She remembered it then. “No,” she answered with a smile. “I shall keep watch. Perhaps I shall be worthy of it by that time.” “Hanged if I can see how we are going to get out of it,” he answered Joan cheerfully. “The moment there is any threat of war, it becomes a point of honour with every nation to do nothing to avoid it. I remember my old duelling days. The quarrel may have been about the silliest trifle imaginable. A single word would have explained the whole thing away. But to utter it would have stamped one as a coward. This Egyptian Tra-la-la! It isn’t worth the bones of a single grenadier, as our friends across the Rhine would say. But I expect, before it’s settled, there will be men’s bones sufficient, bleaching on the desert, to build another Pyramid. It’s so easily started: that’s the devil of it. A mischievous boy can throw a lighted match into a powder magazine, and then it becomes every patriot’s business to see that it isn’t put out. I hate war. It accomplishes nothing, and leaves everything in a greater muddle than it was before. But if the idea ever catches fire, I shall have to do all I can to fan the conflagration. Unless I am prepared to be branded as a poltroon. Every professional soldier is supposed to welcome war. Most of us do: it’s our opportunity. There’s some excuse for us. But these men—Carleton and their lot: I regard them as nothing better than the Ménades of the Commune. They care nothing if the whole of Europe blazes. They cannot personally get harmed whatever happens. It’s fun to them.”!

It seemed, in spite of its open door, a very silent little house behind its strip of garden. Joan had the feeling that it was listening. “Oh, you needn’t look so scared,” laughed the girl, “I haven’t come down to that.” Her voice had changed. It had a note of shrillness. In some indescribable way she had grown coarse. “I’m a kept woman,” she explained. “What else is any woman?”

“It comes to the same thing, doesn’t it, dear?” she answered. “They are there, anyhow. And that is how He knows those who are willing to serve Him: by their being pitiful.” Returning to the interior, Joan had duly admired the Cheyne monument, but had been unable to disguise her amusement before the tomb of Mrs. Colvile, whom the sculptor had represented as a somewhat impatient lady, refusing to await the day of resurrection, but pushing through her coffin and starting for Heaven in her grave-clothes. Pausing in front of the Dacre monument, Joan wondered if the actor of that name, who had committed suicide in Australia, and whose London address she remembered had been Dacre House just round the corner, was descended from the family; thinking that, if so, it would give an up-to-date touch to the article. She had fully decided now to write it. But Mary Stopperton could not inform her. They had ended up in the chapel of Sir Thomas More. He, too, had “given up things,” including his head. Though Mary Stopperton, siding with Father Morris, was convinced he had now got it back, and that with the remainder of his bones it rested in the tomb before them. Joan laughed. “I’m a drummer boy,” she answered. “I beat my drum each week in a Sunday newspaper, hoping the lads will follow.”