“I think it is someone I know,” she said. “Won’t you help me?” “Don’t come with me,” she said. “There’s a cab stand in the Avenue. I shall walk to Sèvres and take the train.”!

They were speaking in whispered tones. Through the open doors they could see into the other room. Mrs. Phillips, under Airlie’s instructions, was venturing upon a cigarette. Her father had wished her to go. Arthur’s death had stirred in him the old Puritan blood with its record of long battle for liberty of conscience. If war claimed to be master of a man’s soul, then the new warfare must be against war. He remembered the saying of a Frenchwoman who had been through the Franco-Prussian war. Joan, on her return from Paris some years before, had told him of her, repeating her words: “But, of course, it would not do to tell the truth,” the old lady had said, “or we should have our children growing up to hate war.”

“Arthur is still away,” she explained, “and I feel that he wants me. I should be worrying myself, thinking of him all alone with no one to look after him. It’s the mother instinct I suppose. It always has hampered woman.” She laughed. “Don’t think me unsympathetic,” she said. “No one will rejoice more than I shall if God sees fit to call you to good work. But I can’t help letting fall my little tear of fellowship with the weeping.” “You will find yourself expensive to dress,” she told her, “cheap things won’t go well on you; and it would be madness, even from a business point of view, for you not to make the best of yourself.”