the risk of writing myself down a glutton—or of reading like an advertisement for somebody's cocoa—I must dwell on the taste of that loaf, that butter, those other wholesome and delicious things with their suggestion of building healthy bodies and reddening rosy cheeks—the food with which England should be fed.

"Everything home-grown!" we were smilingly told by Mrs. Price, the farmer's wife, who took one end of the table, while her husband carved at the other. Their own dining-room in the front of the house was exquisite with old oak and the silver pots of two generations of agricultural prize-winners; but they elected to share their Land Girls' kitchen dinner because it seemed more hospitable and homely.

"There's nothing here that hasn't come off the farm," Mrs. Price added. "Those black currants in the tart are my last year's bottling, of course. But they were straight out of the garden here. I expect you find it dreadfully countrified fare after London—those of you that come from there."

* * * * * * *

Elizabeth and I here spared a moment from revelling in our second helpings of those home-grown vegetables, so efficiently cooked, to look up and laugh. What we were both thinking of was our last, farewell, midday meal in town.

It had consisted of:

(1) Hors d'œuvre, highly vinegary and suspect—tasting of nothing on earth.

(2) A morsel of sole that had distinctly not come "straight" out of the sea, and tasting of the fact.

(3) Escaloppes de veau with tomato sauce. I don't know what they tasted of, though they cost us a meat-ticket; they smelt, too, forbiddingly of the substitute fat in which they'd been fried.

(4) A small greyish roll, tasting of sawdust.

(5) One half peach, tasting of tin.

(6) Black coffee, tasting of dish-cloth, with a virulently green liqueur that we hoped might drown the tastes of the other courses, and a cheap cigarette.

England's lunch!

* * * * * * *

Certainly life was a succession of contrasts. From the dark fugginess of that crowded little Italian restaurant—which I'd loved because Harry "discovered" it—to this spotless Welsh kitchen where the kindly farm people "mothered" the five girls in farm-kit—Vic, Elizabeth, myself and the other two more advanced pupils. One of these was "Sybil," who had played the piano at the Hut last night, and who took her dip in the pool before going to work; the other was a bright-looking girl they called "Curley," though her hair was the straightest imaginable.

That gentle giant, Mr. Price, had a word for each as he carved.

"I like to know something about all you young ladies who've come down here to work," he said to me. "A lot we've had down here since the start. Twenty, I think, coming and going; splendid girls—good little workers, all. And some were one thing and some another. From South Wales the two last were who were here; fathers in the collieries. Then there's Curley," he nodded at her, "all her people in works, Birmingham. And Sybil here," with another nod, "from Buckinghamshire, never been away from home before without a maid, she told my wife. Father a general. May I ask if your father was in the Army too, perhaps?"

"No; my father wasn't in anything particular," I said. "He used to do a little bit of farming himself."

A gleam of interest lighted up the giant's blue eyes.

"Dear me! Farmed himself, did he? How big a farm, missy?" he asked.

"Oh, not big at all. Nor at all successful!" I told him ruefully. "I'm afraid he just lost money over it about seven years ago."

More interest from this other, prosperous-looking farmer.

"Farming," he told me gravely, "was no life for a man in this country until just lately. An existence, that was all. All the food we ought to have grown came in from over the sea. Agriculture, before the war, was simply hand to mouth, hand to mouth." He looked at his wife and added: "If it hadn't been for pedigree poultry and shire horses the farmers would have starved."

His wife nodded across the table; she was the sort of small, dainty little woman that you would expect that great-framed man to choose; her thick hair was prematurely grey, and her well-cut and tiny features, though composed, seemed as if they had looked on struggles in her time.

Then came something that, though it was only talk at a farmhouse table, was significant. It made me think. This new problem of my life on the land was full of old problems to others. Across that liberally-spread board that farmer's wife launched an astonishing remark.

"We nearly starved," she said, "when we were children in my father's time. One New Year he made up his accounts and he was down a thousand pounds. The next year again he was down a thousand. And the third year again he had lost another thousand. That January, I remember, he did not speak for a week."

Her soft voice shook. The faces of the Land Girls were all turned towards her, listening, surprised.

"Then," continued Mrs. Price, "he came into our nursery and said, 'Children, I'm broke. The dear old home will have to go.'"

Here the Land Girl Sybil put in gently:

"But you told me your brother had that farm now. So you didn't have to leave, Mrs. Price?"

"No! Because of my father fighting for it. He borrowed money at very high interest and went in for shire horses. In ten years he was just feeling his feet again. It was twenty years before he paid off everything. That was a struggle. Those were the hard times for farmers. It makes me feel bitter now, girls, when they say farmers are 'grasping,' and 'make money hand over fist,' just because the tide has turned at last, and farming isn't the terribly losing game it was!"

"Well, it'll never be so again, I hope," her husband assured her. Then he beamed about the table and added: "Not with all these young ladies here turning out to help like this! And that one," nodding at me, "a farmer's daughter herself! Where is your father living now, then?"

I told him the name of the village on the borderline between England and Wales.

"Not so far from here, then. Fifty miles off, perhaps. They'll be able to come down and see how you are getting on."

But here Vic broke in mischievously over her bread and cheese.

"Don't you worry, Mr. Price. She isn't going to bust herself with any homesickness. She don't want any more people. She's got off with a young man of her own down here already."

Here Elizabeth must needs turn her head sharply, to glance at me with an inquiry full of rebuke; uttering it aloud as well. "What young man?"

I took no notice of her. I looked at the others; the others who did not think (as she did) that I was far too fond of the whole Repulsive Sex.

"There was no young man—I mean, not in that sort of way at all—Vic's talking nonsense to tease me!" I assured the party, definitely.

"It was simply that Captain Holiday—whoever he is, he seems to think he can go anywhere and do anything—came into the shed where I was working and gave me a few tips about my work."

"Ah, Captain Holiday. Yes. It was him you were asking about, Vic," said Mr. Price, his blue eyes interested again. "Yes, he's our landlord here now that poor old Mr. Holiday's gone. Most of the property about belongs to him. The hospital, and your camp, and this farm, and all. A great interest he takes in all of it. All over it he was this morning. So he went and showed this young lady how to set about her job? Very obliging of him."

Vic again retorted teasingly.

"Oh, I don't know so much! I haven't noticed that young men are so nice and 'obliging' over helping girls with their jobs without they're interested in the girls themselves!"

I really failed to see why every one of the other girls should seem to take such a vivid interest in this argument—particularly Elizabeth, who ought to have known better!

Quite nettled, I put in quickly:

"Personally I shouldn't call this Captain Holiday a very 'obliging' young man." I was thinking of the way in which he'd trundled that wheelbarrow back with its noisome load, instead of emptying it for me, and I concluded, "Rather annoying, I should call him."

Then I was sorry I'd said that. Mr. Price, who had unfolded his long legs from under the table and was rising to his feet at the end of the meal, looked grave and gave me a quick glance.

"Indeed?" he said seriously. "I am sorry to hear it. I can't have anything like that, landlord or no landlord. If Captain Holiday was annoying one of my workers, I shall have to tell him——"

"Oh, please don't," I put in hastily. "I didn't mean that kind of 'annoying' at all. I only meant I was rather annoyed that any one should see I was such a raw beginner at my job. That was all."

In common fairness to the young man I felt I had to speak up for him to that extent. On returning to my cow-house I forgot all about him, forgot even that it was he who'd saved me from half the difficulty of my task. It was not all drudgery, when one found out the best and quickest way of doing what was so new to me—manual work.

Thankful enough was I, though, to knock off!

But on the way home Elizabeth brought up Captain Holiday again.

"Joan," she began, "what do you think of that

Rosalind: "Oh, Jupiter, how weary are my spirits!"
Celia: "I care not for my spirits, if my legs were not so weary."
                                                                                                    —SHAKESPEARE.

Severely I looked at my chum.

She and I were walking down the road between the flowering hedges back to camp behind Vic, Sybil, and Curley.

Now the other two pupils—who had wound up their day's work by milking, which we had been sent to watch—had knocked off obviously as fresh as paint. Elizabeth, too, made no complaint of feeling tired after her day's stone-picking. She strode along manfully, and I thought that the rather wooden way she moved was just because of the clumsy land-boots.

So that I vowed to myself that I'd never let her know what I'd begun to feel, after the midday rest, and in every muscle, namely, the relentless strain of unusual physical exertion.

Ah! How it had got me!

The first game of tennis, the first bicycle ride, the first row, the first long tramp of a summer holiday—everybody knows the ache that comes after these. Multiply that ache by fifty, and you'll have some idea of what happens after the first day's land-work. Personally I felt it would be all I could do to drag my stiffening limbs back to the hut!

I also felt that for Elizabeth to cross-question me at this moment was adding insult to aches. After staring at dinner, too!

"Elizabeth, you are a little owl," I informed her. "I know what you imagine. Can't any sort of young man say a word to me without it's starting some idea of a love-affair?"

Elizabeth, set-faced, said coolly, "Apparently not."

I straightened my back indignantly. Then caught my breath because it hurt me so. Hoping she hadn't noticed this, I demanded, "What d'you mean by that?"

"Wherever you go, Joan, young men always seem to break out," Elizabeth replied rebukefully.

She spoke the words "young men" just as Farmer Price might have mentioned caterpillars in his standing crops.

"You forget that I came down here just because I'd had enough of them!" I said wearily.

Elizabeth, scowling:

"We've only just finished with the eternal Harry. For a year he monopolized you; nobody else existed! Then he went, leaving you without an ounce of go or fun in you—anyhow, he did go; at last. But the very day he'd gone you got a proposal from that other Man-thing; what was his name?"

"D'you mean Richard Wynn?"

"Yes. There was that. Well, you lost his letter. So he was off——"

"Shouldn't have taken him, anyhow," I protested.

"You said you would."

"People will say anything," I defended myself, "after a day like I'd just had in that office."

"I sometimes think you'd be quite silly enough to accept him yet," declared my candid friend as we tramped past the park trees that gave a glimpse of the white hospital. "But then we come down here. And the very first evening—what happens? A third young man crops up!"

"He didn't crop up to see me."

"Curious that you should be the only girl in the camp that he picked out to speak to," sniffed Elizabeth. "And that the next morning he should make a bee line for that cow-house of yours, and——"

Here she broke off with an alarmingly sudden little screech of "Ow!"

I stopped.

"What is the matter!"

"Nothing," retorted Elizabeth, with tears in her eyes.

"My dear old girl, what is it?" I insisted anxiously.

Then she laughed. She blurted out quickly:

"It's only that—the more I move the more it hurts me! Oh, Joan, I'm sore! That's why I snapped at you so crossly. They say 'Cross as a bear with a sore paw'—but—but I'm sore everywhere!"

"Oh! So am I!" I groaned, laughing with the relief of the confession. "I feel as if I'd got fifty new bones."

"So do I!"

"All hurting me like mad!"

"So are mine!" declared Elizabeth, hobbling. "Well, I suppose we'll get used to it. They say this wears off. Let's hope for the best—and for goodness' sake don't let us squabble."

"I never want to!"

"Righto. And tell me," continued my chum, "what you really do think of that young man Captain Holiday?"

I couldn't help laughing. If Elizabeth wants to get at anything, it comes off in the long run. So, as we hobbled stiffly down the road together, I told her as much as I did "think" on the score of this new acquaintance. I described the cow-house scene.

"Such a truly idyllic setting," I chaffed her, "for any sort of a tête-à-tête!"

I repeated the young man's remarks about the way to "make work do itself, and to let gravity grav." I told her how he'd made me roll down my sleeves again, and had ordered me about generally.

"I think he's rather a domineerer. But he is a sahib, of course. He's rather original, too. And almost the rudest person I've met," I said critically. "He is the rudest, next to you."

Elizabeth said blandly:

"Yes, and yet you've always liked me most awfully. I suppose you'll soon find out how much you like him."

I began to say, "We shall probably never see the man again," but remembered that he was the owner of this land on which we toiled, and that it would sound silly. So I merely said:

"I don't dislike him at all."

Elizabeth shook her bobbed hair against her cheeks. Grimly, fatalistically, she added:

"I know you're going to like him horribly."

"I know your poor little sore bones have affected your brain!" I told her. "Haven't I just had one 'doing' over liking some one too horribly? Yet, in the middle of that, you say——"

"It isn't the middle," Elizabeth returned very quickly, "it is coming to the end."

"What!"

"It is the beginning of the end. You won't go on thinking of Harry to the end of your days."

"Much you know about it, child!" I said, and as I spoke the wide sun-lighted green lands faded from before me, and I saw Harry's polished black head above the pink lights of a restaurant table—Harry's handsome, straying eyes. "The thought never leaves me, Elizabeth."

"Hasn't it left you once today?"

Here—well, it was the greatest surprise to me, but I did have to straighten my mouth out of a smile. Today? The thought of Harry had certainly been somewhat overlaid by—cow-house. But I said:

"It's there always, worse luck, at the back of my mind."

"Making more room in front," said my impish chum. "You're better about him already."

Patiently I sighed.

"You're better," insisted Elizabeth, "even this little time away in this weird place with this extraordinary job lot of people has done you good. You will begin to forget soon."

Pityingly I smiled at her.

"Harry," I told her, "is not the kind of man who gets forgotten. I wish he were. He is one of those charmers who leave their mark on a woman's life. He'd such wonderful ways. He——"

"Don't shove me into the wall," begged Elizabeth. "I feel knocked about enough as it is."

"Sorry. I wish I could make you realize, though, about Harry. He once took me to a play where the woman says: 'There are two kinds of love affairs. There are affairs—and there are just loves.' Unfortunately this is one of those."

