He could not see her face. She watched it herself with dim half consciousness as it changed before her in the tawdry mirror above the mantelpiece, half longing that he might look up and see it, half terrified lest he should. “Tell me,” said Joan. “What was my mother like? I can only remember her as more or less of an invalid.”!

“Good lad,” he said, patting her on the shoulder. “It will be an ugly world that will come out of all this hate and anger. The Lord will want all the help that He can get.” “I’ll grant you all that, sir,” answered the young soldier who had first spoken. He had long, delicate hands and eager, restless eyes. “War does bring out heroism. So does pestilence and famine. Read Defoe’s account of the Plague of London. How men and women left their safe homes, to serve in the pest-houses, knowing that sooner or later they were doomed. Read of the mothers in India who die of slow starvation, never allowing a morsel of food to pass their lips so that they may save up their own small daily portion to add it to their children’s. Why don’t we pray to God not to withhold from us His precious medicine of pestilence and famine? So is shipwreck a fine school for courage. Look at the chance it gives the captain to set a fine example. And the engineers who stick to their post with the water pouring in upon them. We don’t reconcile ourselves to shipwrecks as a necessary school for sailors. We do our best to lessen them. So did persecution bring out heroism. It made saints and martyrs. Why have we done away with it? If this game of killing and being killed is the fine school for virtue it is made out to be, then all our efforts towards law and order have been a mistake. We never ought to have emerged from the jungle.”

“Aye,” he answered, “I must be careful I don’t die on Christmas Day. It would make a fine text, that, for their sermons.” “It doesn’t matter, dearie,” she explained. “They know, if they find it open, that I’m in.” Neither spoke for a while. Later on, they talked about the coming election. If the Party got back, Phillips would go to the Board of Trade. It would afford him a better platform for the introduction of his land scheme.