The War Workers Part 57

It was in vain that Lesbia Willoughby, from London, wrote impa.s.sioned accounts to her poor dear Joanna of the many activities in which her days and nights appeared to fly past. "Wounded Colonials, blinded officers, Flag-days, hospitals, canteens, Red Cross entertainments--I have my finger in every single war-pie that's going, and I can't tell you how too utterly _twee_ some of the dear fellows are with whom I get into touch. If you'll only trust that sulky girl of yours to me for six months, I could do wonders for her, and probably get her off your hands altogether. After all, dear, we can never forget that you and I were girls together, can we?"

"Lesbia never means to forget it, that's clear enough," was the sole comment of Lady Vivian.

She did not go through the form of transferring Mrs. Willoughby's invitation to her daughter. It gradually became evident that the Director of the Midland Supply Depot would accord but little of her fully occupied time to a convalescent home not supplied from her own depot, and as Joanna said to Grace, with her habitual slight shrug: "It may be just as well, my dear. I'm not Miss Bruce, and Char and I haven't the same way of looking at things. She vexed and disappointed her father, and no amount of eloquence about her high and mighty motives will ever make me altogether forget it. I shall never be able to hear her talk about her position as Director of the Midland Supply Depot without thinking what a fool I was not to smack her well when she was a child."

Thus Joanna, half laughing, but with the eternal loneliness that all John's steadfast loyalty and Grace's loving companionship would never altogether a.s.suage still underlying the dauntless youthfulness in her blue eyes.

For Trevellyan the months succeeded one another, strangely monotonous.

In company with a hundred thousand others "somewhere in France," he moved between the mud and noise and blood in the trenches, and the eternal dreary billets where letters from home and the need of sleep were the only considerations. But to his Grace in England Johnnie wrote cheerily, of hope and good courage, and peace dawning on a far horizon, and of the prospect of ten days' leave.

To Char Vivian, Director of the Midland Supply Depot, the advancing year, imperceptibly enough, brought certain solutions and enlightenments.

The personal fascination that she could exert when she willed would always secure for her a following of blindly devoted adherents, but her influence was not always strong enough to retain their admiration.

Insensibly, Char modified a little of her arbitrariness.

"They put so much else before the work," she said helplessly to Miss Bruce.

But Char's perceptions were never lacking in ac.u.men, and she became more and more aware of the truth of Joanna's prognostication that the work of the Supply Depot would be done for its own sake, and for that of the cause in whose name it existed. And it was perhaps that awareness which brought to her a gradual realization of motives in her own self-devotion hitherto unacknowledged to herself.

The Director of the Midland Supply Depot might sit day after day and hour after hour at her paper-strewn table, issuing orders and receiving the official interviews and communications that so clearly indicated the high responsibility of her position, but Char Vivian grew to exercise a certain discretion in the matter of her return to the meals and rest so anxiously watched over by Miss Bruce, whose adoring loyalty was hers beyond any possibility of shaking.

In those occasional unofficial concessions to her imploring solitude might, after all, be numbered the most creditable achievements of Miss Vivian.

LONDON, 1917.

THE END