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“Never you mind ‘im, Mister Gilbart,” said a voice at his elbow, and he turned and looked in the face of a girl who, in an interval of dressmaking, had once helped him with his district work.

“Him?”

“The peeler,” Milly Sanders nodded; and it flashed on Gilbart that the policeman’s joke, the carriage, the girl’s face and these thoughts of his had all gone by in something less than ten seconds. “He’ve got the ‘ump to-night, that’s what’s the matter with ‘im.” And Milly Sanders nodded again reassuringly.

“What are you doing here?” Gilbart asked.

“Me? Oh, it’s in the way of business, as you might say. I comes here to pick up ‘ints. I s’pose now you thought ’twasn’t very feelin’-‘earted, and my Dick gone away foreign only this mornin’?”

He remembered now that the girl’s zeal for Mission work had cooled ever since she had been walking-out with her Dick–a young stoker in the Berenice.

“I reckon that’s the last of the dinner-guests. The others won’t be comin’ much before ten. Well, I’m off to the ‘Oe; there’s going to be fireworks, and that’s the best place for seein’.”

“In the way of business, too, I suppose?” said Gilbart, and wondered how he could say it.

Milly giggled. “You ‘ad me there,” she confessed. “But what’s the good to give way? I’m sure”–with conviction–“it’s just what Dick would like me to do. I’m going, anyway. So long!” She paused: “that is– unless you’d like to come along, too?”

It was, after all, astonishingly easy. Even if he found and convinced the Admiral, nothing could be done. Why then should he hasten all this misery? Was it not, rather, an act of large mercy to hold back the news? Say that by holding his tongue he delayed it by twenty-four hours; life after all was made up of days and not so very many of them. By silence then–it stood to reason–he gained from woe a clear day for hundreds. Meanwhile here stood one of those hundreds. Might he not give her, under the very shadow of fate, an hour or two of actual, positive happiness? He told himself this, knowing all the while that he lied. He knew that the thing was easier to put off than to do. He knew that he took Milly’s arm in his not to comfort her (although he meant to do this, too) but to drug his own conscience, and because he was mad– yes, mad–for human company and support. For hours–it seemed for weeks–he had been isolated, alone with that secret and his own soul. He could bear it no longer; he must ease the torment–only for a little–then perhaps he would go back to the Admiral. Chatter was what he wanted, the sound of a fellow-creature’s voice, babbling no matter what. He knew also that he bought this respite at a price, and the price must be paid terribly when he came to wake. And yet he found it astonishingly easy to take Milly’s arm.

“But I say,” she rattled on, “you must be soft!”

“Why?” He was drinking in the sound of her words, letting the sense run by him.

“Why, to suppose the Admiral would see you at this time. What was it about?”

“Please go on talking.”

“Well, I am. What did you want to see the Admiral for? Some Mission business, I s’pose. . . .Oh, you needn’t tell if you don’t choose; I’m not dying to hear.”

They stood side by side on the Hoe, watching the fireworks. Three or four searchlights were playing over the Sound, turned now upon the anchored craft, now upward, following the rockets, and again downward, crisscrossing their white rays as if to catch the dropping multi-coloured stars. “O–o–oh!” exclaimed Milly, as each shower of rockets exploded. “But what makes you jump like that?”