"Oh, yes," said Elizabeth drily.

"If you'd ever had one of either," said I, nettled, "you'd know the difference."

"So that there will always be one thing that I shall never know," concluded the Man-hater, limping along.

I glanced at the small dog-tired but resolute figure in the smock that the evening sunlight was gilding from holland to cloth of gold.

"Wait!" I threatened her again. "Wait until some great huge ultra-masculine man comes along and begins to bully you in a voice like a typhoon!"

"Like a what?"

"Like a gale! Like a Bull of Basan! That sort of huge brute who'd terrify the life out of you, Elizabeth my child, and order you about like Petruchio and Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew! That's what'll happen! I shall simply love to watch you being absolutely subjugated"—

"Book early, to avoid disappointment," mocked my chum.

"—subjugated by a gigantic, navvy sort of person with muscles as big as vegetable-marrows bobbling all over his arms and shoulders!"

"It sounds too fascinating, doesn't it?" jeered the girl whose head reached up to my ear. "I love your prognostications, Joan, especially after a hard day's work! It puts you in train! You really think a bully-ragging Prize-fighter-type will be my Fate!"

"Unless——" Here I had another idea. "Unless you ever meet the one and only man in this world that you've ever written letters to. What about that old Colonel of yours?" I laughed.

A word of explanation here.

"The Old Colonel" had been for a year a standing joke in our London ménage. He was the officer whose furnished flat we had taken over by the week in Golder's Green—and which we'd now left for such very different quarters. His flat was full of neat contrivances, such as the bath-mat, hand-made out of rounds of bottle corks; full, too, of books on "Tactics," all annotated in a neat, old-maidish hand.

We had amused ourselves by making a mental picture of their owner—a methodical, fussy, white-moustached "old" soldier. This had seemed all of a piece, too, with the Colonel's letters; for he and Elizabeth had exchanged much formal correspondence on the subjects of the kitchen chimney and of the tabby-cat he pensioned.

"When he comes back from the Front and sees you," I threatened her, "it may alter everything. If you become an old man's darling——"

"Brrrr!" shuddered Elizabeth.

"Plenty of girls do. You might like it better than marrying the Lion-Tamer, after all.... And don't say I didn't warn you if it does come off——"

"Give me your handkerchief," said Elizabeth, without ceremony plucking the green silk handkerchief out of my smock pocket. "I want to tie a knot in it."

She tossed it back to me as we went on.

"What's that for?" I demanded. "To remind you of what I said about that old Colonel of yours?"

"No," from Elizabeth. "It's to remind you of something, Joan."

As the corrugated iron roof of the hut came into sight beyond the great white cliff of a hawthorn bush she spoke earnestly, but with an imp of mischief dancing in each of her eyes.

"Whatever happens, however much better you may feel, however much more you may laugh and talk like your old self, I want you always to remember one thing. I want you to be sure—sure to go on thinking of Harry at least once every day!"

And before I could take the unsympathetic little wretch by her overalled shoulders and shake her, before I could pull her short hair, or even retort by a single word, we were back at the camp among the girls—with a fresh trial awaiting us!

"Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave."—MILTON.

Yes! Not even yet was there to be rest after the exertions of the first day's land-work.

As Elizabeth and I hobbled into the hut ten minutes after the others, Vic's voice hailed us above the laughing clatter:

"Here, Celery-face and Mop! Off with your spotless—I don't think—uniforms, and come on for a nice swim!"

"Swim?" we echoed, glancing aghast about the hut.

The gang of timber girls, with Miss Easton, had returned from their woods, and they and the farm girls were in various stages of getting out of land-kit and into swimming costumes.

After hard work, here they were all ready again for hard play, for exercise, for plunging into cold water.

I began to say something wistful about embrocation.

"Embrocation? There's a whole pool of something better for you than embrocation outside," Vic said with scorn. "You get those two extra costumes out, Sybil, will you? And you, kids, off with your boots."

There was no gainsaying this redoubtable Vic. Big, and brown, and beaming with good-humor, she stood over us. We just had to start unlacing our gaiters.

The girls trooped out into the meadow in coats over their bathing dresses. Vic and Sybil waited inexorably, for us. Reluctantly and stiffly I took off my overall. And I saw Vic's eyes fasten upon the garments that I was wearing underneath.

They were the same "pretties" that I always wore in town under my georgette blouses. I made them myself. The under-bodice that attracted Vic's notice was of bluish-pink crêpe-de-chine with mauve satin ribbon shoulder-straps, and with the wings of a sky-blue bird—for Happiness—embroidered across the front.

"That's a dinky 'casserole' you've got on there, young Celery-face," pronounced Vic, scrutinizing this garment. "Swanky Royal Air Service crest touch! And a silk 'chim' underneath it, too! My word! You won't be wearing those things long on the farm, though. Look here, Syb!"

Sybil, who had brought out the spare costumes, came up. From her voice and ways I'd fancied that she would sympathize with my own idea of dressing for the Land. This was to make it a point of self-respect that, though I must wear coarse holland and rough stuff for my outside things, my under-garments should still be as dainty as ever.

It surprised me when Sybil, glancing at my underthings, shook her head deprecatingly.

"Those won't do," she told me gently. "Not for cleaning out cow-houses in! You don't find a man-worker—well!" she laughed, "you never find a man wearing pink crêpe-de-chine all day. But what I mean is that when you're on a man's job you've got to dress the part, not just for the look of it, but for the use. A man works 'in the sweat of his brow'—and of his body. So he has got to have clothes he can sweat into comfortably—to put it frankly. He doesn't wear things that hold the moisture and cling—as yours are doing now."

I glanced down. The crepe and ribbons certainly were clinging to me. Moreover, they were very chilly now I'd stopped moving about.

"Give you your death of cold, those would," Vic declared, and Sybil, wrapping a towel round my shoulders, supported her.

"Working as a man, you simply can't wear the clothes you wore when you were just sitting still as a girl!" she remarked.

"I can't wear woollies and sweaters next me," I protested. "I would rather die of cold!"

"You needn't wear wool," Sybil said, as I got stiffly into my costume. "Though of course athletes say a sweater next your skin is the only thing. They do scoff at the way women wear four thicknesses of silk or lace, and then a 'sweater' over it all, doing no good! But you must wear a woven vest or one of linen mesh—or anything that dries quickly, and lets the air through to your skin. I'll lend you something, then you can order more."

"And keep dinky undies
For civvies and Sundays,"

sang out Vic. "Now then, ready?"

Vic caught each of us by an arm, and ran us out of hut and home, down the green and daisied meadow at the back of the camp.

In front of us two girls, with bare legs showing under their ballooning Land Army coats, and a third swathed round with a bath-robe, were gambolling like lambs down the grassy path. From behind the alders at the bottom came sounds of splashing and laughter. We followed to where the bank descended under trees to the Welsh trout-stream, brightly clear as a child's eyes, with little cataracts between mossy boulders from which the girls could dive into the wide, smooth pool that reflected them.

Well! It was all the bathroom the camp had. We might as well get in and treat it as a good wash!

Elizabeth, on the pool brink, said:

"N—neither of us can swim, you know—oooh!" she wound up with her little screech. Vic, gently, but firmly, had shoved her under water.

I dipped before she could catch hold of me, while the others shouted with laughter. The first moment was awful. Then came the glorious glow and tingle of reaction, and we felt quite jolly, as Vic promised that she and young Sybil would soon teach us to swim.

"In and out with you today, though," she decreed. "Here's the towel—have a scrub now. I'll rub you down."

Scarified but warm enough, we sat under an alder in our overcoats, watching the others until tea-time or supper-time as we cared to call it. And then—Ah! It was as though one substantial midday meal had never been....

We just legged it ("for the best!" as the Timber girls shouted) back to the mess-table in the Hut!

"Whence came ye, merry Damsels, whence came ye,
        So many, and so many, and such glee?"
                                                                                    —KEATS.

Later Elizabeth and I talked to Miss Easton, who, while the Campites played, read, sewed, or danced as before, told us a little about them all—these girls, who were already less strange to us, and who were all to become our friends.

Miss Easton began with her own story. Her last job had been in a munitions factory, where she'd worked ten hours a day on a skeleton bridge 35 feet up in the air, which had danced and quivered with the heat of a row of furnaces below. She said it always felt like Vesuvius going to break into eruption. Not unnaturally her health had broken down.

At the Labour Exchange she had mentioned "Forestry" as a forlorn hope, and they'd given her a trial—in more senses than one.

She had been set to cross-cut sawing with a hardened "old hand." Twenty-five trees was counted a day's work. Halfway through the twenty-third she had fainted clean off. For a week she'd crept back to her billet, and had just taken her aches and blisters to bed, where she lay like a log until the next morning. Now she could stand anything—climb like a cat or run like a deer.

"I feel finer every day," she told us, smiling.

Then she told us of the others, in order of what used to be called "Social Importance." I suppose Sybil Wentworth came first. She was the country-house girl, who had only known London as the Season, the Park, Hurlingham and Henley. Her own home was lovely, Miss Easton said; there was Georgian wing and a Norman chapel, and it boasted one of those other countless bedrooms where Queen Elizabeth had passed a night.

Now Sybil's mattress was drawn up next to Lil's, who had been maid-of-all-work in one of the million villas that are too small to house and feed a servant decently, but where a servant must be kept because one is kept in bigger houses.

Among Lil's mates were a girl from Somerville, a pickle-factory hand, a student of music, and Vic the Cockney.

In every community of girls is one who will always take the lead by virtue of her vitality and initiative. Here it was Victoria Jelks, the ex-coster girl from Kentish Town, who stood out as one of the handsomest, "goeyest," and most efficient women I have met.

The forewoman took Vic's advice; Sybil deferred to her. Yet she belonged to the class that we have seen blackening Hampstead Heath on Bank Holidays, grimy and anæmic, made ugly by the life and toil of town. The country, the air, the healthy work have beautified them back into the mould that Nature meant; have given them back shapeliness and colour.

I pondered over the miracle, as I saw it now.

For these once-town girls, too, the two great drawbacks of the country did not exist. Dulness, loneliness! How could they feel lonely or bored leading this communal life all set to laughter? No wonder if they found it like the very best bits of being back at school again! With fewer restrictions, too, with what wealth of new ideas, fresh outlooks on life gained by the intermingling of class with class....

Kitchener's First Army was not more of a medley of types!

"Why," Elizabeth asked softly, "have they all joined up?"

"Oh! Different reasons they give," answered the forewoman. "One joins because her pal joined. Lil there was tired of domestic service—I'm sure I don't blame her. Another hears what fun the life is—and it is fun, even if we do have to work hard. We couldn't work so hard if it weren't fun! Another thinks it's a shame if we can't do as much as the Frenchwomen do. Another girl just said, 'I've got six brothers serving.'"

Here a lump came into my throat as I listened. I thought of my own brothers. Jack, who went down with his ship in '15—Guy with his guns—Victor, the youngest of us all, who had just got his wings, and was off to join his air squadron in France. What sort of sister was I to those fighting boys? Unworthy! Poor in physique and grit, I'd been ready to buy myself out of the Land Army almost before I'd given it a trial.

I was still thinking of that after "Lights out," when all the girls were already asleep.

But Elizabeth, from the next mattress, heard.

She crept near in the darkness.

"Joan! What is it? Why are you crying?" she whispered. "Are you cross because I teased you about that wretched Harry?"

"No! Oh, no," I whispered back. "It's only that I—I felt ashamed of myself! There was I—ready to jack up this morning! I won't now. No, not if I never stop feeling stiff again, I shall stick it. I've just made up my mind this minute."

"You made it up before," murmured my chum, wriggling back to her mattress. "You made it up this morning when that young man said——"

"Oh, bother that interfering young man," I interrupted, "I hope I don't see him again."

Elizabeth, as she rolled over again, said drowsily but firmly, "You'll see him again before three days are up."

"I would I were a milkmaid."—TENNYSON.

Elizabeth was right in her prediction. Before the three next days were up I had again encountered this Captain Holiday.

This time it was not in that Augean stable of a cow-house—which, by the way, I had finished cleaning out—thereby earning a word of approbation from Mr. Price, and also hardening my muscles. I no longer felt that my body was full of new bones, all hurting me at once. I felt, already, as if I were gaining a new body.

Quite ready for anything I felt on that late afternoon when Mrs. Price came to me with the two big milk pails.

"Please scald these out," said the farmer's daintily-featured little wife. "You can take your first milking-lesson this evening."

I was delighted as I washed my hands in the back kitchen, scalded out the pails, and followed Mrs. Price in her crisp grey overall into the big cow stall.

Milking! This would be so much easier, as well as more enjoyable, than wielding that pitchfork and bending my back over that heavy barrow to and from that disgusting midden!

How fragrant, after that last job, was the atmosphere of the big stable, where the breath of the cows mingled with the incomparable smell of the new milk that was already frothing and foaming into the pail held between the knees of the Land Girl "Curley"—that straight-haired, smiling brunette.

She was sitting milking the biggest of the seven black-and-white cows that stood tied up in a row. At the stall next to her sat Sybil on a three-legged stool of heavy oak, also milking busily.

"Now, Joan, you shall start away on Clover here. She's the easiest," said Mrs. Price, leading me to a cow at the farther end of the stable—a cow that was snowy white but for the broad band of black that encircled her body and the black tassel of her tail.

The farmer's wife took that tail in her hand and with a twist of straw-rope tied it down to one of the cow's hind-legs.

