She told Joan what she remembered herself of 1870. She had turned her country house into a hospital and had seen a good deal of the fighting. “Oh, it worries him, of course, poor dear,” Mrs. Phillips answered. “You see, I’ve always been such a go-ahead, as a rule. But I think he’s getting more hopeful. As I tell him, I’ll be all right by the autumn. It was that spell of hot weather that knocked me over.”!

Joan offered to go in and sit with the invalid. But Mary feared the exertion of talking might be too much for him. “He gets so excited,” she explained. She slipped out noiselessly. Joan thanked him. As he held the door open for her their hands accidentally touched. Joan wished him good-night and went up the stairs. There was no light in her room: only the faint reflection of the street lamp outside.

“You have got to consider the cost of refusal,” she said. “His offer wasn’t help or neutrality: it was help or opposition by every means in his power. He left me in no kind of doubt as to that. He’s not used to being challenged and he won’t be squeamish. You will have the whole of his Press against you, and every other journalistic and political influence that he possesses. He’s getting a hold upon the working classes. The Sunday Post has an enormous sale in the manufacturing towns; and he’s talking of starting another. Are you strong enough to fight him?” And then during college vacations, returning home with growing notions and views of her own, she had found herself so often in antagonism with him. His fierce puritanism, so opposed to all her enthusiasms. Arguing with him, she might almost have been listening to one of his Cromwellian ancestors risen from the dead. There had been disputes between him and his work-people, and Joan had taken the side of the men. He had not been angry with her, but coldly contemptuous. And yet, in spite of it all, if he had only made a sign! She wanted to fling herself crying into his arms and shake him—make him listen to her wisdom, sitting on his knee with her hands clasped round his neck. He was not really intolerant and stupid. That had been proved by his letting her go to a Church of England school. Her mother had expressed no wish. It was he who had selected it. And she had promised him. He needed her. The words she had spoken to Madge, not dreaming then of their swift application. They came back to her. “God has called me. He girded His sword upon me.” What right had she to leave it rusting in its scabbard, turning aside from the pathway pointed out to her because of one weak, useless life, crouching in her way. It was not as if she were being asked to do evil herself that good might come. The decision had been taken out of her hands. All she had to do was to remain quiescent, not interfering, awaiting her orders. Her business was with her own part, not with another’s. To be willing to sacrifice oneself: that was at the root of all service. Sometimes it was one’s own duty, sometimes that of another. Must one never go forward because another steps out of one’s way, voluntarily? Besides, she might have been mistaken. That picture, ever before her, of the woman pausing with the brush above her tongue—that little stilled gasp! It may have been but a phantasm, born of her own fevered imagination. She clung to that, desperately.