"Certainly. Then you're not expecting Miss Rose back for a minute or two?"

"Oh, no! She only went out twenty minutes ago."

He was still standing, and Mrs. Otway suddenly felt herself to be inhospitable.

"Do sit down," she said hurriedly. Somehow in the last few minutes her point of view, her att.i.tude to her friend, her kind, considerate, courteous friend, had altered. She no longer looked at him with indulgent half-contempt as an idle man, a man who, though he was very good to his mother, and sometimes very useful to herself, had always led, excepting during the South African War (and that was a long time ago), an idle, useless kind of life. He was going now to face real danger, perchance--but her mind shrank from _that_ thought, from that dread possibility--death itself. Somehow the fact that Major Guthrie was going with his regiment to France brought the War perceptibly nearer to Mrs. Otway, and made it for the first time real.

He quietly took the easy chair she had motioned him to take, and she sat down too.

"Well, I have to confess that you were right and I wrong! You always thought we should fight the Germans." She tried to speak playfully, but there was a certain pain in the admission, for she had always scorned his quiet prophecies and declared him to be, in this one matter, prejudiced and unfair.

"Yes," he said, "that's quite true! But, Mrs. Otway? I'm very, very sorry to have been proved right. And I fear that you must feel it very much, as you have so many German friends."

"I haven't many German friends now," she said quickly. "I had as a girl, and of course I've kept up with two or three of them, as you know. But it's true that the whole thing is a great shock and--and a great pain to me. Unlike you, I've always thought very well of Germans."

He said quietly, "So have I."

"Ah, but not in my sense!" She could not help smiling a little ruefully.

"You know I never thought of them in your sense at all--I mean not as soldiers."

There was a pause, a long and rather painful pause, between them.

CHAPTER IX

Major Guthrie looked at Mrs. Otway meditatively.

Apart from his instinctive attraction for her--an attraction which had sprung into being the very first time they had met, at a dinner party at the Deanery--he had always regarded her as an exceptionally clever woman. She was able to do so much more than most of the ladies he had known. To his simple soldier mind there was something interesting and, well, yes, rather extraordinary, in a woman who sat on committees, who could hold her own so well in argument, and who yet remained very feminine, sometimes--so he secretly thought--quite delightfully absurd and inconsequent, with it all.

Major Guthrie had always been sorry that Mrs. Otway and his mother didn't exactly hit it off. His mother had once been a beauty, and was now a rather shrewish, sharp-tongued old lady, who had outlived most of the people and most of the things she had cared for in life. Mrs. Otway irritated Mrs. Guthrie. The old lady despised the still pretty widow's eager, interested, enthusiastic outlook on life.

Suddenly Major Guthrie took a large pocket-book out of his right breast pocket. He opened it, and Mrs. Otway saw that it contained a packet of bank-notes held together by an india-rubber band. There was also an empty white envelope in the pocket-book. Slipping off the band, he began counting the notes. When he had counted four, she called out, "Stop!

Stop! I am only giving you a twenty-pound cheque." And then she saw that they were not five-pound notes, as she had supposed, but ten-pound notes.

He went on counting, and mechanically, hardly knowing that she was doing so, she counted with him up to ten. He then took the envelope he had brought with him, put the ten notes inside, and getting up from his chair he laid the envelope on Mrs. Otway's writing-table by the window.

"I want you to keep this by you in case of need. I know you will forgive me if I say that I shall go away feeling much happier if you will oblige me by doing what I ask in this matter." Under the tan his face had got very red, and there was a deprecating expression in his dark blue eyes.

"I don't understand," she said, and the colour also rushed into her face.

"I beg of you not to be angry with me----" Major Guthrie stood up and looked down at her so humbly, so wistfully, that she felt touched instead of angry. "You see, I don't like the thought of your being caught, as you've been caught this week apparently, without any money in the house."

But if Mrs. Otway felt touched by the kind thought which had prompted the offer of this uncalled-for loan, she also felt just a little vexed.

Major Guthrie was treating her just like a child!

"I'm not in the least likely to be short of money," she cried, "once the banks are open again. The Dean says that everything will be as usual by Monday, and I have quite a lot of money coming in towards the end of this month. In fact, as we can't now go abroad, I shall be even richer than usual. Still, please don't think I'm not grateful!"

She got up too, and looked at him frankly. The colour had now gone from his face, and he looked tired and grey. She told herself that it _had_ been very kind of him to have thought of this--the act of a true friend.

And so, a little shyly, she put out her hand for a moment, naturally supposing that he would grasp it in friendship. But he did nothing of the sort, so she quietly let her hand fall again by her side, and feeling rather foolish sat down again by her writing-table.

"With regard to the money you are expecting at the end of this month--do you mean the dividends due on the amount you put in that Six Per Cent.

Hamburg Loan?" he asked, quietly going back to his armchair.

