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Updated: September 28, 2025
The mothers of the nation were doing their duty. All the land was a breeding-ground for the dividends of Hedworth Westerling. At the far side of the park he saw another kind of dividend another group of marching men. These were not in uniform. They were the unemployed. Many were middle-aged, with worn, tired faces.
When Hedworth mastered for the moment she was reminded that he was merely playing a familiar tune on her soul-keys. She felt for the man who had first touched those keys a persistent tenderness, and during the last days watched restlessly for his letter. But she felt no desire whatever to see him again. For Hedworth she longed increasingly. Hedworth returned. The other man vanished.
"Poor fellow!" thought Edith with a sigh. "But I doubt if any woman or any circumstances would ever make a man like that happy. There are those wretched people, and I am not half dressed!" Nevertheless, he again took his stand in her brain and elbowed Hedworth whose concrete part was still detained in Switzerland. She did not answer the letter at once; it was not an easy letter to answer.
Until Hedworth made me feel awakened womanhood personified, I had not thought of this man for years, not even during the year of my mourning, when I was rather bored. What am I to do? I can't fling my life away. I am not a morbid idiot. But I can't marry one man if what I feel for him is simply the galvanizing of a corpse. Hedworth ought to be taken ill and his life despaired of.
Hedworth stood up as she paused, and leaned against the mantel, looking down at her. They were in her boudoir, a yellow satin room that looked like a large jewel-casket. Lady Carnath's long slender round figure betrayed its perfections in a gown of black chiffon; on her white neck and arms and in her black hair were many diamonds; she had dressed for the opera, then given the evening to Hedworth.
"I have had enough of dawdling and sentimentalizing. We will marry at your place in Sussex on the second of October." "Very well," she said. Shortly after she went to Paris to confer with the talent that should enhance her loveliness, then paid Mrs. Hedworth a visit in Switzerland. Hedworth met her there, and his mother saw little of her guests. Edith returned to England alone.
Miss Hedworth, the young lady in question, had long been dead; but, all who had known her, retained the most pleasing impressions equally of her charms of person and of mind.
"Then, good-by till I hear from you over the 'phone or I return to see you after the crisis is over!" concluded Lanstron as he hurried away. Hedworth Westerling would have said twenty to one if he had been asked the odds against war when he was parting from Marta Galland in the hotel reception-room. Before he reached home he would have changed them to ten to one.
One or two afternoons a week Colonel Hedworth Westerling, commander of the regimental post of the Grays on the other side of the white posts, stretched his privilege of crossing the frontier and appeared for tea at the Gallands'. It meant a pleasant half-hour breaking a long walk, a relief from garrison surroundings.
He saw his own picture on the front page of a newspaper, with the caption, "His Excellency, Field-Marshal Hedworth Westerling, Chief of Staff of Our Victorious Army." He stared at the picture and the picture stared at him as if they knew not each other. A racking shudder swept through him.
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