Joan laughed. “I’m a drummer boy,” she answered. “I beat my drum each week in a Sunday newspaper, hoping the lads will follow.” Suddenly she heard a light step in the passage, and the room door opened. A girl entered. She was wearing a large black hat and a black boa round her neck. Between them her face shone unnaturally white. She carried a small cloth bag. She started, on seeing Joan, and seemed about to retreat.!

“Do you mind?” he said. “We shall get there so much quicker.” “But we must succeed to be of use,” urged Mary. “Must God’s servants always remain powerless?”

He was looking at the ring upon her hand. “Your mother’s,” he answered. “I built them the year I came back from America and gave them to her. I thought it would interest her. Perhaps it would, if I had left her to her own ways.” 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.