"That is to stop her flicking you in the eye with it," explained Mrs. Price. "Now Vic always puts the tail to the cow's side and pins it down by leaning her head against it; but you can't manage that yet. Always nervous they are at first, with a stranger. Soon get used to you," Mrs. Price assured me, as the cow looked round, tossed her head, shuffled her little hoofs, and would have twitched that captive tail. "I'll talk to her a little."

Fondling her silky flanks, the farmer's wife spoke to Clover, in soothing, softly-accented words that I suppose were Greek to Curley and Sybil—but I still remembered a little of the language that had been chattered about me in those far-off school-room days, when I'd worn a plait and wandered about a Welsh farm, so differently run from this one.

I'd seen Dad's cowman stand to milk on the steep hillside, where the cows grazed. He had called to his cows just like this.

"Little heart!" cooed Mrs. Price, in Welsh. "Heart of gold! Best white sugar, you are! Little Clover, dear! I'll start her, Joan."

She set the wide-lipped pail under the cow, and with that other small, capable hand of hers began milking where she stood. Sharply and copiously the white spurts ran through her fingers.

"Now, Joan," she said in a moment. "Sit down to it. Take your pail so. Now your fingers like this. Now try."

I tried.

Once or twice I'd been allowed to try at home, long ago. But how I'd forgotten!

Heavens! How difficult it was! If Clover were the easiest cow in that stable, I should have been sorry to try the most unyielding one! It was almost impossible to me at first to squeeze out even a drop of milk.

I worked away, and quite suddenly I realized that it was coming mightily hard on my fingers and forearms, this work that seemed to be no work at all to Mrs. Price, and easy enough to the two other girls.

"Do you know how long it takes to make a milker, a really first-class milker? Three years," declared the farmer's wife impressively. "And even then she has to be born as well as made, like. After all, it's an art, same as playing the piano. But you can learn to milk quite well, quite so that the cows get milked all right, in a month, say. You'll do all right, only work."

I worked without much success, but doggedly. I was sweating with effort under my hat and into my mesh garments, lent by Sybil. I was flushed, but determined; terrified of hurting Clover, delighted when a meagre spurt of milk did reward me, attentive to Mrs. Price's instructions, and afraid I was showing myself up as the completest fool, when—

Yes, this naturally was the moment that that young man's voice made itself heard behind me. He must have come in by the other door farther down the stable.

"Good evening, Mrs. Price!"

"Good evening, Captain Holiday. Have you come to have another look round?"

"You don't mind, I know," said the direct, uncompromising tone, which I could guess was accompanied by that friendly and ingratiating smile.

Intent upon my occupation, I went on struggling. My back was to him; but there are times when one can feel a pair of eyes fixed as surely as one could feel a hand placed on the nape of one's neck.

* * * * * * *

Now, looking back, I wonder at myself.

Was there really that time when I never wished to see him? Was he still nothing to me, then? It seems incredible to me, after all that has come since.

But, that late afternoon, all in the fragrant atmosphere of the milk that rang in the pails, with the sweet grass-scented breath of the cows all about me, he was nothing to me, nothing still but an intruder.

* * * * * * *

With a sigh of exasperation I tugged at the warm, leathery udder of Clover. Strenuous minutes elapsed. Still Captain Holiday stood by, saying no word to me, but always watching.

Always conscious of his presence, I saw nothing of him but his shadow flung before him, clean-cut blue on the yellow-white wall of the stable.

Then I heard Mrs. Price asking him if he were comfortable at the lodge?

So that was where he lived; Vic had told me there was quite a swanky big lodge to the hospital grounds.

He told Mrs. Price that they were very nice quarters. Then came something I hadn't expected. I heard Mrs. Price give a curiously mischievous little chuckle. It ran through her voice as she asked the next question:

"More than enough room there, isn't there, Captain Holiday, for a bachelor?"

This was a hint, I know, smiling and plainly meant! Not only that, but I felt her smile taking in myself as well as him.

She was as bad as Elizabeth. I was glad my back was towards both of them.

Captain Holiday's cool voice replied:

"Quite. That's why I'm having some people down to stay with me. Must have a house-party for the concert. You know we're getting up a concert at the hospital, Mrs. Price. Yes, I'm expecting a wounded pal of mine down in a day or so."

Mrs. Price's soft voice broke in to speak to me.

"Tired, Joan? Rest a minute, just——"

I moved into a more comfortable position, giving a look round before I bent to my task again.

The young "Must-know-all," as the nursery phrase has it, was still watching my fingers. What was it in his slight smile that seemed to prompt me to what I did next?

I squeezed some milk on to my fingers, and then, I know, his smile grew broader. It was as though he'd seen that old trick somewhere, and had egged me on to it. But where had this soldier watched milking before?

"That's coming better now, Joan," approved Mrs. Price. "That's because you wetted your fingers. Look—dip your fingers in the milk, my mother taught me. Easier for the cow and easier for you."

I said:

"Yes, I remember now seeing the man dip his fingers in the pail at Dad's farm. I'd forgotten. Lots of things will come back to me presently."

Here, above me, the man's shadow moved quickly on the wall. It was as though Captain Holiday, still planted there behind me, were listening as intently as he was watching me.

Rather confused, I went on to show that I did know something about this job.

"I saw on the efficiency test papers," said I, "that the examiners from headquarters don't like the wet milking. It said preference would be given to dry milking."

"Cleaner, for some, p'raps," said Mrs. Price. "Fifteen marks, too; but I thought you were no town girl! Doesn't it show now, Captain Holiday?"

A non-committal "Um" came from Captain Holiday as his tall shadow slid away from the wall and out of the farmyard just as Elizabeth and Vic came in.

"Again!" was my chum's laconic comment when we were walking home.

I laughed good-humouredly enough, for I was a little pleased with the way I'd got on with my work.

"Elizabeth, you're getting one-idea'ed," I told her as I strolled along, picking out of the hedge a country nosegay of stitchwort and dog-violets and primroses with one gay pink flower of campion. "I must say I shall be glad when Hackenschmidt the Second turns up——"

"Who?"

"The hefty Brute who's going to tame you, you Man-hater, when the time comes," I explained, putting a leaf of Herb-Robert, pungent-scented and lacy, as frill to my bouquet. "I shall be able to rag you about him then, instead of having to put up with your nonsense. You wait."

"Yes, I'm waiting," nodded Elizabeth grimly.

I said "All things come to her who waits. I expect he'll take at least seventeens in boots! And throw them at you!"

"A word in due season, how good it is!"—SCRIPTURE.

At the Camp we found the Timber-gang buzzing about what constituted for all of us the great event of the day—the day's mail.

It arrived after the girls were already at work, so that since breakfast they had been looking forward to the letters, wondering about them....

Ah, these letters! Most people realize by this time how much they have always meant to the boys at the Front. They meant as much and more to the war-working girls! You people who "can't be bothered to write much," you correspondents who "forget"—I wish you could have seen that group of uniformed lasses with the green Forestry ribbons round their hats, clustering about the forewoman who held the packet. I wish you could have heard the eager tone of their "Any for me?"

"Two for you, Curley—one from France. Oh! girls, look at the snapshots of me sister's nippers. 'To Auntie Vic, with love from Stan'—all right, ain't it?" cried Vic.

"Only these four for me?" exclaimed the red-haired Welsh timber girl.

"And none for me! Isn't it a cruel shame?" lamented Lil. "Here, Aggie, do let me have a read of yours——"

"I say, this isn't for me. It got slipped in among mine. 'Miss Weare'—who's she when she's at home? Oh! The little new one. Here, Mop——"

Elizabeth took the letter.

I was reading a kind letter from Agatha, my step-mother, who ended with, "Still I hope you will not find that this new venture of yours is a mistake after all," when there was a little sudden laugh and a quick exclamation from my chum at my elbow.

"Joan, I say, Joan!"

"Yes? Who've you heard from?"

"Who d'you think?" she returned amusedly, taking me by the elbow to draw me aside into the porch. "I'll give you three guesses!"

"Man or woman? Ah, I needn't ask. Woman, of course?"

"As it happens, no!"

"What? A man?" I exclaimed. "But you never write to any men——"

"Don't I? I do."

"Only to one landlord," I said. "Only to the ancient Colonel!"

Elizabeth gave her gurgling boyish chuckle.

"Right in one," she said. "It is the old Colonel again. You know I wrote to him last about that loose scullery tap that we had to leave as it was. Well, he's home on sick leave now, he says, and he writes from our flat—his own flat, I mean. Only he's coming down here very shortly——"

"Here?" I exclaimed, glancing round the big hut, with its characteristic grouping of Land Girls off duty.

Some of them were still poring and chattering over their mail; Peggy, with her foot upon a chair, was cleaning her hobnailed boots; Vic, now clad in a bathing costume and her Land Army hat, was sitting on a corner of the table, swinging her legs, whistling, and stitching at a button that had come loose on her khaki breeches.

"This is no place for a dear old gentleman like your colonel! What does he want to come here for?" I added.

"Says he'll be staying with a friend of his in this neighbourhood," explained Elizabeth, handing me the note with the neat, precise handwriting that we had seen on so many business letters, "and that as I was here he would give himself the pleasure of calling upon me if he might. Antediluvian touch, isn't it? And, of course, he won't be allowed to call here, I suppose, even at his age."

"Oh, but I hope we shall meet him," I said, as I prepared to get into bathing-things again for my swimming lesson from Vic and Sybil in the pool. "It will be rather fun, after all our guess-work, to see what the funny old thing really is like."

Now this was vouchsafed to us in a few days from then. And I admit that this, and what it brought in its train, has been quite one of the shocks of my life.

"This is the life,
    This is the life,
This is the life—for mine!"
                                                        —THE BING BOYS.

We had been at Mr. Price's farm for a week now. In that short time the miracle had begun to work.

Seven bottles of the most powerful pick-me-up could not have worked in that time what was done by these seven natural tonics—fresh air, physical toil, simple, wholesome food, cold water, newness of occupation, laughter with comradeship, and profound sleep o' nights!

"This is pretty awful, you know," we whispered rebelliously to each other half a dozen times a day.

But——

Already we were beginning to enjoy it all! Neither of us admitted this, of course. For my part, I should have felt it was too ridiculously soon to enjoy anything in life again—and such a life!

That rag-time rabble of girls! That lack of civilized comforts in camp! Vic's orders for the day! This routine of jobs only fit for a farm-lad—yet what thrills of pride ran through me at the thought that I, Joan Matthews, was doing them at all, and that soon I should begin to do them quite well!

I had cleaned out a hopelessly filthy-looking cow-house—thrill of pride number one—all by myself—nearly. No rush of work accomplished at the office had ever given me such satisfaction! Then I'd taken three milking lessons, at the first of which Mrs. Price said I'd made a good start—thrill number two. Now Mr. Price had set me and my chum on to a new job—thrill number three—in which he was instructing us himself.

This was to harness his old white mare, Blossom, to the cart, to take it down to the field of roots across the road from the farm, and to fork up roots, which we were presently to pulp into food for the bullocks, which were still being partly stable-fed each day.

Into that big field, bordered by elms, through which we caught glimpses of a faintly purple range of mountains, Elizabeth and I tramped with the farmer; she at Blossom's mild head, I carrying a fork and listening to that gentle giant, Mr. Price.

"When we have got a cart-load I will take you to the grinding-machine and show you how you mash these things up," he told me. "Very handy, the new power-engine! Three belts for shafting I've got from the engine to the machine. Put it in this winter, I did. All done by horse-power before that. Wonderful! What they're getting to do now in the farms! Wouldn't have believed it in my father's time—no, nor that I should have little young ladies like that one to lead the horses for me," he smiled. "Stop her here, missy. Whoa, back! It's up here we'll start."

But before Elizabeth had left the horse's head, before I'd dug my fork more than once into the rich-smelling earth, a "Good morning" sounded behind us, in a deep but gentle voice.

We turned, I saying resignedly to myself in that flash:

"I suppose it's Captain Holiday again—sounds as meek as Moses for once, but he's evidently come to see how the Land Girls get on with their root-digging, and to tell them all about it."

And I found that I was wrong.

The young man who'd been tramping up that field behind us was not Captain Holiday, though he wore khaki and leggings like his.

"Er——" he began with a hand to his cap, and obviously not sure whether he ought to speak first to the farmer or to me. "I—er—saw you from the road there. If you don't mind, aren't you"—nervously—"aren't you the two ladies from London?"

"Yes," I said, standing there rather astonished.

The young officer went on with his eyes on the cart, that shut out any view of Elizabeth.

"Oh, yes. I hope you don't mind, but I thought I'd come up and—er—speak——"

At that moment I thought I had never in my life seen anybody so agonizingly timid. Gazing at the D.S.O. ribbon on his chest, I could only wonder if he had won it whilst he was in a high fever and did not know what he was doing.... Miserably shy, too, he looked to me.

But he didn't go away. He went on talking, though stammeringly.

"You know, I know you both quite well—I mean by name, of course. We've—we've exchanged plenty of letters and all that," he went on stammeringly.

"I'm afraid it's a mistake," I began.

"Oh—er—no," he interrupted. "I'd better tell you who I am—stupid of me. I'm—er—my name is Fielding. Colonel Fielding."

Colonel Fielding!—Fielding?

But that was the name of our landlord! That was the officer from whom we'd taken over our Golder's Green flat!

How we'd talked and talked over the fancy picture that we had made up of him—the white-moustached old warrior of a bygone age, as we had imagined him!

Now, here he stood before us—and could anything be less like our preconceived view of him?

