“Not sure I am yet,” he answered with a grin. “It depends upon how I get through this evening.” He glanced round the room. “Have I got to pass all this crowd, I wonder?” he added. “Your having done so unconsciously only makes the matter worse,” observed Mr. Singleton. “I had hoped it emanated from politeness, not enjoyment.”!

“I wonder,” he said. “You could hardly be your mother’s daughter without it.” “I wish you would always be yourself, as you are now,” she said, “and never pose.”

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. She must have knelt and stood mechanically, for the service was ended. The pulpit was occupied by an elderly uninteresting-looking man with a troublesome cough. But one sentence he had let fall had gripped her attention. For a moment she could not remember it, and then it came to her: “All Roads lead to Calvary.” It struck her as rather good. Perhaps he was going to be worth listening to. “To all of us, sooner or later,” he was saying, “comes a choosing of two ways: either the road leading to success, the gratification of desires, the honour and approval of our fellow-men—or the path to Calvary.” “You left a glove behind you, the first day you ever came to our house,” Mary explained. “And I kept it.”