They kissed good night, and Joan went up to her own room. She found it just as she had left it. A bunch of roses stood upon the dressing-table. Her father would never let anyone cut his roses but himself. There was a distinct challenge in Flossie’s eye as she asked the question. Joan felt herself flush, and thought a moment.!

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. But it was her Gethsemane: the best that Fate had been able to do for her. It was here that her choice would be made. She felt that.

They had reached the end of the street again. Joan held out her hand with a laugh. “They afford much food for reflection,” thought Mr. Simson, “though I cannot myself go as far as you do in including Christianity under that heading.” “There is no God, apart from Man.”