Colonel Fielding in the flesh was a young man of twenty-six, slim-waisted and fair. The white moustache of our imaginings was represented by the merest hint of close-cropped golden down upon his upper lip.

I could hardly believe it.

"Do you mean," I exclaimed, "that you are really the Colonel Fielding who let us his flat?"

"Er—yes. I am." He reddened, actually reddened all over his face as he cleared his throat and added, "Do you mind telling me—are you Miss Elizabeth Weare?"

"No, I'm Miss Matthews," I told him. "That's Miss Weare——"

For it was at this moment that Blossom dragged the cart a step forward, and Elizabeth, calling manfully. "Whoa-back!" in imitation of Mr. Price, reached up to her head again, and pulled her round.

I suppose to the end of his days one man will see Elizabeth as she was at that moment in the field of roots.

It was a colourful and blowy day. The sky, threatening rain, showed capricious clouds, dove-grey and silver-white, tossing across the blue. A mauve screen of Welsh hills, a nearer fringe of budding elms bordered that big field of lush brown-and-purply-green. Set in the middle of it like a giant's toy was the scarlet-painted farm-cart with the white mare; a small, boyish, crop-haired, smocked and breeched Land-girl at her head.

Colour and sunburn suited my chum's small face. The Land Army hat had been drenched by several showers to a becoming softness over her thick hair. She held herself (even in those early days of freedom from skirts) with a new poise. She was as effective as any poster in the Tube! but with no Tube atmosphere about her; no! the strong scents of earth, the wine-sweet breath of Spring wind that tossed the black locks on her rosied cheeks, and flapped in her smock, billowing it out below her belt or furling it above her legs—her legs which were at once sturdy and dainty. Briefly, she looked ripping. And I saw that Colonel Fielding saw it even in that first moment of his greeting her.

It was not much more than a greeting and a good-bye; a word to the farmer about "hoping he didn't mind"—which would appear to be the youthful colonel's pet stand-by of a phrase.

"Er—I might be down for some time probably," he concluded, reddening again. "Perhaps I might be allowed to call?"

Elizabeth, without looking at him, answered in a tone like the shutting of a door:

"We live in camp here. Men aren't allowed there."

"Oh—sorry. I hope you didn't mind. Perhaps," he added—faint but pursuing—"I shall see you again—er—somewhere——"

Elizabeth, stony little wretch, said nothing at all. I think I began to say "Are you staying at Careg?" out of sheer pity, but it was Mr. Price, the gentle Welsh giant, who broke in:

"Yes, sure! Any time you like to see over the farm! I'll show you our shire horses! Interest you, those would. You shall come round with me."

"Oh, thanks. I should love to," murmured Colonel Fielding, with one last glance at my chum before he melted away out of the landscape.

Even as he did so, I saw the expression on that fair, girlish face of the man we'd always nicknamed "Elizabeth's Old Colonel." He was unmistakably, unfeignedly admiring. It made him show, for a second, quite a determined gleam between his long lashes.

But what a waste of time for him to admire Elizabeth—at least if he tried to show it! He was, anyhow, not the sort of person, I decided, that any girl would fall in love with!

Finnicky, I called him. I said so afterwards to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth said she was so busy with the horse she hadn't had time to see what he was like.

Then (as I should have told you) we forgot all about that encounter in the root-field.

For three days we lived the Life Laborious; busy and full, but empty of all young men. Not a glimpse of one.

Then, one evening down at the swimming-pool, I said to Elizabeth, sitting on a mossy boulder and waiting for Vic to come up:

"Do you know we've been here for three weeks now? I feel as if we had been Land Girls all our lives. But the last week has been the quickest——"

"—And the jolliest!" interrupted my chum.

Then we both burst out laughing together.

Pretence was at an end. We agreed that we were simply loving the life and the people, the work and the play.

We agreed that we were simply loving the life and the
people, the work and the play

As for me, I was such a different girl. I hadn't time to think about how different.

"Ready, Celery-face?" sang out Vic, striding from behind the alder where she'd flung off her coat.

A group of girls watched her—the former star of a London swimming-bath—as she took her plunge into the pool.

Then I waded in after her, and, all awkwardly still, swam the dozen strokes that brought me up to her. Panting, I held on to her. An absurdly short little effort—but it was the taste of a new function to me, the beginner. What years I'd wasted in not knowing how to swim! But oh, the joy of it now!

I looked round to see Elizabeth striking out with arms that were, like mine, milky-white to the elbow and then gloved in sunburn.

For by now I must tell you we had got our "Land Girl's complexion." This asset is gained in three distinct stages.

First stage: A scorching and very unbecoming scarlet that spread itself over the face. The recruit from town, seeing herself with a tomato-nose set between crimson cheeks, flies to her old and true friend, the powder-puff. Useless! To powder over that red is like putting a coat of transparent whitewash over a brick wall.

The second stage: Soreness and blisters; a skin that peels off in flakes like the bark of a silver birch. No help for this! Sybil had given me cucumber and benzoin lotion to cool the smart, but the only cure was that which time brought about.

Stage the third: A smooth, even wash of honey-tan over the newly-bloomed roses of the cheeks; the colour of the ripe glow on a sun-kissed peach.

Elizabeth had reached this becoming stage on the day that Colonel Fielding had seen her first at the white mare's head in the field of roots, and I was scarcely a day behind her. I laughed at the reflection in the pool of the girl whom Vic and the others still nicknamed "Celery-face!"

Rosier than ever after our swim, we dressed and strolled together down the lanes. For "the more you have of a thing the more you want it" applies to fresh air as well as to the other essentials of life.

Now that we were working out of doors all day, we found we wanted to stay out of doors in the evening! How unlike town, where, having worked all day in a stuffy office, our one idea of relaxation was an equally stuffy theatre!

But I did sometimes miss the theatre! Upon this very evening I said to Elizabeth:

"The birds are lovely tonight—listen! But do you know what? I would give anything to be going to a revue tonight; just to see some pretty girls' clothes after these weeks of felt hats and breeches! Just to hear some gay tunes from a good band!"

"Yes," agreed Elizabeth, quite dreamily for her. "I would like to hear a little music again just for once. I——"

"Who's saying they want to hear a little music?" It was a merry girl's voice that broke upon our ears. "Here's where dreams come true!"

We looked to the right. On a gate in the blossoming hedge sat the tiny Timber-girl Peggy, she who in the evening always wore a flower pinned by a badge to the breast of her crisply-ironed smock. This evening it was a spray of honeysuckle.

Beside her, leaning his elbows on the gate, stood a blue-suited young soldier from the hospital; he also wore a large spray of honeysuckle in his button-hole, and another in his khaki cap, which was further decorated by a lucky gollywog in pink and green wool! He touched it smiling as we paused beside our little comrade.

"Oh, talking of music, girls," said Peggy, "look what my boy's got for you, for all of us! Show them, Syd."

Syd, who was a sergeant, and had the cheerfullest pink face I have ever seen above a blue jacket, thrust his hand into the pocket of that jacket, and brought out a large envelope which he handed to me. It was unaddressed and open. I took out a sort of illuminated card; its border showed floral designs, a rising sun, black cats, and several regimental crests. In curliest copperplate there was written:

To the Lady Land-Workers,
Careg Camp.
You are invited to a
GRAND CONCERT,
to be held at
THE CAREG AUXILIARY RED CROSS HOSPITAL,
on the night of June 10.
To commence at
7 pip emma
(Tanks and bi-planes at 9.45.)

"How lovely!" I exclaimed, handing this card back to Peggy. "I heard something about there being a concert at the hospital, but I never knew we were to be asked."

"Yes, miss," said Sergeant "Syd" in a husky, boyish voice. "Captain Holiday himself said the invitation was to go to the camp in good time, so that all of the young ladies might arrange to come. He hoped all of you would, of course."

"Tell him not to worry, we're all for it," declared saucy little Peggy from her gate. "I daresay it'll be a wash-out of a concert"—with a wink at us—"but we'll have to be thankful for what we can get in the Land Army. I suppose you'll give us a solo on the comb? And is your Captain Holiday going to oblige at the concert, Syd?"

"Not him! Says he doesn't know one tune from another," laughed the wounded soldier. "Sitting in the audience with you young ladies, that's the job he's for."

"I'm astonished at him," said Peggy, with a mischievous smile straight at me.

Syd added:

"I tell you who is a very fine singer, now—we could listen to him all night—his voice is a fair treat, and he's going to sing. It's that officer that Captain Holiday's got staying at the Lodge with him. Colonel Fielding, his name is."

I exclaimed:

"Oh! So he's staying at the Lodge!"

Peggy gave me a quick look and said:

"So he's another friend of yours?"

"No," I explained. "We've just met him." Then, thinking it would be silly to make any mystery about all this, I explained about Colonel Fielding being our landlord in London, and I mentioned the business letters about breakages and drains.

"And we're to hear him sing, are we?" I concluded—and again Sergeant Syd enlarged upon what a treat it would be for anybody who liked good music.

"Oh, but I don't know anything about 'good' music," said Elizabeth, carelessly.

We went on, leaving that picturesque group of Land-girl and soldier by that gate in the hedge.

Presently I found myself thinking of the way Colonel Fielding's delicate fair face had lighted up at the sight of Elizabeth, sturdy and muddy and sweet, in the mangold-field.

How obviously he had admired that sight!

He was probably looking forward to seeing it again. Poor wretched young man! For if he imagined that my boyish, independent, man-hating little chum would have a word for him at that concert—whatever he sang like—a bitter disappointment was in store for him, thought I. I had seen Elizabeth before, when men had been attracted. Prickly as a hedgehog she had become in the twinkling of an eye!

While I was thus musing, she was gazing above the hedge at the hills in the gloaming, purple against a primrose belt of sky. A heavenly evening! No wonder Elizabeth wanted to drink in the beauty of country and sky rather than to talk. I felt as she did.

Suddenly Elizabeth spoke, in a matter of fact tone that sounded as if she had just dragged herself back into the life of every day.

"That concert," she said, "won't be bad fun."

"I expect it will be ripping," I agreed, as we took the turning that led us back by a roundabout way to the camp again. "Wasn't that invitation-card for it rather sweet? You know he'd painted all those crests and flowers and things himself."

"He did?" said Elizabeth, "he or Captain Holiday, d'you mean?"

I turned to her a little puzzled.

"Captain Holiday—or who?" I said.

Quickly Elizabeth slipped out—"or Colonel Fielding, of course!"

Then she laughed, and went on quickly: "What rot!" and she turned aside to pull a wild rose out of the hedge above the pond.

"Of course I wasn't thinking about what I was saying. It is Peggy's sergeant who paints those things, isn't it?" she said.

I looked at her.

With her face still turned to the hedge she went on talking rather quickly.

"Yes; Peggy told me her boy was 'very clever at anything in the artistic line.' He does designs for belts, and mats, and cushion covers himself, and they're sold at Red Cross sales; and the most lovely necklaces made out of beads of wallpaper!" pursued Elizabeth, as if she were interested in nothing on earth so much as in the artistic productions of Peggy's boy.

But why had she coupled the names of Captain Holiday and Colonel Fielding as if they were the names uppermost in her thoughts?

How oddly, how aptly she'd slipped out that Colonel Fielding! Could she—could she have been "thinking of him." ...

Oh!

How could I think such a lunatic thing! In spite of all I'd threatened of her getting "tamed" one day!

Not Elizabeth. Anybody else, but Elizabeth—No!

I was sure of that.

* * * * * * *

No sooner had Peggy brought in to our forewoman that illuminated invitation to the wounded soldiers' concert than there was little talk of anything else in the Land Girls' camp.

The questions of the hour were who would sing; what they'd sing; what refreshments would be offered; which of the boys was going to make the best "girl," varied with which of us girls could dress up as the best "boy"—given, unanimously, for "Mop," as they called Elizabeth.

These things were discussed in twenty voices before the farm-girls and the timber-gang set out for work in the morning, and after they returned in the evening.

A further burning question was whether we went in uniform or in our civies?

At last Miss Easton, the young forewoman, exclaimed in mock despair:

"I shall feel as if I'd been to the blessed concert ten times over at this rate, before ever it happens! When it does come off it'll fall as flat as a committee report. Whatever did they want to send out the invitations all these days ahead for? 'Tisn't as if we'd so many engagements in this"—she gazed out of the hut window at the pastoral scene of lambs taking their evening scamper round and round a daisied meadow—"in this crowded Metropolis that we had to be booked in advance."

Peggy returned demurely:

"Ah, Miss Easton, dear, that's all you know. Some of 'em at the hospital made up their minds to let all us at the camp know in time, so that nobody should go off on short leave to see their people or anything, by mistake, on the 10th!"

Here Vic sighed stormily, rolled up her eyes in mock emotion, and remarked:

"What it is to be in love!"

The usual laugh went round as at the least of Vic's utterances. Then the talk turned upon the love-affairs of the Campites present. We were given the probable date of Peggy's wedding with her Syd in the autumn. We were told of the disgraceful fickleness of Curley, the straight-haired brunette, who had been engaged to a young gentleman in the Tank Corps, who had shown her photograph to a friend of his, who had taken an enormous fancy to it, and had written to Curley who had broken off the engagement with her first love, and who had been walking out, by letter, with the friend ever since.

"I'm astonished at her," Peggy said severely.

"What's the good of being astonished at anything in war-time?" retorted Curley. "And what's the good of going on writing to a fellow when you are sick and tired of the sight of him before ever he goes to France? Better sense to break it off in time, and see if you like the next one better when he comes home!"

