“It doesn’t read quite the same,” he answered. “Phillips goes home under the impression that he has made a great success and has roused the country. He and millions of other readers learn from the next morning’s headlines that it was ‘A Tame Speech’ that he made. What sounded to him ‘Loud Cheers’ have sunk to mild ‘Hear, Hears.’ That five minutes’ hurricane of applause, during which wildly excited men and women leapt upon the benches and roared themselves hoarse, and which he felt had settled the whole question, he searches for in vain. A few silly interjections, probably pre-arranged by Carleton’s young lions, become ‘renewed interruptions.’ The report is strictly truthful; but the impression produced is that Robert Phillips has failed to carry even his own people with him. And then follow leaders in fourteen widely-circulated Dailies, stretching from the Clyde to the Severn, foretelling how Mr. Robert Phillips could regain his waning popularity by the simple process of adopting Tariff Reform: or whatever the pet panacea of Carleton and Co. may, at the moment, happen to be.” There came a day in early spring. All night long the guns had never ceased. It sounded like the tireless barking of ten thousand giant dogs. Behind the hills, the whole horizon, like a fiery circle, was ringed with flashing light. Shapeless forms, bent beneath burdens, passed in endless procession through the village. Masses of rushing men swept like shadowy phantoms through the fitfully-illumined darkness. Beneath that everlasting barking, Joan would hear, now the piercing wail of a child; now a clap of thunder that for the moment would drown all other sounds, followed by a faint, low, rumbling crash, like the shooting of coals into a cellar. The wounded on their beds lay with wide-open, terrified eyes, moving feverishly from side to side.!

“It’s just a homely affair,” she explained. She had recovered her form and was now quite the lady again. “Two other guests beside yourself: a Mr. Airlie—I am sure you will like him. He’s so dilletanty—and Mr. McKean. He’s the young man upstairs. Have you met him?” Joan laughed. “Difficult to get anything else, just at present,” she said. “It’s the soldiers I’m looking to for help. I don’t think the men who have been there will want their sons to go. It’s the women I’m afraid of.”

Her father came to the station with her in the morning. The train was not in: and they walked up and down and talked. Suddenly she remembered: it had slipped her mind. “And I want him, if that’s any consolation to you,” Joan answered with a short laugh. It wasn’t much of a confession. The child was cute enough to have found that out for herself. “Only you see I can’t have him. And there’s an end of it.” “No,” said Joan. “But perhaps that’s the way the best fights are fought—without thinking.”