She leant forward, fixing her eyes on him. “Don’t tell me,” she persisted, “that you had none. That life is all just mere blind chance. Think of the young men who are hanging on your answer. Won’t you send them a message?” “Dear lad,” said her father, “he would take the most dangerous work that he could find. But I wish he hadn’t been quite so impulsive. He could have been of more use helping me with this War Office contract. I suppose he never got my letter, telling him about it.”!

“Take care they don’t get the best of you,” Miss Ensor advised him. Mud! that seemed to be the one word with which to describe modern war. Mud everywhere! Mud ankle-deep upon the roads; mud into which you sank up to your knees the moment you stepped off it; tents and huts to which you waded through the mud, avoiding the slimy gangways on which you slipped and fell; mud-bespattered men, mud-bespattered horses, little donkeys, looking as if they had been sculptured out of mud, struggling up and down the light railways that every now and then would disappear and be lost beneath the mud; guns and wagons groaning through the mud; lorries and ambulances, that in the darkness had swerved from the straight course, overturned and lying abandoned in the mud, motor-cyclists ploughing swift furrows through the mud, rolling it back in liquid streams each side of them; staff cars rushing screaming through the mud, followed by a rushing fountain of mud; serried ranks of muddy men stamping through the mud with steady rhythm, moving through a rain of mud, rising upward from the ground; long lines of motor-buses filled with a mass of muddy humanity packed shoulder to shoulder, rumbling ever through the endless mud.

Mary smiled. “But why shouldn’t the good newspaper proprietor hurry up and become a multi-proprietor?” she suggested. “Why don’t you persuade Lord Sutcliffe to buy up three or four papers, before they’re all gone?” Joan looked at her watch. She had an article to finish. Madge stood on tiptoe and kissed her. Mrs. Phillips made yet another effort. “Have you thought about him?” she asked.