thing as a conscience. She told me she wasn't going to see the official war-pictures to-night because she had a previous engagement with a downy couch, a splendid love-story, and a good fat box of candy. Candy! When the rest of us aren't taking sugar in our tea! Depraved, I call her."
Inwardly Vincent winced—not at Barbara's testimony itself (he had heard Elizabeth Oliver talk often in similar strain) but at the discovery that the rôle which he had believed she had assumed for him alone, was played indiscriminately, for everybody's amusement. He had thought Elizabeth Oliver had shut her eyes to stern realities to spare him pain. Fool! Barbara shattered the image of any such angel of mercy, which he had been molding out of Elizabeth Oliver's sparkling smiles and glances, rippling peals of laughter, pretty expressions of enthusiasm over all things gay and merry, playful pouts and frowns, and disapproving shrugs, over all things grave and serious.
But though the image was broken the parts of which it had been made were indestructible. Vincent could not forget Elizabeth Oliver's smiles and glances, and the hundred and one little atoms that went to make up her manner and per-