General agreement over this—except from the red-haired Welsh timber-girl who declared in her richest contralto:

"That wasn't love, then, for if you loved a man, it would be for ever!"

A diversity of opinions upon this, ending in a gale of laughter as Miss Easton reminded the red-haired one:

"Well, Aggie! You used to say in the woods that the birds seemed to call aloud the name of the boy one cared for! And in March you said they sang 'Dick! Deeck!' And the other day you said they were singing 'Hugh-ie! Hugh-ie!'"

Aggie, blushing down her milky, freckled throat, retorted with some allusion to some people "getting off with some fat, old, rich timber-merchant, after the war!" To which the young forewoman replied good-naturedly that she didn't mind at all the idea, of settling down with some nice, kind, elderly sort of man!

After the war, and all she'd had to do for twenty odd girls—seeing after every detail of their health, behaviour, outfit, railway vouchers, billets, stripes, rows with landladies, tests, and leaves—she would be glad enough to come in for a bit of "mothering" herself.

"Which," she concluded quaintly, "a girl gets best from a husband who isn't too young!"

Chorus of—

"Ah, bah! An old husband would be awful!"

And then Sybil, who had never travelled without a maid before the war, declared that after the war the best husbands for the girls who had been in the Land Army would be the Colonials, the Overseas men. These splendid-looking outdoor fellows could offer a girl the life—with plenty of hard work rewarded by open-air freedom, and health, and fun—which she had learnt to love.

Hot argument here, following a demand from Lil the Londoner of—

"What's the matter with our own boys?"

Everybody had a word to say on this perennial poignant question of young men and marriage.

I rather dreaded being asked what my views were. Silently I sat, going on with my work; which was shortening Elizabeth's second smock for her. The things are made in three sizes only, and the smallest of them was just a trifle voluminous, and long for the little boyish figure of my chum. As I stitched away at the tuck I was taking in it, I wondered when my turn was coming.

It didn't come.

None of the other girls asked me if I would like to marry a dark man or a fair one, a Colonial or a Britisher.

Then I wondered a little at that. Afterwards, long afterwards, I learnt the rather touching fact that Vic had forbidden the lot of them to tease "young Celery-face" about any young men.... Vic had tumbled to it that, honestly, I didn't like it. And Vic had a good deal of fine feeling, tucked away, upon this subject.

Vic's own love-affair (her "boy" had died in enemy hands, I afterwards heard) had made her sensitive for others.

So, as Elizabeth had gone shopping in the tiny village known to our mess as "the town," I was left to a peaceful Saturday afternoon.

It was on the Monday after that that a queer thing happened to me.

"When I was a farmer, a farmer's boy, I used to keep my master's chickens..."—NURSERY SONG.

At the close of a day largely devoted to the task concerning Blossom, the cart, and the mangolds, I came up to the farmhouse to get their second feed for Mrs. Price's chickens. Of these she had eighty, and I know she set great store by them. She well might! The hens, I heard, cost ten shillings each; one speckled grey cockerel was a guinea!

Some of the hens with their brood clucked about that midden in the yard to which I'd added by several barrow-loads; the rest were in a field that sloped quite steeply up the hill. I had fed the first lot in the yard; I had ascended the hill to the field with the coops dotted about it, and I had shut a brood of restless, fluffy, "peep"-ing chicks into the coop for them to feed undisturbed by their marauding grown-ups, when suddenly there brushed against my leggings the fluffy white-and-golden coat of Captain Holiday's collie.

"Tock, tock, tock!" called the hens about me. And, above me, I heard the captain's "Good afternoon."

I rose, straightened myself from putting down the wire door of that coop, and turned to face him.

A little shock of surprise met me with the sight of him. He was—different. What had he done to himself? I wondered in a flash—in the same flash I realized that it was merely his clothes.

For the first time since I'd met him Captain Holiday had changed out of his accustomed khaki. He was wearing tweeds. A hat that might have done duty on a scarecrow, with a fishing-cast about it, shaded his eyes from the late afternoon sun. His Norfolk jacket was a shaggy, grey-green disgrace to a gipsy's wardrobe ... but it suited him quite well. I wondered why he had never worn these things before.

After this I found myself thinking that I must have seen him in tweeds before now.

Wasn't his figure somehow very familiar—— But no. How could that be?

"Good afternoon," I replied to him in the tone that may be translated, "What do you want now?"

As if in answer, he held out to me the tin pail that he was carrying. With his sweetest smile he barked out, "Rotten careless hen-wife you'd make! I had to bring this along to save Mrs. Price a journey. You forgot the milk to put in the chicks' tins."

"Did I!" I exclaimed, disconcerted. "That was stupid of me!"

"It was," retorted Captain Holiday, still with the smile that might have accompanied the prettiest compliment. Characteristic!

I scarcely looked at him, hoping that he'd go.

He did not. He seemed to expect me to have something to say to him—at all events, he stayed while I filled up those milk pannikins, and followed me round to the other coops.

I said, looking away from him, and with would-be irony:

"You seem as interested in poultry as in the rest of farming."

"Yes," he agreed. "I've always been interested in pottering about with stock of any kind. Always the job I fancied; 'always my delight,' as they say here; so——" He broke off. "What are you looking at?" he asked abruptly. "A penny for your thoughts."

I was looking up beyond the tall, slight figure set against the background of slanting field and stone hedge cutting a purply-grey sky. That part of Mr. Price's farm reminded me of a bit of the old place at home.

How typically Welsh were the hilly green and the grey stones, and the rich shifting colours of the cloudy distance! These brought back to me my Welsh-set childhood.

* * * * * * *

Days of wandering the marshes, waist-deep in meadow-sweet and bog myrtle, dreaming the long, long dreams of little girlhood! Days of sitting curled up like a squirrel in the school-room armchair while the rain lashed the panes and all the world of Every-day was blotted out as I pored over Shakespere, or "Called Back" or "The Last Days of Pompeii" or "Three Men in a Boat"—ah, the omnivorous and profoundly satisfying reading of the early teens! Meals that to a growing girl were banquets of Welsh mutton and jam roly-poly ... tea-parties that were events ... jokes that brought laughter that brought tears to stream down the cheeks convulsed ... quick fierce likes and dislikes ... shames ... delights—ah, over all, delight! Zest in the newness of Life! How many of these things had I left behind in those days-gone-by!

With a breath of the old wild mountain air, fresh and bewildering, bringing unreasoned tears to the eyes, those days were back, for that moment I felt the thick brown pigtail weigh upon my neck as I bent my face down to the face of the whimpering fox terrier pup in my arms. That pup had been given to me by one of my father's farm pupils seven years ago. I was back in that time.

Into my day dream broke a voice that seemed, for a second, part of it.

"A penny for your thoughts!"

* * * * * * *

With a start I palled myself together, glancing now straight at the young man. How strange—yet how well known to me, he seemed! Why? The thought persisted; why? Of what did he remind me so elusively at this moment?

Then an extraordinary thing happened.

I do not know how it was that I said what I did—those five quite unpremeditated words. My voice sounded odd in my own ears as I spoke. Yet it was quite in a normal matter-of-fact voice that I did speak. Standing there on the hill slope where the black and the grey speckled poultry clucked about our feet, I looked up at the young man again and asked him this question:

"Isn't your name Richard Wynn?"

"To talk of Love is soon to make Love."—PROVERB.

After this strange question of mine, there was a moment's pause.

It rang in my ears still, my quick, but quietly uttered,—

"Isn't your name Richard Wynn?"

What on earth had possessed me to say that? The moment after I was as surprised at it as he was himself. Or wasn't he surprised? His face had hardly changed. He looked quite steadily back at me. What did he think? I wondered in a flash. What would he say?

Quite quietly he replied:

"No, no, it isn't. Surely you know my name's Holiday?"

As if I hadn't ever heard it! How absurd I'd been! How idiotic! How wool-gathering!

I pulled myself together.

"Oh, I know," I said quickly and apologetically, as I caught up a handful of the poultry-food. "Yes. Of course, I know that."

"Then," returned Captain Holiday, "why did you ask me if my name was Richard Wynn?"

I laughed a little.

"It was a silly question," I admitted. "It must have sounded quite mad! Only for one minute, seeing you in these clothes, I suppose——"

He looked swiftly down at the shaggy cuff of that quite disreputable Norfolk jacket. "Seeing me in these clothes; yes——?"

"Tock, tock, tock," put in the grey hen.

"Well, you suddenly reminded me of somebody I used to know," said I, and I turned to scatter that handful to those clucking, calling fowls.

Captain Holiday—whose name ought to have been Curiosity—put his hands behind his back, and tilted his head to one side, taking almost the pose of a small boy who is still at the deadly age of questions. Evidently this tall young man had never outgrown it! How simply, but in what a not-to-be-put-off voice he persisted:

"What was this 'somebody' like?"

"I've just said he was something like you, Captain Holiday. That is," I added, "I couldn't really tell you if he were or not."

"What d'you mean by that?" Captain Holiday asked.

I laughed again. One simply could not feel impatient or annoyed with this extraordinarily inquisitive young man. He took one past that! So, as I walked on with my pail to the next coop, followed by the young man and the dog, I said:

"What I mean—if you must know all about it——"

"Yes, I must. I mean I'd love to."

Well! "knowing all about it" must be a sort of mild obsession of his. Perhaps he'd been Intelligence Officer or something. The only thing to be done appeared to be to humour him!

So I said:

"What I mean about that young man called Richard Wynn, your double, is that I can't honestly say I know what he was like!"

"Why can't you?" barked the catechist.

"Because I don't remember."

"You don't remember?" quite sharply from Captain Holiday. "How, don't remember? Why don't you?"

"Because it's such ages ago since I saw him," I replied. "Seven years! And what is the next question, please?"

The next question was a brusque

"How often had you seen him, then?"

"Often? Why, I saw him every day," I replied, going down on one knickerbockered knee to wrestle with the refractory door of a coop. "He stayed at my father's place for six months."

The voice above me decreed:

"Then, of course, you must know what the fellow was like."

Extraordinary, the constant interest he took in subjects which had absolutely nothing to do with him! But I'd said a man was like himself. That was next door to talking about what he was like himself—which Elizabeth had declared was all young men ever did want to talk about!

"I don't know," I persisted, rattling the wire-netted door. "I've forgotten Mr. Wynn's face."

"You can't have 'forgotten' the face of a man you saw every day of your life for six months," Captain Holiday informed me, authoritatively. "You must have been what? Thirteen or fourteen. No girl 'forgets' a man's face like that!"

"She does!" I declared.

"People don't 'forget' faces," he repeated. "It's nonsense."

"It is not," I cried, half-laughing, half-exasperated, as I rose. "People do forget what they've never taken very much notice of, even when it was there! I've no memory at all for faces. I only know what I thought of them at the time."

I thought his next question would be, "What did you think of the young man you imagine was like me?" But this was not what came. He demanded, more casually. "And what became of him?"

"I don't know," I replied. "I never heard. Except——" Here I suppressed a half-rueful smile at the thought of what I had heard, only some weeks ago, from this same long-forgotten Richard Wynn.

"Except what?" took up the Inquisitor.

I sighed elaborately. For a moment I felt almost inclined to tell him deliberately the whole madcap story of Richard Wynn's proposal of marriage to me; but for some reason I didn't.

So, looking straight at him, I adopted a tone of studied and explanatory politeness. I hoped this gentle irony might have the effect of making him a little bit ashamed of all his questions.

"I only heard from this Mr. Wynn once," I said. "Then he did not tell me what he was doing, or what had happened to him all these years. So I can't tell you. And I could not write to him, or ask him about anything, because I'd thrown away his letter."

"Thrown it away?" Captain Holiday exclaimed, quite loudly.

"I threw it away by mistake—with the address. So that was that—and I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that's absolutely all I can tell you about him, Captain Holiday!"

I scattered my last handful, let the last replete and peeping chick out of the last coop. Captain Holiday—perhaps feeling a trifle rebuked—said nothing further. Swinging my empty pail I ran down the hillside. He and his dog followed me through the farm gate and went on.

At the door of the kitchen I handed in my pail. The rosy farm-servant said to me:

"Miss, you'll have to run if you want to catch up your friends. They've been gone some time."

I glanced up at the clock.

"Is it so late, Maggie-Mary!" I exclaimed.

I sped through the yard and on to the up-and-down high road, thinking as I went the question that almost every Land Girl asks herself at some time:

"How did I ever manage to walk at any pace at all in the days when I wore hampering skirts to flap about me wherever I turned?"

Before I could find an answer to this question I found Captain Holiday at my side again!

"Let me walk along a bit of the way with you," he suggested quite nicely. "May I?"

What could I say but "If you like"? My way back to camp did take him past the Lodge, after all.

However, I didn't want another Longer Catechism. So, as we fell into step, walking towards the sunset, down the road with basking green on either hand, I decided to introduce the subject of the forthcoming and much-discussed Hospital Concert!

But I was not in time. It was Captain Holiday who started the conversation, and on lines that I hardly expected, but beginning, once again, with one of his questions!

"Is that little pal of yours engaged to be married?"

Surprised, I replied:

"Elizabeth? Miss Weare? To be married? I should think not! I mean, I don't think she ever means to marry."

"That's good," remarked Captain Holiday, cheerfully.

I stared at him.

"'Good'? Why good?"

He said "Oh!" and fumbled in the pocket of his Norfolk for his pipe.

"Oh, perhaps I meant she'd be all the more company for you down here. People in love are poisonously poor company, I find!" he went on, turning to me as if with a burst of confidence. Then he twinkled, gave me a swift glance, opened his lips as if to ask a question; shut them.

