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Mortals inured to living in a continual bracing-up for expected shocks are rarely ready to meet the shock when it occurs; and so war, arriving at last in the March of 1860, was first greeted with shrugs of incredulity which speedily turned into the most inordinate activity. Gore Browne, going down into the Waikato to quell insurrection, had, with his usual ill luck, provoked a battle in which, trumpeted the Chronicle in huge headlines:

“Two men were killed, our Governor unfortunately not being one of them.”

More dignified, The Southern Cross spoke of the writing on the wall, the Queen's sovereignty, and the Götterdämmerung of the Maoris—which last the Maoris took for a new kind of curse and instantly set their tohungas to combat it with worse ones.

Under chilly autumn skies a startled Auckland, and presently Wellington, became armed camps, with every male between the ages of sixteen and sixty impressed for the militia, and regulars buzzing brightly like bees which had found something to sting at last. White-faced women, finding no security in truculent husbands for ever holding meetings and pipe-claying sword-belts (only the pipe-clay seemed to get on everything else first) prayed in the churches; and Tiffany, kneeling in St Paul's, clutched Sally's hand tightly and tried to forget Sophia loudly sobbing on her other side. Mamma, although the tears ran down her face and she seemed smaller than ever, was unaccountably something to hold on to now.

“This life isn't all, darling,” said mamma with shining eyes. “There is always Eternity, you know.”

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But what was a possible Eternity to Tiffany with Dick going to be killed in the present? He was Dick now … and how could that care-free gay spirit ever have been anything else? And she was his bunch of cherries, his widow's cruse and all the other nonsensical dear names he was always finding for her.

Just the threat that Hew was to have her, he told Tiffany, had set him blazing. So he went in a blaze to Peregrine, to be icily refused, and then to Tiffany to be not refused at all. Tiffany now bowed her face in gloved hands, glowing still with the memory of how she had said that not even papa had the right to dispose of her heart, and Dick had said—what hadn't he said with his brown face all tender and laughing at her?

“You witch,” he had said, half-reproachful, half-puzzled, “what have you done to me? I vow I have never wanted anything as I want you. I want you more than I ever wanted a nip after a hard march, and how can that be?” said Dick. “Captive of your bow and spear. A nice fate for a soldier, egad,” he said, taking her in his arms with kisses … oh, kisses … whispering words that lost their common meaning and turned into flying enchantments round her head. Tiffany, meeting a man's love with love for the first time, had no scales with which to gauge herself.

Tiffany was (thought Darien, who had gone to the farm instead of to churches) in such a state of intoxication that anything might happen and probably would. Well, not my business if they do, thought Darien, abandoning responsibility for Tiffany in favour of merino rams and John's great Clydesdales which the army would take to haul munition-wagons.

The organ began to grind out a hymn, and in a flutter of ambers, pinks and mauves, a rustle of silks, everybody stood up.

Oh, God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,

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sang Sally, hearing her voice so full of tears for Brian, dandified in his new uniform, for Jermyn, already gone to be a special reporter at the front.

Our shelter from the stormy blast
And our eternal home,

quavered Sophia, whose ear never allowed her to find the tune, and besides she was so busy wondering if it would be wicked to begin a new watch-chain on Sunday. Anything I can do for these poor gentlemen going to be killed I will, thought Sophia, who had already plucked all trimming from her bonnet and was prepared to pluck the last hair from her head as proof of her earnestness.

Tiffany did not sing at all. She walked home through the grey day, hearing the loud sounds of preparation up at the barracks. A bugle called, and her heart went wild with the wild sweet call. Buddha, Osiris, Mohammed, did you ever love and lose as I must, wondered Tiffany, folding her passionate heart closer in the long rust-colour shawl, schooling to calm beneath the little rust-colour bonnet that face of living desire which so many men were looking at in these days.

Dick Sackville, bullying an awkward squad, bullying his batman, poring over maps, inspecting legs and mouths of horses coming in by the dozen, doing, like everyone else, a hundred matters at once in the midst of such noise and bustle as one couldn't believe, discovered himself so enraged with Fate that he did not understand it, being one who usually took life easy.

Just when I've found the sweetest thing I've ever known, he thought, tumbling the contents of boxes, bags, and wallets on the floor preparatory to packing. “Brown, if you don't keep that door shut—oh, it's you, Carstairs. What d'you want?” he snapped.

Carstairs wanted somebody to condole with him. “Our good colonel—always at his little games of make-believe—saying we can get everything through on pack- page 286 horses,” complained Carstairs. “Any fool knows we'll need every ammunition and commissariat wagon we've got.”

“Mean to drive 'em up and down the town? No roads anywhere else,” said Sackville, sorting socks and bundles of letters out of the heap.

“Make the roads as we go … as we have to make everything in this blasted country,” said Carstairs, picking up a stray photograph. “A nice little miss. Yours to command, Dick?”

“No,” said Sackville, flinging it into the fire.

“It's Miss Tiffany Lovel now, ain't it.” (Carstairs always knew every man's business but his own.) “No luck there, my hearty. His Omnipotence intends her for a colonial bog-trotter.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Sackville, shovelling bundles of letters tied with blue and pink ribbons, with tresses of hair into the fire. There they went, all the loves of yesteryear. Never anyone else for me now, he thought, wondering rather uncomfortably how often he had thought that.

“The Waikato is in flood again,” said Carstairs. “We'll have to raft everything over if we don't all go round by New Plymouth. Well, God save the Queen.”

“And Gore Browne for upholding her authority,” said Sackville, sourly.

“Don't blame it on her, poor lady. She'd have had more sense. This is going to be considerably nastier than our Indian frontier scraps, Dick.”

Sackville knew that, and when Carstairs was gone after commenting on the way a new love affair always spoiled an old mate's sense of humour, he kicked all the stuff together, bade Brown take it away and pack it, and then flung himself into a chair by the fire, too miserable to light a pipe.

To love such a girl as Tiffany was enough to spoil any man's sense of humour … when he couldn't get her and page 287 must go off to what would likely prove a particularly foul kind of warfare instead. So adorably she still held him off, for all her lovely innocent revealings. Proud, shy, virginal—all the qualities he had never believed in before. She had marshalled them all against the passion that was burning her up, for him. She'd marry him to-morrow if that cursed father of hers—he sprang up, walking restlessly, seeing her dear face whichever way he turned.

“No other girl,” he said, indistinctly. “No other for ever. I swear it.”