He shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, they are always eager enough for it, at first,” he answered. “There is the excitement. The curiosity. You must remember that life is a monotonous affair to the great mass of the people. There’s the natural craving to escape from it; to court adventure. They are not so enthusiastic about it after they have tasted it. Modern warfare, they soon find, is about as dull a business as science ever invented.” “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?”!

“As friends of Mary Stopperton,” he said, “we meet on neutral ground. But in all matters of moment I expect we are as far asunder as the poles. I stand for the People.” She slipped her hand in his. “I want you to give me that Dream of yours; that you built for my mother, and that all went wrong. They call it Allway’s Folly; and it makes me so mad. I want to make it all come true. May I try?”

She had written to Folk. No female nurses were supposed to be allowed within the battle zone; but under pressure of shortage the French staff were relaxing the rule, and Folk had pledged himself to her discretion. “I am not doing you any kindness,” he had written. “You will have to share the common hardships and privations, and the danger is real. If I didn’t feel instinctively that underneath your mask of sweet reasonableness you are one of the most obstinate young women God ever made, and that without me you would probably get yourself into a still worse hole, I’d have refused.” And then followed a list of the things she was to be sure to take with her, including a pound or two of Keating’s insect powder, and a hint that it might save her trouble, if she had her hair cut short. Mary was leaning over the table. Miss Ensor’s four-penny veal and ham pie was ready. Mary arranged it in front of her. “Eat it while it’s hot, dearie,” she counselled. “It won’t be so indigestible.” The stars came out before they had ended dinner. She had made him talk about himself. It was marvellous what he had accomplished with his opportunities. Ten hours a day in the mines had earned for him his living, and the night had given him his leisure. An attic, lighted by a tallow candle, with a shelf of books that left him hardly enough for bread, had been his Alma Mater. History was his chief study. There was hardly an authority Joan could think of with which he was not familiar. Julius Caesar was his favourite play. He seemed to know it by heart. At twenty-three he had been elected a delegate, and had entered Parliament at twenty-eight. It had been a life of hardship, of privation, of constant strain; but she found herself unable to pity him. It was a tale of strength, of struggle, of victory, that he told her.