n spread out on the table
before Anna. She always enjoyed herself over that paper. It was Miss
Rose's daily gift to her old nurse, and was paid for out of her small
allowance. The two morning papers read by her ladies were in due course
used to light the fires; but Anna kept her own _Daily Pictorials_ most
carefully, and there was an ever-growing neat pile of them in a corner
of the scullery.

But to-day's _Daily Pictorial_ lay in a crumpled heap, tossed to one
side on the floor of the kitchen, for poor old Anna had just read out
the words:

"FRENCH FRONTIER SUCCESSES."

"GERMAN DRAGOON REGIMENT ANNIHILATED."

"ONE THOUSAND GERMAN PRISONERS IN ALSACE."

Up to this strange, sinister week, Anna had contented herself with
looking at the pictures. She had hardly ever glanced at the rest of the
paper. She did not like the look of English print, and she read English
with difficulty. But this morning the boy who had brought the fish had
said, not disagreeably, but as if he was giving her a rather amusing bit
of information, "Your friends have been catching it hot, Mrs. Bauer; and
from what I can make out, they deserves it!" She had not quite
understood what he meant, but it had made her uneasy; and after she had
cleared away breakfast, and washed up, she had sat down with her paper
spread before her.

She had looked long at a touching picture of a big sailor saying
good-bye to the tiny baby in his arms. He was kissing the child, and
Anna had contemplated him with a good deal of sympathy. That big bearded
British sailor would soon be face to face with the German Navy. Thus he
was surely doomed. His babe would soon be fatherless. Kind old Anna
wiped her eyes at the thought.

And then? And then she had slowly spelled out the incredible, the
dreadful news about the German Dragoon Regiment. Her father, forty-four
years ago, had been a non-commissioned officer in a Dragoon Regiment.

Yes, both mistress and maid felt wretched on this, the third day of the
war, which no one, in England at least, yet thought of as the Great War.

Mrs. Otway was restless, quite unlike herself. She wondered, uneasily,
why she felt so depressed. Friday was the day when she always paid her
few household books, but to-day, as it was still Bank Holiday, the books
had not come in. Instead, she had had three letters, marked in each case
"Private," from humble folk in the town, asking her most urgently to pay
at once the small sum she