The Zeppelins Passenger | Page 6

echoed.
Nora led them away, and Helen, with a word of excuse, followed them.
Griffiths, who had also risen to his feet, came a little nearer to
Philippa's chair.
"And you, too, of course, Captain Griffiths," she said, smiling
pleasantly up at him. "Must you hurry away?"
"I will stay, if I may, until Miss Fairclough returns," he answered,
resuming his seat.
"Do!" Philippa begged him. "I have had such a miserable time in town.
You can't think how restful it is to be back here."
"I am afraid," he observed, "that your journey has not been successful."
Philippa shook her head.
"It has been completely unsuccessful," she sighed. "I have not been
able to hear a word about my brother. I am so sorry for poor Helen, too.
They were only engaged, you know, a few days before he left for the
front this last time."
Captain Griffiths nodded sympathetically.
"I never met Major Felstead," he remarked, "but every one who has
seems to like him very much. He was doing so well, too, up to that last
unfortunate affair, wasn't he?"
"Dick is a dear," Philippa declared. "I never knew any one with so
many friends. He would have been commanding his battalion now, if
only he were free. His colonel wrote and told me so himself."

"I wish there were something I could do," Griffiths murmured, a little
awkwardly. "It hurts me, Lady Cranston, to see you so upset."
She looked at him for a moment in faint surprise.
"Nobody can do anything," she bemoaned. "That is the unfortunate part
of it all."
He rose to his feet and was immediately conscious, as he always was
when he stood up, that there was a foot or two of his figure which he
had no idea what to do with.
"You wouldn't feel like a ride to-morrow morning, Lady Cranston?" he
asked, with a wistfulness which seemed somehow stifled in his rather
unpleasant voice. She shook her head.
"Perhaps one morning later," she replied, a little vaguely. "I haven't any
heart for anything just now."
He took a sombre but agitated leave of his hostess, and went out into
the twilight, cursing his lack of ease, remembering the things which he
had meant to say, and hating himself for having forgotten them.
Philippa, to whom his departure had been, as it always was, a relief,
was already leaning forward in her chair with her arm around Helen's
neck.
"I thought that extraordinary man would never go," she exclaimed,
"and I was longing to send for you, Helen. London has been such a
dreary chapter of disappointments."
"What a sickening time you must have had, dear!"
"It was horrid," Philippa assented sadly, "but you know Henry is no use
at all, and I should have felt miserable unless I had gone. I have been to
every friend at the War Office, and every friend who has friends there. I
have made every sort of enquiry, and I know just as much now as I did
when I left here - that Richard was a prisoner at Wittenberg the last
time they heard, and that they have received no notification whatever

concerning him for the last two months.
Helen glanced at the calendar.
"It is just two months to-day," she said mournfully, "since we heard."
"And then," Philippa sighed, "he hadn't received a single one of our
parcels."
Helen rose suddenly to her feet. She was a tall, fair girl of the best
Saxon type, slim but not in the least angular, with every promise,
indeed, of a fuller and more gracious development in the years to come.
She was barely twenty-two years old, and, as is common with girls of
her complexion, seemed younger. Her bright, intelligent face was,
above all, good-humoured. Just at that moment, however, there was a
flush of passionate anger in her cheeks.
"It makes me feel almost beside myself," she exclaimed, "this hideous
incapacity for doing anything! Here we are living in luxury, without a
single privation, whilst Dick, the dearest thing on earth to both of us, is
being starved and goaded to death in a foul German prison!"
"We mustn't believe that it's quite so bad as that, dear," Philippa
remonstrated. "What is it, Mills?"
The elderly man-servant who had entered with a tray in his band,
bowed as he arranged it upon a side table.
"I have taken the liberty of bringing in a little fresh tea, your ladyship,"
he announced, "and some hot buttered toast. Cook has sent some of the
sandwiches, too, which your ladyship generally fancies."
"It is very kind of you, Mills," Philippa said, with rather a wan little
smile. "I had some tea at South Lynn, but it was very bad. You might
take my coat, please."
She