"What a sickening time you must have had, dear!"

"It was horrid," Philippa assented sadly, "but you know Henry is
no use at all, and I should have felt miserable unless I had gone.
I have been to every friend at the War Office, and every friend
who has friends there. I have made every sort of enquiry, and I
know just as much now as I did when I left here--that Richard was
a prisoner at Wittenberg the last time they heard, and that they
have received no notification whatever concerning him for the last
two months."

Helen glanced at the calendar.

"It is just two months to-day," she said mournfully, "since we heard."

"And then," Philippa sighed, "he hadn't received a single one of our
parcels."

Helen rose suddenly to her feet. She was a tall, fair girl of the
best Saxon type, slim but not in the least angular, with every
promise, indeed, of a fuller and more gracious development in the
years to come. She was barely twenty-two years old, and, as is
common with girls of her complexion, seemed younger. Her bright,
intelligent face was, above all, good-humoured. Just at that moment,
however, there was a flush of passionate anger in her cheeks.

"It makes me feel almost beside myself," she exclaimed, "this
hideous incapacity for doing anything! Here we are living in luxury,
without a single privation, whilst Dick, the dearest thing on
earth to both of us, is being starved and goaded to death in a foul