Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/178

 shock wasn’t worse than the first. Colonel Butler! Phyllida’s soldier-hero, driving a cab! He had won a Military Cross and a D.S.O.—with a bar, I believe; he had always seemed a manly, straightforward young fellow—and here he was driving a cab! “This—this—” I felt myself apostrophizing Phyllida, Brackenbury, that poor fool Ruth—“this is what I’ve saved you from.”. . And then one had a certain revulsion of feeling: the pity of it! . . . And then stark horror! If Phyllida met him! Not then; I knew she was at a dance with Will and would not be back for hours, but at any moment when I was not there to protect her from herself. I recalled her dreadful threat that, if she saw or heard of Hilary Butler, she would fling herself into his arms and beg him to marry her. . . “But—of course I remember you,” I said.

He smiled—without embarrassment of any kind—and walked up the steps with me.

“Have you a key?,” he asked, “or shall I ring?”

He spoke so nicely. . . If you like, just a touch of what I think must be West Country; but, when things were at their worst and I felt that we had to be prepared for anything, it was a slight consolation to know that he could easily have it drilled out of him. . . I could