Joan promised, and the child went out. She looked pretty when she smiled. She closed the door behind her noiselessly. “No, it wasn’t,” answered the child. “Most of them were against it. And then there was Mama,” she added in a lower tone.!

What was plucking at her sleeve—still holding her? “I like the articles you are writing on the History of Superstition. Quite illuminating,” remarked Mr. Simson.

“There’s something bigger coming,” he said. “Here everything seems to be going on much the same, but over there you feel it. Something growing silently out of all this blood and mud. I find myself wondering what the men are staring at, but when I look there’s nothing as far as my field-glasses will reach but waste and desolation. And it isn’t only on the faces of our own men. It’s in the eyes of the prisoners too. As if they saw something. A funny ending to the war, if the people began to think.” “You mean,” answered Joan quietly, “that if I had let your mother die and had married your father, that he and I would have loved each other to the end; that I should have helped him and encouraged him in all things, so that his success would have been certain. Is that the argument?” They had tea at an old-fashioned inn beside a stream. It was a favourite resort in summer time, but now they had it to themselves. The wind had played pranks with her hair and he found a mirror and knelt before her, holding it.