"Come and have lunch with me," said the young red-hatted officer next to G.J. "I haven't got to be back till two-thirty, and I want to talk music for a change. Do you know I'm putting in ninety hours a week at the W.O.?"

"Can't," G.J. replied, with an affectation of jauntiness. "I'm engaged for lunch. Sorry."

"Who you lunching with?"

"Mrs. Smith."

The Staff officer exclaimed aghast:

"Conception?"

"Yes. Why, dear heart?"

"My dear chap. You don't know. Carlos Smith's been killed. She doesn't know yet. I only heard by chance. News came through just as I left. Nobody knows except a chap or two in Casualties. They won't be sending out to-day's wires until two or three o'clock."

G.J., terrified and at a loss, murmured:

"What am I to do, then?"

"You know her extremely well, don't you? You ought to go and prepare her."

"But how can I prepare her?"

"I don't know. How do people prepare people?... Poor thing!"

G.J. fought against the incredible fact of death.

"But he only went out six days ago! They haven't been married three weeks."

The central hardness of the other disclosed itself as he said:

"What's that got to do with it? What does it matter if he went out six days ago or six weeks ago? He's killed."

"Well—"

"Of course you must go. Indicate a rumour. Tell her it's probably false, but you thought you owed it to her to warn her. Only for God's sake don't mention me. We're not supposed to say anything, you know."

G.J. seemed to see his mission, and it challenged him.

Chapter 11 - The Telegram

*

As soon as G.J. had been let into the abode by Concepcion's venerable parlour-maid, the voice of Concepcion came down to him from above:

"G.J., who is your oldest and dearest friend?"

He replied, marvellously schooling his voice to a similar tone of cheerful abruptness:

"Difficult to say, off-hand."

"Not at all. It's your beard."

That was her greeting to him. He knew she was recalling an old declined suggestion of hers that he should part with his beard. The parlour-maid practised an admirable deafness, faithfully to confirm Concepcion, who always presumed deafness in all servants. G.J. looked up the narrow well of the staircase. He could vaguely see Concepcion on high, leaning over the banisters; he thought she was rather fluffilly dressed, for her.

Concepcion inhabited an upper part in a street largely devoted to the sale of grand pianos. Her front door was immediately at the top of a long, straight, narrow stairway; so that whoever opened the door stood one step higher than the person desiring entrance. Within the abode, which was fairly spacious, more and more stairs went up and up. "My motto is," she would say, "'One room, one staircase.'" The life of the abode was on the busy stairs. She called it also her Alpine Club. She had made upper-parts in that street popular among the select, and had therefore caused rents to rise. In the drawing-room she had hung a horrible enlarged photographic portrait of herself, with a chocolate-coloured mount, the whole framed in German gilt, and under it she had inscribed, "Presented to Miss Concepcion Iquist by the grateful landlords of the neighbourhood as a slight token of esteem and regard."