I knew what he meant.

Quickly and definitely I snapped out the answer to the question he hadn't asked.

"No! I'm not engaged either!" I said. Then, carrying this war of questions into the odd creature's country, I added, "Are you?"

"Why? I suppose you mean you find me poisonously poor company?" he asked, with a defiant jerk of the head in that scarecrow's tweed hat of his.

"Not at all," I said politely. "But are you?"

Instead of answering he stopped and glanced to the right. There was a break in the hedge.

"Shall we take this short cut home through the fields?" he said.

I followed him to the narrow, greasy path, if it were a path.

It seemed to me one of those short cuts home that are certainly the longest way round! ... How could I—oh, how could I not have realized already that all I wanted was to be walking anywhere—for any distance—with him!

That realization was not to come yet....

But to go back to the beginning of this ramble, Captain Holiday, striding and smoking beside me, said:

"Am I engaged? Well, I say! May I tell you something about myself?"

"That would be a change! Generally, you want to be told things about other people!" I said.

He gave a short laugh.

"Yes; well, now you can have a bit of your own back. I want a woman's point of view on a certain matter. You're sure it won't bore you? I don't mind if it does," he added quickly, with that quicker smile that always brushed any offence out of his words. "Women are put here to listen to men's grousing. However! Seriously, I want to talk to you. You could help me about this."

"I? Help you?" I said. "D'you mean it?" But I knew he meant it. Sincerity was in his tone. Also a new note—appeal.

I could not help feeling pleased. He did not think me a fool then, even if he had seen me first in circumstances that might have given him that impression. He thought that I could help him in his own difficulty, whatever it was.

This was where I suddenly found I must have skipped whole stages in my acquaintanceship with this young man. He had jumped from being a busybody and a stranger to being a friend—yes! A friend to whom one felt positively motherly—or at least sisterly.

I turned to him as we walked, and said:

"Of course I'd be glad to advise you in any way that would be of any use to you. You tell me first."

"Righto!" said Captain Holiday. "By Jove, here's some more of this wire. Never mind. We'll turn off here—I think I struck the wrong field. Well! You were asking me if I were engaged. I am not. I asked a girl to marry me, though, not so long ago."

He stopped. I said, sympathetically:

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"Are you? Why?"

I couldn't help opening my eyes.

"Why? I mean—sorry she turned you down."

Now Captain Holiday opened his eyes.

"Who said she turned me down?" he asked.

In spite of how he improved upon acquaintance, in spite of his friendliness, his nice smile and ways, he was very difficult to make out.

"You said the girl wouldn't be engaged to you——" I began patiently.

"I said nothing of the kind," Captain Holiday interrupted, contradicting me flatly. "I told you I was not engaged—here, it must have been that other turning after all, we'll go back—not engaged, but that I had asked a girl to marry me."

More at sea than before, I retraced my steps down the path beside him, and suggested:

"Then, if the girl said 'Yes' to you——"

"She," explained Captain Holiday, looking serenely over the evening landscape, "did not say either 'Yes' or 'No.'"

Now I saw his difficulty!

Suspense!

Yes. I understood that. How I understood the chills—and flames—of that fever! Hadn't I suffered from them myself, in the days when I had had to think in turn. "He will," "He won't," or "Will he?"

"That's horrible for you," I agreed warmly to this other young man. "It's bad enough to know the worst. But not to know which it's to be is——"

"Quite so," finished Captain Holiday.

"Still, you needn't make up your mind at once that it will be the worst, need you?" I went on soothingly.

"You think I needn't?"

"Why d'you feel you must give up all hope?" I asked.

"Sometimes I don't," he admitted simply.

I nodded, saying:

"It's the other 'sometimes' that's so awful."

"Exactly," he said. "When I think 'after all, why should any girl like me particularly?'"

"You don't often think that, do you?"

"No, not often," said Captain Holiday serenely again, "only occasionally when I've had a bad night and feel off colour and pippy!"

I couldn't help laughing. The sustaining, intoxicating conceit of men! As Elizabeth says, it's the only thing that could keep them going since the war restrictions!

Then he looked quickly sideways at me.

"You think that's neck," he remarked. "Perhaps you think there is no reason why any girl should like me?"

And for the moment his voice dropped a tone, and there was a wistfulness on his brown face. I stopped laughing. I didn't want to hurt his feelings in any way. Besides, when one came to think of it, he was quite nice enough for a girl to like him—quite much!

Thoughtfully I said:—

"So much depends upon the kind of girl!" and then I asked, "What kind of girl is she?" in a tone as gentle as I could make it, so as to avoid jarring him.

But in quite a matter-of-fact, usual sort of tone the young man replied:

"Oh, well! She's the girl I want."

Helpful, wasn't it?

"I see," said I, not seeing anything, of course, except that, as Elizabeth once said, it's quite impossible to get a man to describe anything or anybody so that you know what they are like.

We walked on for a moment in silence, following our shadows on the goldy-green grass; evening shadows that caricatured a giant soldier man striding across the field beside a giantess of a Land Girl.

I began again:

"She might be the type of girl who honestly did not know herself whether it was 'Yes' or 'No' that she wanted to say," I said. "Some girls simply have to take lots of time to consider whether they care for the man in that way or not—even after he's asked them! They have to think things over. They have to look at the man from every point of view before they know their own minds about him. I've met that type of girl. I can't say I understand her mys——"

"Ah," he put in with a quick turn of the head, "you wouldn't be like that! You'd know at once if you could stand the man?"

"I think so," I said, a little shortly. I didn't want to be reminded of what my own views had been about "the man"—that is, Harry. They had led me into making a fool of myself. Hadn't I liked him at once, disastrously, from his first soft dark-eyed glances at me? What I was "like," myself, was not the question. Also I didn't see how it was going to help Captain Holiday.

He, on the other hand, seemed to think it might throw some light upon the subject.

"You'd know at once if it was all N. G. as far as your own feelings were concerned?" he persisted.

"At once," I agreed.

"That would save the other person a lot of trouble, of course," said the young man at my side. "I think you're right. One ought to 'know' at once, about that sort of thing. You would, you say?"

"Yes, I should. But there are such lots of different kinds of girls, Captain Holiday——"

"Of course, I don't see that."

"No. Because you're in love, you see, and people never do see more than just the one person then."

"I expect you're right again," said Captain Holiday. He looked down at me quite submissively—at me, to whom he'd laid down the law in that hectoring fashion every time he'd seen me! He might be right about cow-houses and the laws of gravity and about stock, as well as about any question in his own profession of soldiering—but at least he saw now that I could teach him something about the ways of human beings!

And I felt no longer a Land Girl who was still months away from earning her first stripe, but quite a woman of the world for once!

Encouragingly I went on:

"Perhaps she is the kind of girl who does mean 'Yes' all the time——"

"And didn't say so?"

"Because perhaps she put it off to make it seem all the more wonderful to you when it came," I suggested.

"Ah," he said. "It would be wonderful then?"

How little he must know about love, I thought, to ask such a question.

"Wonderful?" I said, looking away from him across to the sunset. In the radiance of the level rays a swarm of tiny insects spun enraptured—each thinking, possibly, that the sun had risen and shone only for him and his little winged love, creatures of a day.

"One five minutes of that," I said, as much to myself as to him, "is worth having lived for twenty stodgy years without it. Even if you lose it again it would have been worth it!"

"You think so?"

"Yes! And I do hope that it will happen like that for you," I told him. "I don't mean the losing it again part. I do hope that you will get everything that you want."

"Yes, so do I," said Captain Holiday, in that rather disconcerting way of his. "But, look here—you seem to be able to tell one so much—supposing it were neither of those two things that you suggest that kept the girl from answering, as I want her to? What about that?"

"Couldn't you," I suggested, "ask her again some time?"

He fingered his small, obstinately-growing moustache.

"That's an idea. Yes. Well! Thanks very much. I'll think about what you've said, Joan."

Joan——!

"By the way, I have decided to call you by your Christian name."

"Oh! Er—yes," I agreed, staggered, but feeling that I could not refuse this proof of goodwill to a young man who had just made me the confidante of so much. "H—How did you know it?"

"Doesn't your little pal call you by it? Mine's Dick, you know."

I nodded, not feeling I could use it just yet. If he'd been as abrupt in his love-making as he was in his making friends, there was some excuse, thought I, for the young woman who kept him waiting for his answer.

Then, with equal brightness, he changed the subject altogether.

"D'you know that I'm having a house-party at the Lodge next week? For the concert—yes. You've seen my wounded pal, haven't you? Then I've got a girl from London and her mother coming down to stay."

"A girl—oh! have you?"

And then I could not help it. The question slipped out, as it were, of its own accord.

"Captain Holiday, is she 'the' girl?"

But the exasperating man wouldn't give me a direct answer.

"The girl," he said with a laugh. "Ah, well, I suppose most girls have got somebody who'd consider they were 'the' girl."

"Yes, yes; but I mean is she the girl you've been talking to me about all this time?"

Again he only laughed, and said something chaffing about "curiosity."

Curiosity indeed! From him! Pretty good, wasn't it? And not another sensible word could I get out of Captain Holiday for the rest of the walk.

When we did finally reach the field, however, from which we could see the corrugated iron roof of our hut set in the trees, he did vouchsafe to me one more remark about the girl who was shortly coming down from London. Just after his salute and "good evening," he turned back to me to say:

"I'll tell you this much: she happens to be my own first cousin."

However, he'd said enough—or left enough unsaid. I knew well enough that, cousin or no cousin, she was the girl about whom there'd been all that discussion.

"To maidens' vows and swearing
Henceforth no credit give."
                                                            —GEORGE WITHER.

I ran back to the hut.

So late! I found the tea-supper all cleared away, and most of the Campites dispersed about their evening avocations.

Only Elizabeth the trusty had kept back for me milk, a huge plateful of bread-and-butter, and cold bacon.

I expected that Elizabeth would sit down near me while I devoured my meal, and would spice it with comments on the reason for my lateness. Here I had reckoned without my hostess. Not only did she not have a word to say about my having walked—or loitered—home with a young man; but she hadn't, apparently, got a word to say to me about anything, though we had hardly seen each other all day!

In an abstracted way she glanced at the food disappearing from before me, murmuring absently:

"Mustard? Or don't you take it?" Then, looking at the clock said: "Slow, I'm sure." And then, with a curious look on her small face, she left me and strayed forth into the gloaming outside the hut.

I finished my meal, cleared it away, and went out to find her. No sign of Elizabeth in the field that led down to the bathing-pool. I crossed the tiny bridge over the stream, and wandered into the next field.

Here, through the branches of some hazels growing beside a stone fence, I caught sight of the gleam of a light overall. I went up to it. I found Elizabeth in a nook where it was almost dark under the branches.

"Hullo!" I greeted her. "So this is where you've hidden yourself away, is it?"

Elizabeth, turning, gave a violent start. "Hullo," she said, in what I can only describe as a most unwelcoming tone. To me, her inseparable chum!

I let myself down on a boulder close to her.

"Elizabeth, old thing, what's the matter? Have you got a headache?" I said.

"Headache!" echoed Elizabeth quite pettishly. "You know I never have headaches."

"I thought perhaps you were a little tired."

"Tired! Not in the very least, thanks." My chum's tone was discouraging.

I tried again.

"Look here, my dear, are you stuffy with me about anything? Did I rag you too much about getting tamed by Hackenschmidt the Second, or——"

"Stuffy?" echoed the little Man-hater, her tone getting snappier and snappier. "If I were, Joan, I'd tell you."

"Yes; I should have thought so," said I, feeling perfectly convinced that something was up. "For you know that if there's anything I could do for you——"

Here Elizabeth quite took my breath away by the suddenness with which she spoke.

"There is something you can do," she blurted out through the gloom. "You can just go away, if you don't mind, and leave me alone."

I'd only just breath left to say flatly:

"Oh, righto," and to get up and set off back to the hut.

Elizabeth wanted me to leave her alone! What on earth was the meaning of that?

"To be left alone"—with most girls that means that they have fallen in love and want to pick themselves up before they can assess the damage.

But with Elizabeth? With that genuine Loather of Men?

Never—!

With most girls, to say "I dislike men" means one of perhaps six things.

1. They don't know any men.

2. No men have been known to pay any attention to them.

3. Some man has treated them very badly.

4. They wish to be contradicted and teased.

5. They are fibbing for the sake of fibbing.

With Elizabeth not one of these reasons would hold for a second.

But Elizabeth in love! Reason positively shouted an "Oh, no." ...

Yet a mad little suspicion, whispering within me, seemed to defy that voice of reason. As I walked along in the fast-gathering gloom I remembered I had seen a man look at Elizabeth quite lately. More lately still I had seen Elizabeth most uncharacteristically confused at the mention of that man's name.

Wildly improbable, I told myself. And, as I did so I walked straight into the meaning for Elizabeth's wanting to be left to herself just then.

In fact, I bumped into the young man, who was coming along the path.

"Oh, sorry," said a low-pitched, masculine voice that I had heard before. A hand was put up to a cap. Then the figure which I had run against passed quickly on up the field.

Elizabeth's "old" Colonel! She was meeting him out there!

Him?

There are no words to describe my condition of pole-axed astonishment at this.... Why try to find any?

(Elizabeth——!)

* * * * * * *

In about half an hour she returned to the hut, where the others were turning up again by twos and threes.

Elizabeth, looking about two inches taller than usual, gave a defensive glare round the groups of smiling and gossiping girls. But none of them had seen her except me. The defensive glare was then focussed upon me.

