een hard-worked and starved.
Since then she had always hated the Belgians.

"No, no," said Mrs. Otway quickly. "Not to Ostend. To Boulogne, in
France."

CHAPTER X

In the early morning sunshine--for it was only a quarter-past
seven--Rose Otway stood just within the wrought-iron gate of the Trellis
House.

It was Saturday in the first week of war. She had got up very early,
almost as early as old Anna herself, for, waking at five, she had found
it impossible to go to sleep again.

For the first time almost in her life, Rose felt heavy-hearted. The
sudden, mysterious departure of Major Guthrie had brought the War very
near; and so, in quite another way, had done Lord Kitchener's sudden,
trumpet-like call, for a hundred thousand men. She knew that, in
response to that call, Jervis Blake would certainly enlist, if not with
the approval, at any rate with the reluctant consent, of his father; and
Rose believed that this would mean the passing of Jervis out of her
life.

To Rose Otway's mind there was something slightly disgraceful in any
young man's enlistment in the British Army. The poorer mothers of
Witanbury, those among whom the girl and her kind mother did a good deal
of visiting and helping during the winter months, were apt to remain
silent concerning the son who was a soldier. She could not help knowing
that it was too often the bad boy of the family, the ne'er-do-weel, who
enlisted. There were, of course, certain exceptions--such, for instance,
as when a lad came of a fighting family, with father, uncles, and
brothers all in the Army. As for the gentleman ranker, he was _always_
a scapegrace.

Lord Kitchener's Hundred Thousand would probably be drawn from a
different class, for they were being directly asked to defend their
country. But even so, at the thought of Jervis Blake becoming a private,
Rose Otway's heart contracted with pain, and, yes, with vicarious shame.
Still, she made up her mind, there and then, that she would not give him
up, that she would write to him regularly, and that as far as was
possible they would remain friends.

How comforted she would have been could an angel have come and told her
with what eyes England was henceforth to regard her "common soldiers."

Rose Otway was very young, and, like most young things, very ignorant of
life. But there was, as Miss Forsyth had shrewdly said, a great deal in
the girl. Even now she faced life steadily, unhelped by the many
pleasant