ts of his to London. Sometimes they had
been quite amusing letters.

She put on a cool, dark-grey linen coat and skirt, and a shady hat, and
then she started off for the mile walk to Dorycote.

* * * * *

It was a very warm afternoon. Old Mrs. Guthrie, after she had had her
pleasant little after-luncheon nap, established herself, with the help
of her maid, under a great beech tree in the beautiful garden which had
been one of the principal reasons why Major Guthrie had chosen this
house at Dorycote for his mother. The old lady was wearing a pale
lavender satin gown, with a lace scarf wound about her white hair and
framing her still pretty pink and white face.

During the last few days the people who composed Mrs. Guthrie's little
circle had been too busy and too excited to come and see her. But she
thought it likely that to-day some one would drop in to tea. Any one
would be welcome, for she was feeling a little mopish.

No, it was not this surprising, utterly unexpected, War that troubled
her. Mrs. Guthrie belonged by birth to the fighting caste; her father
had been a soldier in his time, and so had her husband.

As for her only son, he had made the Army his profession, and she knew
that he had hoped to live and die in it. He had been through the Boer
War, and was wounded at Spion Kop, so he had done his duty by his
country; this being so, she could not help being glad now that Alick had
retired when he had. But she had wisely kept that gladness to herself as
long as he was with her. To Mrs. Guthrie's thinking, this War was
France's war, and Russia's war; only in an incidental sense England's
quarrel too.

Russia? Mrs. Guthrie had always been taught to mistrust Russia, and to
believe that the Tsar had his eye on India. She could remember, too, and
that with even now painful vividness, the Crimean War, for a man whom
she had cared for as a girl, whom indeed she had hoped to marry, had
been killed at the storming of the Redan. To her it seemed strange that
England and Russia were now allies.

As a matter of fact, the one moment of excitement the War had brought
her was in connection with Russia. An old gentleman she knew, a tiresome
neighbour whose calls usually bored rather than pleased her, had hobbled
in yesterday and told her, as a tremendous secret, that Russia was
sending a big army to Flanders _via_ England, through a place called
Archangel of which she had vaguely heard. He