I hadn't meant to say a word to the girl! I really hadn't!

I suppose nobody feels exactly chatty when they've just fallen out of a balloon?

But Elizabeth, evidently wishful to speak, followed me up to the mattresses when I went to unroll mine for the night.

"Joan! Er—he told me he met you!"

"Oh, yes!" I said, in a voice as ordinary as possible. I didn't want her to think I was going to "rag," or make any sort of fuss about this. Why shouldn't Elizabeth go out for an evening stroll with a young man if she wanted to—just like any other girl on the land or anywhere else?

"He knows some of my people," Elizabeth flung back in that defensive mutter, "and he wanted to talk to me about another tenant for the flat in London, and, as well as that, he's got a mother who's got a friend who's got a daughter who's thinking of joining up for the Land Army. So, you see, he wanted to—talk to me."

"Yes, I quite see," said I.

Three excuses for talking, from a young man whom she only called "He"!

"So he wrote to me. I promised I'd see him for a minute after tea tonight."

"Oh, yes. When did you promise that?" slipped from me before I knew.

Elizabeth gave her mattress a little kick as she lugged it out.

"I met him on the road the other day," she said in the tone of one who shakes a fist at the world—what it is to have to live up to the name of Man-hater!—and added: "You needn't think there's any nonsense of that sort about it!"

"I never said there was," mildly from me.

"You're always ready to think it!" tigerishly from her. "So I thought I'd just tell you, to stop your getting any wrong impression!"

"Righto!" said I, pacifically. "I won't think anything about it, old thing."

Elizabeth gave a queer little sigh—was it of gratitude?—as she spread her blankets.

Whether she was just annoyed at the possibility of my thinking she had taken a fancy to a mere man who admired her, or whether she really had begun to take a fancy—well, I gave it up as I settled down to my well-earned rest.

I'd said I wouldn't think any more about it. As a matter of fact I was too stunned by the extraordinary possibilities of the subject. I left it. I turned to the thought of Captain Holiday's other guest for that concert, that girl from town who was coming to stay with her mother at the Lodge.

I found myself wondering over her again during the few minutes that elapsed between my curling up on my mattress and my losing consciousness of that and every other question.

It was all very well for that young man to announce so succinctly, "She's just the girl I want." What did he think that would convey to me? She would be rather lucky, as luck goes, to have any one so nice and amusing in love with her. But what sort of a girl would a man like that want?

Absolutely no frills about her, I decided. She would be extraordinarily practical and efficient; very out of doorish; good-looking, but not pretty in any "doll-y" sort of way; thorough sportswoman—only, why hadn't she wanted to say either "yes" or "no" to him? Why not "yes" at once? Why not——

Here a curious little incident wound up a day of curious incidents. I had, whilst engaged in these meditations, been tucking my wrist watch under the rolled-up scarf that was my only pillow. My hand met a handkerchief that I had forgotten was there. As I took hold of the thing I felt a knot that was tied tightly in the corner of it.

A knot to remind me of something.

Now what was that, and when had I tied it?

Suddenly I remembered.

Elizabeth had tied that knot in my green silk handkerchief days and days ago. And she'd said: "That's to remind you to think mournfully of Harry at least once a day."

I'd forgotten that. More than that, I'd forgotten Harry for the moment—or for how long? Had it really been days since I had given a thought to those bitter-sweet memories of the man who used to blot out every other interest from my horizon? Had the land-work cure progressed so rapidly that other interests were beginning to keep all remembrance of Harry in the background?

I looked back to the obsession that had been the indirect cause of sending me—a love-sick wreck!—on to the land.

And now—was it possible that I'd got over it so well?

In ruefulness, relief, and surprise I drew a deep breath. Then I turned over and slept.

But I never dreamt of what else was coming to remind me of Harry—and very shortly!

"Quand on n'a pas ce qu'on aime, il faut aimer ce qu'on a."
                                                                                    —FRENCH PHILOSOPHER.

A few days after I had been wondering what Captain Holiday's "the" girl would be like, my curiosity was gratified.

I met her!

This was how it occurred:

I was out in "the town" shopping—fascinating occupation—don't any woman's eyes brighten at its name?

Yes.... But the chances are ten to one against her knowing anything about the Careg Land Girl's Camp version of the function.

Not for us the dear delights of window-gazing, of comparing prices and textures in one big, temptingly set-out establishment after another.... Well, we got our delight in another way.

Shopping for the girls was a game of chance and skill, I can tell you. It "combined all the charm of novelty with that of big game-hunting!" as Vic put it. It meant diving into the funniest little caves of shops, all garlanded by festoons of such different kinds of goods as picture post-cards, hanks of darning cotton, and onions.

It sometimes included vaulting over the counter ourselves, and helping dear old ladies to forage for what we wanted in a wilderness of cardboard boxes at the back of the shop. And even after our search it generally meant that we went on our way disappointed, to the accompaniment of such remarks as "No, indeed, I'm very sorry! I'm sold out of every bit"—of whatever it was we wanted—"and I don't know when I shall ever see any! It's the war, yes, yes! I haven't got a ha'porth of nothing of the sort, not in the whole place!"

This seemed to be the keynote of supplies in the town, late on that very wet Saturday afternoon when I had accompanied Vic, and Peggy, the tiny Timber-girl, to do the shopping for the rest of our camp.

"Got the list, Celery-face?" said Vic. As we sheltered for a moment in an archway I pulled out the long list of commissions which our colleagues had drawn up for us.

Optimists! They really thought we could get these things for them in "the town"!

I read aloud.

"Last two numbers of The Tatler." (I expect the latest number they've got at the station here is April 1, Nineteen Five.)

"Pot of lemon-marmalade; you could get it at Morris's. (I don't think.)

"Sybil wants jasmine soap, 1s. 3d." (Why not the moon?)

"Two skeins of floss embroidery silk, deep cream or nearest." (The nearest is Regent Street, I expect.)

"Reel of black cotton, No. 40, packet needles, No. 9's, brown shoe-laces, broad." (All asked for, and none to be had.)

"Shocking!" was Vic's cheery verdict. "As for the packets of grey square envelopes for Miss Easton, nothing doing—and there was I pinning my faith to them having a good line in salvage stock left over from the Ark, this being the last place where the Flood stopped—not that it ever has really stopped in Wales, if you ask me."

"Oh, that eternal joke about the weather in Wales!" I laughed. "Just as if it didn't rain much harder in plenty of other places! Have you ever stayed in Surrey, by the way? That's where it never leaves off!"

"It 'ud have a job to beat this beauty-spot today," persisted Vic, winking the rain from her lashes. "Look at it!"

It certainly was a soaking wet afternoon, Wales running Surrey a good second for once.

For it certainly was a soaking wet afternoon! The clouds were a blanket of indigo, from which the rain poured in millions of white streams, hissing on to the narrow, little, slate-paved street, all shiny with puddles. Tossing the drops from the brim of my Land Army hat, I went on reading the list of ordinary every-day things which we Land Girls in the damp depths of that wilderness found as hard to come by as gold!

I read.

"'Gramophone needles.' (No earthly.)

"'Dri-ped for Curley's boots. (No.) 'Tin of toffee.' (No.) 'Sticking-plaister.' (No.) 'Oranges.' (What are they?) 'Writing-pad.' (Bagged the last.) 'Shampoo-powder, any decent sort that smells nice——'"

"Aha. Who's wanting to make her hair smell nice all of a sudden?" demanded Peggy with interest. "I'm astonished at her! Who is it?"

"Don't know," I fibbed valiantly—for I knew perfectly. It was young Elizabeth who had begun to want to minister to that thick, soft hair-crop of hers in this way.... A sign of the times! That fixed it, surely? I exchanged a soulful though still half-credulous glance with the nearest cottage-window, blank with rain.

"I haven't tried Mr. Lloyd, the only chemist's, for that yet," I went on. "Shall we go on and see if he's ever heard of such a thing?"

Cramming the list into my pocket, we set out again down that river of a street.

The chemist's shop was at the other end of it.

And as we splashed down the street we had a little adventure of the kind that had probably occurred to more than one set of land girls.

A group of lads who encountered us began to laugh and jeer at our uniform—they themselves were in "civvies," mackintosh and caps. Farmers' lads from remote places in the mountains!

I don't know what they said, but from the tone it was obviously not complimentary.

So feeling that blank discomfort which falls upon the average girl at any man's incivility, I found myself clutching Peggy's arm in order to hurry past, and saying hastily: "Come on, Vic——"

But Vic, to my horror, had paused.

She left my side. She took a step towards the nearest of the lads, a rosy-faced nineteen-year-old with a ragged thatch of black hair showing under his bowler hat. There she stood, firmly planted on the streaming road, handsome head well up in the rain, figure held proudly erect, and she demanded in a voice that rang:

"What's that you're saying about us?" A sheepish giggle from the group; not one of the boys spoke.

"You were saying we ought to be ashamed of ourselves, wasn't it? Something like that, eh? That's what you think of us, is it?" Vic went on.

"I'd like just to tell you what we Land Army girls think of you!" Vic announced. "And that is, that it's you who ought to be ashamed of yourselves! Huh! Why aren't you in France? Can't leave the farm, you can't. You're sheltering yourselves behind the land, you are. You ought to be standing shoulder to shoulder with the rest o' the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

"You've got regiments. Nobody can say they don't fight all right. Yet here you are at home. Exemption, eh? Indispensables—I don't think. Who's to milk father's cows? Well, we've volunteered to do that. That's what we're here for. That's why you can't bear to see us about the place. You're afraid——"

Mutters from the boys here.

"Yes, you're afraid that when it's shown that we girls can do most o' your work you'll be pushed out after all!" went on the relentless Vic. "So you try and bring a bad name on the Land Army, you little blighters, who take jolly good care you aren't in any army at all! You make game of our uniform, you that haven't a suit o' khaki among the lot of you! Nice ones you are to talk!"

Here there was an uneasy movement in the enemy's ranks.

Skulking little wretches! There are some of these in every place, town or country—the dregs of a noble race whose cream was taken first of all. Probably as soon as our backs were turned they would have wheeled round and begun to shout after us again. But this Vic did not mean to allow. She kept her face turned squarely on the retreat.

She called out after them:

"Making fun, were you, because we girls wear the breeches? A good job for the country that we do! As for you, it's a pity they can't take and make you," raising her voice to a shout, "wear petticoats!"

They were now out of ear-shot, so she turned, flushed and triumphant.

"I'm astonished at you," Peggy launched her favourite dictum reproachfully, as we plodded on in the wet. "I wouldn't stoop to answer back a lot of louts like that. I wouldn't speak to 'em."

"Daresay you wouldn't," retorted Vic, good-humouredly, "but if we were all as jolly dignified as you and Celery-face here, those Cuthberts would go through the rest of their natch never knowing what a decent girl thought of 'em! So I thought I might as well demean myself to tell them off proper just for once in a way!"

With which conclusion we found ourselves just outside the tiny chemist's shop. A dog-cart was drawn up there—little did I suspect at that moment who had driven in it! I only noticed that it was occupied by a little stable-boy who did odd jobs about the Lodge for Captain Holiday.

Well, in we all three clumped to the shop with coloured globes and show-cards and dangling bunches of "baby's-comforters" and sponges of Victorian date. And here there met our astonished eyes that figure that was so utterly and entirely uncharacteristic of "the town," or of anything at all in the country round about it!

It was a girl, in an ultra-smart, white and black rubber rain-coat, with a small black and white rain-hat set at an indescribably French angle on her head. Our first glimpse of her, as she stood with her back to us and her face to the obviously paralysed little Welsh chemist, gave us the impression of some slim and elegant magpie who had flown in there to shelter from the rain.

She was speaking. Her high-pitched, clear drawl seemed to belong to Bond Street.

"But d'you mean to say you don't keep any of Roget et Collet's things?"

Then, as we Land girls came clumping and dripping in, she turned with a little stare that seemed to say, "What figures of fun have we here?"

Our rainy-day kit is scarcely dainty. That brown Board of Agriculture mackintosh with the flappy cape-sleeves seemed to amuse the pretty townified girl.

Ravishingly pretty she was in her small-mouthed, big-eyed, Lily-Elsie style with an authentic curl twisting in front of her pink ear, and eyelashes to which the rain-drops hung. How perfectly suited, too, by the costly simple "rightness" of her clothes. Girl and "get-up" composed a type one would scarcely have expected to see here.

The last person I expected to see—for I had seen her before!

With my second good hard look at this fashionable vision I recognized her.

"Hul-lo! You here? It is you, isn't it!" I exclaimed.

She opened her eyes at me, while Peggy and Vic stood by in amazement that this chic magpie apparition should be known to me.

I hadn't been mistaken, even though I could not imagine what should bring her here of all places in the world. It was she all right.

It was Muriel Elvey, the girl who had taken Harry from me!

Muriel opened her big eyes even more widely upon me.

"Good gracious! Is it? Yes, it's Joan Matthews! How priceless!" she exclaimed in that pretty drawl of hers. She glanced from me to the other two Land Girls and back again. "Of course! How d'you do?"

Here she extended her small, perfectly-gloved hand towards my sunburnt paw, that I saw for the first time was irremediably roughened by farm work.

I saw that Miss Muriel took in this and every other detail of my appearance, while she went on gaily:

"Isn't this too funny? The last person I'd ever dreamt of seeing! Of course, I'd heard you'd gone on the land, Joan, or something quaint like that——"

"Why 'quaint'?" thought I, while the same thought showed on the faces of my two mates.

