“But I’ve won,” she said. “I’m dying further forward. I’ve helped advance the line.” “Yes,” answered Joan. “He was a landscape painter, wasn’t he?”!

Mary frowned at him; but Mr. Simson, eager for argument or not noticing, blundered on:— “She ought not to talk to more than one person at a time,” the nurse explained, with a shake of the head. She was a quiet, business-like woman. She would not express a definite opinion.

Mary argued that England could and should keep out of it; but Greyson was convinced it would be impossible, not to say dishonourable: a sentiment that won the enthusiastic approval of the little drummer in Joan’s brain. He played “Rule Britannia” and “God Save the King,” the “Marseillaise” and the Russian National hymn, all at the same time. He would have included “Deutschland über Alles,” if Joan hadn’t made a supreme effort and stopped him. Evidently a sporting little devil. He took himself off into a corner after a time, where he played quietly to himself; and Joan was able to join in the conversation. There were the others. The men and women not in the lime-light. The lone, scattered men and women who saw no flag but Pity’s ragged skirt; who heard no drum but the world’s low cry of pain; who fought with feeble hands against the wrong around them; who with aching heart and troubled eyes laboured to make kinder the little space about them. The great army of the nameless reformers uncheered, unparagraphed, unhonoured. The unknown sowers of the seed. Would the reapers of the harvest remember them? “Good man,” said Mrs. Denton. “I’m quite serious. You tell him from me that the next revolution has got to be against the Press. And it will be the stiffest fight Democracy has ever had.”