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Kitty Greenwood was opening the shop. She had unlocked the iron grill that was drawn at night across the glass-fronted door, and having pushed it to one side, she stood in the doorway, and looked up and down Vernor Street as though she found Vernor Street as good to look at as an English garden. There had been rain in the night, and the air was fresh. The sun, climbing beyond the spire of St. James’s church, drew a band of yellow light along one half the street. Across the way Fream’s Hotel was pulling up its blinds. A hotel porter in black trousers and a dark blue waistcoat was watering the two clipped standard bay-trees that grew in green tubs on either side of the hotel entrance.

An officer, brushing his hair at one of the windows of “Fream’s”, bent forward to look at Kitty Greenwood. She stood about as high as her mother, five feet or so; she had a bobbed head of honey-coloured hair with some darker shadowings intermixed with it; at a little distance her eyes looked black in the glowing roundness of her face. She was a solid little person, with a beautiful throat, and a chin that had a white firmness. She stood confidently upon her small feet. If she guessed that she was being looked at from the windows of Fream’s Hotel, she was not disconcerted or intrigued by the scrutiny. She had grown accustomed to being looked at by all sorts of men, oldish men, young men, bold men, hungry men. And it is possible that she had come to understand that to many of these poor lads she was golden fruit, the more desirable because death might pluck life from their lips at any moment. She had been kind to men, but without desiring to give herself to any one of them. She had an exceptional sturdiness. And in the shop she could be something of a little autocrat. There was no nonsense about Kitty.

A voice came to her from within—the voice of the charwoman busy in the divan. It said something about cigarette-ends and matches and the carpet. It was full of cheerful Cockney complaints.

“These young gents—! You’d think—.”

Kitty replied to the voice.

“They—don’t—think,—Mrs Higgins. They don’t want to think—.”

There were sounds of brushings.

“All over the cushions—too. You’d think as how—.”

“Yes, six of them, Mrs Higgins,—they went back to the front this morning.”

“O,—lord,—Wictoria!—Pore lads—!”

Yes, six young scallywags, hard-bitten youngsters, with strained blue eyes! Her mother had a soft place in her heart for such scallywags; she was kinder to them than Kitty was, for Kitty had a sense of order, and like many little women she stood upon her young dignity. Mrs Sarah had collected a whole battalion of scallywags, and mothered them, and somehow kept them from going where they might have gone. Yes, her mother was a dear. She seemed to understand—.

Though Kitty did not know that a very stately old fellow, with one of those fine, simple English faces, had spoken of Mrs Sarah as “A moral force”. Not that he used those very words. What he did say was that Mrs Sarah was worth a whole trainful of padres.

“She’s—so—human, my dear fellow. She knows—.”

So Kitty re-entered the shop, and taking a little feather dusting-brush from a shelf under the counter, began to set it whisking about among the cigar boxes and over the glass cases full of pipes and cigarette-holders. She loved the shop. She liked its order, its neatness, its polished cases and cabinets, its mahogany and its glass, the shelves full of boxes and drums of cigars, the cigarettes—gold-tipped and cork-tipped, lying in their little boxes, the sleek unsoiled pipes. She was a very clean young creature, supremely healthy within and without. The war had not blurred her outlines.

Presently she went to examine the till. She was less decorative and more practical than her sister Corah, and the till and its contents were Kitty’s particular concern. She checked its contents twice a day, withdrew and locked away the superfluous cash, and saw to it each morning that there was a proper supply of change available. She liked her paper money clean and uncrumpled, and kept the pounds and ten-shilling notes neatly clipped in separate packets. Half-crowns, florins, shillings, sixpences had each a compartment, and her copper money lived in a flat brown cigar box. The charwoman had finished tidying the divan, and had closed the door that separated the divan from the shop. The door had a long mirror attached to it, and Kitty, after sliding a pile of florins back into the till, happened to glance in the direction of this mirror.

She saw a figure reflected in it.

It was but one of the thousands of figures that had impressed their images upon that mirror, the reflection of a young officer in khaki, slim in the leg, and rather slightly built about the shoulders. He stood in the doorway, but there was a hesitancy in his attitude. There was something about his eyes—.

Kitty closed the till. She had a feeling that she had only to say “Shoo—!” and that figure in the doorway would disappear like a vagrant shadow, and for a moment she continued to look into the mirror. She had seen thousands of faces, stolid faces, raw faces, shrinking faces, faces that were wilfully gay or helplessly overcast. Sometimes she had met eyes that had given her little qualms—.

But—this face—somehow—was different from all the others, though why it was different she could not say. She realized that the eyes were looking at her. They had a kind of wide, appealing dumbness.

She turned.

“Good morning.”

He seemed to flinch slightly. His right hand jerked itself upwards in a salute.

“I want some cigarettes,—straight-cuts—.”

He took three steps into the shop.

“Virginian?”

“Please.”

“What—kind?”

“O—anything.—I—. Gold flake will do.”

“How many?”

“O,—fifty.”