"But I didn't know at all which bit of 'the land' it was supposed to be," concluded Muriel. "Isn't it appallingly hard work? Can you stand it? It would kill me," she went on. She always could chatter nineteen to anybody else's dozen. "I get fearfully done up, with my own war work."

"I didn't know you did any."

"Oh, dear, yes. I go round to no end of hospitals in town and play the piano to the men. They adore it," declared Muriel. "Only the nurses are such cats! Women never can be decent to me, somehow I had a fiendish row with one ward-sister—all jealousy on her part, of course. I simply came away. But what a place to come away to, isn't it?" She gave a tiny grimace about the musty village shop, and towards the glimpse of streaming wilderness outside. "And imagine my meeting you here!"

I spoke up.

"Well, but imagine meeting you! I thought you were never to be seen away from London or some civilized seaside town? What brings you to Careg?"

For even yet the whole situation hadn't broken upon me. Only, I was sore and ruffled, and utterly upset by this meeting with Muriel.

It was opening an old wound. I'd thought I'd forgotten. But, brought face to face with this girl for whom Harry had left me before he sailed, my heart throbbed as painfully as it had on that ghastly morning when I'd got that note to say he'd gone.

Now I wondered with a stab if she were actually engaged to him? I hadn't heard that she was.

She, the unexpected one, gave a pleased little laugh.

"What brought me to Wales?" Muriel replied. "You may well ask, my dear. I was positively dragged down here. Pestered out of my life to come! By a man, of course. No!"—laughing again—"you needn't look as if you thought it must be a romance. He is merely a cousin. My cousin Dick Holiday——"

"What—?" I echoed, thoroughly petrified by this. Her cousin? He was Muriel's cousin? He, who had been talking to me of "the" girl—and who had allowed me to leap to the conclusion that she and the girl-cousin who was coming down to stay were one and the same person! Violently I had leapt to that conclusion. Quite violently, in my haste, I thought now:

"Oh! The man-snatcher! She took my Harry. Now she's annexed Captain Holiday. She takes everybody!"

"I promised him I'd come down with mother and play the piano for his soldiers and things at some priceless concert or other that he's giving," Muriel Elvey went on. "His big place down here is turned into a hospital, you know. That is," with a glance at my muddy boots and uniform, "I don't suppose you've met him, of course, but he's——"

"What, Captain Holiday?" Vic broke in, unaddressed and heartily. "Not met the gent what's giving the concert? Met him? Huh! I should shay sho!"

Muriel, with an indescribable stiffening of her pretty, well-turned-out figure, stared up at the big Cockney Land Girl who thus accosted her.

Vic leaned against the counter, beaming. She might have stood for the symbolical figure of Young Democracy, gazing tolerantly down upon costly Convention.

"All us girls'll be turning up at Captain Holiday's concert," Vic told her. "It's going to be some beano, I give you my word. So you're going to oblige, too, are you? See you then!" She gave a little nod, and turned to the chemist who had been listening with the concentration of a male gossip to every syllable of this conversation.

"Now, Mr. Lloyd! What about this shampoo powder we've heard so much about? ... What's in that box, there, to the right? ... There we are! Egg and lemon—and very nice, too. Sixpence? Right! Good-bye-e-e-e!"

Vic marshalled us out of the shop with a friendly grin divided between the chemist and Muriel Elvey, who was left standing there—utterly pole-axed, I am sure by this glimpse of the sort of companionship into which one was launched when one joined the Land Army.

I could see that she found Vic "too impossible for words!"

This hurt me for my messmate and pal, though I am convinced Vic knew little and cared less about the fact that she had just been looked upon as a young female hooligan! I tramped back along the "puddlesome" roads to camp in a state of mind that I had not known since I'd shaken the dust of London off my feet in the spring.

Still "minding" so dreadfully about Muriel Elvey and Harry?

Why be surprised because men fell like ninepins before her expensively-shod feet? Yet I was astonished. Not at Harry. At that other man for whom she was "the" girl—or so I'd convinced myself.

Surely, though, Captain Holiday should have been the exception to the rule that men adore the Muriel type?

Yes; I'd made up mental pictures of this girl of whom he'd talked without mentioning her name.

To think that the girl he wanted could be a Muriel!

She was the girl of whom one couldn't think without setting her in the background of restaurant-lights, hothouse flowers and Bond Street dressmakers.

When one saw Muriel, one saw always her "things": Muriel and her pearl-string; Muriel and her gold-mesh purse with tiny powder-box and lip-stick attached; Muriel and her mauve leather dressing-case; Muriel and her ivory manicure-set.

Each was a lure, each was a mesh of the net for a man like my lost admirer Harry.... His people were now exceedingly well-off, but there had been no luxury in his boyhood, which, as he'd told me, had been passed in a bleak little house behind the shop where the money had been made, penny by penny, to give him his chance.

At twenty-five, luxury was still rather a new delight to him. He could not take it for granted, poor darling; he who had never seen his mother with any "pretty" things of her own. Hence the reaction. He loved a woman to have "possessions." He adored her to "fuss" incessantly about her nails and skin and hair.

But Captain Holiday, I thought, liked such different things!

Him one couldn't think of without a background of out-of-doors; woods, mountain, field—and perhaps a manure-heap with a Land Girl working there.

And now (so I persuaded myself) he had become infatuated with and wanted to marry a boudoir-type of girl, who hated to go out in a wind!

Ah, the tricks that are played by the charm of Contrast! ... and why should I feel sore about them?

At last the great day of the long-discussed Concert arrived.

At last the burning question was decided whether we Campites were to attend in uniform or "civvies."

Popular opinion had been in favour of Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. Some girls had wired home to hasten their parcels. The red-haired Welsh timber-girl had been all delight over the prospect of adorning herself in a blouse of rose-pink voile with flowers embroidered in coarse white cotton. How entirely it spoilt her looks! In fact, there was scarcely a girl in that camp who didn't look a thousand times more attractive in uniform than she did in an ordinary hat and frock.

Uniform does manage to be always "right" in a way that only the most successful "other clothes" ever achieve. But only one woman in twenty can ever be persuaded to see that.

Elizabeth and I were highly pleased, however, when the verdict came from the forewoman that uniform was to be worn at the concert after all.

That concert began early, in order to finish early. We should never have time to get back from work, have our tea, and change into civilian clothes before we set out again for the hospital—particularly the gang of timber-workers, who were now in the woods, two miles beyond the training farm. And it wouldn't look nice to have them in uniform and the farm-girls out of it. We must be all alike, decided Miss Easton, and smarten up our working kit by getting into a clean smock and giving our boots an extra polish.

Grumbling broke out—what camp in either the women's or the men's armies could go on without its grouse? But the girls agreed to lump it, as it had to be.

"After all, the boys'll have to be in their everlasting hospital blue, with those chronic red ties o' theirs that I'm getting fair fed up with the sight of, so we'll be fellow-sufferers in distress," pronounced Vic cheerfully as she swallowed her tea, left the table, and then got to work on another pair of brogues.

"After you with that brown boot-polish, young Mop"—to Elizabeth—"and when you've finished with the glass, Peggy, p'raps you'll find me a clean handkerchief, the thieves in this place having pinched the lot of mine. Ho! Why do I talk in this unfemin-nine style? Most unwomanly I call it. Effects of this here life in camp," she rattled on good-humouredly.

"I shall have to mind myself presently, before that refined pal of Celery-face's. Her what's going to play the piano. She didn't half give me a nasty look in the chemist's. Sure she thinks I'm no lady. Now what's her little game? Is she trying to get off with the Captain, Celery-face?"

I said a trifle bitterly:

"If she likes people, she does not have to 'try' for them."

"Ah, is she one o' those lucky ones," said Vic, cheerfully shining her brogues. "Well, I'm going to watch the young lady tonight, and see what she makes of——"

"Hurry up, you girls!" urged Miss Easton from the porch. "The concert starts at a quarter to. It's time we were off!"

* * * * * * *

Well! As Vic said, we were to "see life" that evening at the concert.

The scene was that big comfortable country house transformed into that jolly hospital for the boys from the Front. Its enormous double drawing-room must have witnessed plenty of "county" dinner-parties; dull and formal functions, no doubt. Nothing dull or formal about tonight, now that it was turned into an impromptu music-hall!

The wounded lads buzzed about it like a swarm of blue bees giving an At Home, welcoming the visitors, showing them into the rows of seats set in the lower half of the room.

"Here you are! Land Army to the right!" a cheery voice hailed us as we trooped in—twenty-odd girls in uniform.

It was Peggy's sergeant who greeted us. His hair was varnished brighter than the parquet floor; he wore the largest rose I have ever seen in his button-hole, and the gaudiest lucky golliwog decorated his red tie.

"I was to reserve these seats for you young ladies. The best, of course!" he beamed upon us. "Stalls this way, if you please. Peggy, you sit at the end of the row so that you can pop out quick in the interval."

"I'm astonished at you," came a Timber-girl's retort as we settled into our seats and looked about the bright, crowded place.

The farther end was occupied by the stage platform with the piano set near the wings. A curtain had been made of what looked like all the spare quilts in the house.

Standing in front of this (as I saw directly we came in) was our host, Captain Holiday.

Evening-dress made him taller and different, both from the smart soldier he was in khaki and the country sportsman he seemed in those dilapidated tweeds of his. Suddenly he seemed a stranger again to me. It chilled me.

He was talking to one of the soldiers, a red-haired Blue Boy, with a good-looking, clean-cut, actor-ish face. I heard Captain Holiday saying:

"Righto! I'll tell the Colonel to let you fix him up. That's in the second part."

"Yes, sir," said the red-haired boy.

Captain Holiday, looking down the room caught sight of our party. I heard him give an "Ah." He smiled, nodding at me. This was somehow cheering after that slight chill. He made a movement forward, I think—I'm sure he was coming to speak to me.

But at that moment a pretty, coquettish voice called "Dick!"

And there entered, by a door nearer the stage, Muriel Elvey and her mother. Mrs. Elvey, the sort of mother who never is anything but an adequate "background" to her daughters, looked placid and pleased in well-fitting black, with diamonds.

As for Muriel, she was lovely, yes, lovely! in her Frenchiest little frock of pinks and mauves, and mingled heliotropes. The girlish, low-cut bodice of it had no sleeves, and was held up over her white shoulders by strings of palest coral beads. She was a vision such as Careg had never seen. No wonder the Blue Boys gazed! No wonder the Land Girls, in their clean but coarse overalls, bent forward and studied her with the rapturous, envying sighs they would have heaved over some exquisite fashion-plate! No wonder that she was followed by a slim masculine shape in black-and-white that was Colonel Fielding.

He, too! No wonder, indeed, that her cousin, Captain Holiday, was at Muriel's side in an instant, bending his dark head over her golden one, with its fillet of coral-pink buds.

Now, curiously enough perhaps, that sight spoilt the whole first part of the concert for me.

At first I didn't know why. Such was my incredible self-deception that I gave myself quite the wrong reason for the fact that Muriel Elvey came between me and any enjoyment of the playlet "Poached Eggs and Pearls," excellently acted by a company of nurses and wounded. I was beset, I told myself, by the promptings of jealous memory.

I pictured that golden, rose-filleted head of Muriel's close to another dark head. Harry's! That was what I couldn't help thinking of. I watched Muriel—the centre of all eyes as she sat at the piano—and I realized what she'd meant to Harry. Not a thought had he had for me after that evening when I introduced him to her. And now history was repeating itself. Now Captain Holiday hadn't a look for anybody else.

It hurt.

Oh! Not the Captain Holiday part, of course! I assured myself hastily—the other. I'd thought I was getting over that. How queer are the workings of that most painful passion—jealousy! Brooding, I sat there with my mates, enjoying themselves on each side of me. I laughed with the others, with the others I watched the stage, and clapped when the curtain fell—to Muriel's music—for the end of the first part.

Then Captain Holiday, still standing by Muriel at the piano, called out:

"There will now be an interval of fifteen minutes! War-time refreshments will be found in the dining-room."

So, with a scraping aside of chairs and a babel of voices, the audience surged out of the "theatre." I went with the others. But that black mood of mine had swept my mind away out of my new and joyous country life, back to the bad old days of London after Harry left.

I sat on a big chair near the door, and watched.

Each Land Girl had found a wounded soldier or two to attend to her. Vic, with Elizabeth under her wing, was the centre of a group of blue. Then a long glass of lemonade was brought to me by the pleasant-faced, red-haired lad I had noticed with Captain Holiday. He talked to me in a gentle, but curious, voice, husky, yet high-pitched. For he told me he'd been shot through the lungs.

"Done me in for the profession if I go back after the war," he said cheerfully. "Spoilt my singing voice." He told me he'd been on the stage from the time he was ten until he joined the Army in 1914.

Here Sergeant Syd, coming up to us with an arm through Peggy's, broke into the conversation.

"Yes, and you'd have been all right, you silly blighter, if you'd have stayed where they wanted to keep you, down at the base singing to the boys in rest camp. You needn't ever have left there! But no. He would go up the line, Miss."

The red-haired actor warrior agreed in the husky voice that was spoilt for song:

"I wanted to go up the line. After all, I didn't join to go on singing."

Another aspect of life: the obscurely heroic that is taken for granted every day!

"Corporal Ferrant," said a voice at his elbow. It was Muriel again.

"Oh, will you go to the Colonel's room now?" she said pleasantly. "He's ready for you to make him up." Then:

"Hullo, Joan!" she said. "What do you think of this priceless show? My hands are dropping off with playing so hard."

She glanced around. Then she let herself down lightly on the arm of my chair as if she wanted to say something particular to me.