“I wish I had your pen,” he said, suddenly breaking the silence. “I’m all right at talking; but I want to get at the others: the men and women who never come, thinking it has nothing to do with them. I’m shy and awkward when I try to write. There seems a barrier in front of me. You break through it. One hears your voice. Tell me,” he said, “are you getting your way? Do they answer you?” “And don’t you take any notice of me,” further explained the good woman, “when I seem to be in opposition, like. I chip in now and then on purpose, just to keep the ball rolling. It stirs him up, a bit of contradictoriness. You have to live with a man before you understand him.”!

Carleton himself never interrupted them. Indeed, one might have thought he was not listening, so engrossed he appeared to be in the pile of letters and telegrams that lay waiting for him on his desk. When they had finished he would ask them questions, still with his attention fixed apparently upon the paper in his hand. Then, looking up for the first time, he would run off curt instructions, much in the tone of a Commander-in-Chief giving orders for an immediate assault; and, finishing abruptly, return to his correspondence. When the last, as it transpired, had closed the door behind him, he swung his chair round and faced her. Suddenly the vision of old Chelsea Church rose up before her with its little motherly old pew-opener. She had so often been meaning to go and see her again, but something had always interfered. She hunted through her drawers and found a comparatively sober-coloured shawl, and tucked it under her cloak. The service was just commencing when she reached the church. Mary Stopperton showed her into a seat and evidently remembered her. “I want to see you afterwards,” she whispered; and Mary Stopperton had smiled and nodded. The service, with its need for being continually upon the move, bored her; she was not in the mood for it. And the sermon, preached by a young curate who had not yet got over his Oxford drawl, was uninteresting. She had half hoped that the wheezy old clergyman, who had preached about Calvary on the evening she had first visited the church, would be there again. She wondered what had become of him, and if it were really a fact that she had known him when she was a child, or only her fancy. It was strange how vividly her memory of him seemed to pervade the little church. She had the feeling he was watching her from the shadows. She waited for Mary in the vestibule, and gave her the shawl, making her swear on the big key of the church door that she would wear it herself and not give it away. The little old pew-opener’s pink and white face flushed with delight as she took it, and the thin, work-worn hands fingered it admiringly. “But I may lend it?” she pleaded.

It was from a small operating hospital in a village of the Argonne that she first saw the war with her own eyes. “Did he, Carlyle, ever come to this church?” asked Joan. Joan thought. “It’s curious,” she said, “one so seldom hears of anybody being born on Christmas Day.”