"What is a Company Headquarters?" she asked. "I want to see it."

A subtle, faint perfume reached Alf's nostrils and thrilled him all through. Now that she was in the full light of day, he could take in her exquisite quality. Her clothes, though obviously expensive, were too plain to suit Bill's untutored eye, but Alf, possessing by some queer freak of nature an unexpectedly true taste, saw in her the apotheosis of all that was most admirable in women. By all the laws of probability his tastes should have been for bright colors and nodding feathers, but such [Pg 72]decorations left him cold, while this girl struck him dumb. She was simply the embodiment of his ideal.

[Pg 72]

"Now I'm here," she went on, "I want to see for myself just what you poor men have to put up with. How awful it must be to live in a trench like this. And can't you show me a German?"

She smiled up into Alf's face.

That smile galvanized him as before, into a display of rash gallantry.

"So you shall, miss," he said. "Just step along the trench 'ere, and we'll show you all we can."

Isobel surveyed the trench doubtfully and then looked down at her delicately shod feet.

"Couldn't we walk along the top?" she asked. "It all seems so quiet and peaceful—surely there'd be no danger. We must be a long way from the Germans, aren't we?"

"It's not Fritz, miss," interposed Bill earnestly. "It's our sergeant. 'E mustn't see us with you. A fair terror, 'e is."

"Oh," said Isobel easily, feeling that she could deal with these dream-people of hers as she pleased. "I'll see you don't get into trouble. This is such an opportunity—I mustn't waste it ... here's a flight of steps, if you'll give me your hand again and...."

She reached the top and her voice ceased as suddenly and uncannily as a voice ceases when it is cut off in the middle of a word on the telephone. She stood staring dumbly across the old No-Man's-Land, [Pg 73]making in her dainty furs the strangest picture that battle-scarred strip of land had seen. Alf and Bill, one on each side of her, gazed, too.

[Pg 73]

 Prev. P 48/185 next