"Yes, it is six per cent. on four thousand pounds--quite a lot of money!" She spoke in a playful tone, but she was beginning to feel embarra.s.sed and awkward. It was, after all, an odd thing for Major Guthrie to have done--to bring her the considerable sum of a hundred pounds in bank-notes without even first asking her permission to do so.

The envelope containing the notes was still lying there, close to her elbow.

"I'm afraid, Mrs. Otway, that you're not likely to have those dividends paid you this August. All money payments from Germany to England, or from England to Germany, have of course stopped since Wednesday."

And then, when he saw the look of utter dismay deepening into horrified surprise come over her face, he added hastily, "Of course we must hope that these moneys will be kept intact till the end of the war. Still, I doubt very much whether your bankers would allow you to draw on that probability, even if you were willing to pay a high rate of interest.

German credit is likely to suffer greatly before this war is over."

"But Major Guthrie? I don't suppose you know what this means to me and to Rose. Why, more than half of everything we have in the world is invested in Germany!"

"I know that," he said feelingly. "In fact, that was among the first things, Mrs. Otway, which occurred to me when I learnt that war had been declared. I expected to find you very much upset about it."

"I never gave it a thought; I didn't know a war could affect that sort of thing. What a fool I've been! Oh, if only I'd followed your advice--I mean two years ago!" She spoke with a great deal of painful agitation, and Major Guthrie felt very much distressed indeed. It was hard that he should have had to be the bearer of such ill tidings.

"I blame myself very, very much," he said sombrely, "for not having insisted on your putting that money into English or Colonial securities."

"Oh, but you did insist!" Even now, in the midst of her keen distress, the woman's native honesty and generosity of nature a.s.serted itself.

"You couldn't have said more! Don't you remember that we nearly quarrelled over it? Short of forging my name and stealing my money and investing it properly for me, you couldn't have done anything more than you did do, Major Guthrie."

"That you should say that is a great comfort to me," he said in a low voice. "But even so, I don't feel as if I'd really done enough. You see, I was as sure--as sure as ever man was of anything--that this war was going to come either this year or next! As a matter of fact I thought it would be next year--I thought the Germans would wish to be even more ready than they are."

"But do you really think they are ready?" she said doubtfully. "Look how badly they've been doing at Liege." It was strange how Mrs. Otway's mind had veered round in the last few minutes. She now wanted the Germans to be beaten, and beaten quickly.

He shook his head impatiently. "Wait till they get into their stride!"

And then, in a different, a more diffident voice, "Then you'll consent to relieve my mind by keeping the contents of that envelope--I mean of course by spending them? As a matter of fact I've a confession to make to you." He looked at her deprecatingly. "I've just arranged with my London banker to make up those Hamburg dividends. He'll send you the money in notes. He understands----" and then he got rather red. "He understands that I'm practically your trustee, Mrs. Otway."

"But, Major Guthrie--it isn't _true_! How could you say such a thing?"

She felt confused, unhappy, surprised, awkward, grateful. Of course she couldn't take this man's money! He was a friend, in some ways a very close friend of hers, but she hadn't known him more than four years. If she _should_ run short of money, why there must be a dozen people or more on whose friendship she had a greater claim, and who could, and would, help her.

And then Mary Otway suddenly ran over in secret review her large circle of old friends and acquaintances, and she realised, with a shock of pain and astonishment, that there was not one of them to whom she would wish to go for help in that kind of trouble. Of her wide circle--and like most people of her cla.s.s she had a very wide circle--there was only one person, and that was the man who was now sitting looking at her with so much concern in his eyes, to whom it would even have occurred to her to confess that her income had failed through her foolish belief in the stability, and the peaceful intentions, of Germany.

Far, far quicker than it would have taken for her to utter her thoughts aloud, these painful thoughts and realisations flashed through her brain. If she had been content to put into this Hamburg Loan only the amount of the legacy she had inherited three years ago! But she had done more than that--she had sold out sound English railway stock after that interview she had had with a pleasant-speaking German business man in the big London Hamburg Loan office. He had said to her, "Madam, this is the opportunity of a lifetime!" And she had believed him. The kind German friend who had written to her about the matter had certainly acted in good faith. Of that she could rest a.s.sured. But this was very small consolation now.

"So you see, Mrs. Otway, that it's all settled--been settled over your head, as it were. And you'll oblige me, you'll make me feel that you're really treating me as a friend, if you say nothing more about it."

And then, as she still remained silent, and as Major Guthrie could see by the expression of her face that she meant to refuse what he so generously and delicately offered her, he went on:

"I feel now that I ought to tell you something which I had meant to keep to myself." He cleared his throat--and hum'd and hum'd a little. "I'm sure you'll understand that every sensible man, when going on active service, makes a fresh will. I've already written out my instructions to my solicitor, and he will prepare a will for me to sign to-morrow." He waited a moment, and then added, as lightly as he could: "I've left you a thousand pounds, which I've arranged you should receive immediately on my death. You see, I'm a lonely man, and all my relations are well off.

I think you know, without my telling out, that I've become very much attached to you--to you and to Miss Rose."