in this time of trouble and gave Elsa some weeks of happiness and peace. It occurred to me that young Harding was living alone in his big old country house near Weybridge, and would be glad and grateful, because of his loneliness, to give house-room to Brand and his wife. He had a great liking for Brand, as most of us had, and his hatred of Germany had not been so violent since his days in Cologne. His good-nature, anyhow, and the fine courtesy which was the essential quality of his character, would make him kind to Elsa, so ill and so desperately in need of kindness. I was not disappointed. When I spoke to him over the telephone, he said, "It will be splendid for me. This lonely house is getting on my nerves badly. Bring them down."
I took them down in a car two days later. It was a fine autumn day, with a sparkle in the air and a touch of frost on the hedgerows. Elsa, wrapped up in heavy rugs, lay back next to Brand, and a little colour crept back into her cheeks and brought back her beauty. I think a shadow lifted from her as she drove away from that house in Chelsea where she had dwelt with enmity among her husband's people.
Harding's house in Surrey was at the end of a fine avenue of beeches, glorious in their autumn foliage of crinkled gold. A rabbit scuttled across the drive as we came, and bobbed beneath the red bracken of the undergrowth.
"Oh," said Elsa, like a child, "there is Peterkin! What a rogue he looks!"
Her eyes were bright when she caught sight of Harding's house in the Elizabethan style of post-and-plaster splashed with scarlet where the Virginia creeper straggled on its walls.
"It is wonderfully English," she said. "How Franz would love this place!"
