But neither mother nor daughter had offered to show her postcard to the
other. There was so little on them that it had not seemed necessary. Of
the two, it was Mrs. Otway who felt a little shy. The wording of Major
Guthrie's postcard was so peculiar! Of course he did not know French
well, or he would have put what he wanted to say differently. He would
have said "you" instead of "thee." She was rather glad that her dear
little Rose had not asked to see it. Still, its arrival mollified her
sore, hurt feeling that he might have written before. Instead of tearing
it up, as she had always done the letters Major Guthrie had written to
her in the old days that now seemed so very long ago, she slipped that
curious war postcard inside the envelope in which were placed his
bank-notes.

CHAPTER XVI

August 23, 1914! A date which will be imprinted on the heart, and on the
tablets of memory, of every Englishman and Englishwoman of our
generation. To the majority of thinking folk, that was the last Sunday
we any of us spent in the old, prosperous, happy, confiding England--the
England who considered that might as a matter of course follows
right--the England whose grand old motto was "Victory as Usual," and to
whom the word defeat was without significance.

Almost the whole population of Witanbury seemed to have felt a common
impulse to attend the evening service in the cathedral. They streamed in
until the stately black-gowned vergers were quite worried to find seats
for the late comers. In that great congregation there was already a
certain leaven of anxious hearts--not over-anxious, you understand, but
naturally uneasy because those near and dear to them had gone away to a
foreign country, to fight an unknown foe.

It was known that the minor canon who was on the rota to preach this
evening had gracefully yielded the privilege to the Dean, and this
accounted, in part at least, for the crowds who filled the great
building.

When Dr. Haworth mounted the pulpit and prepared to begin his sermon,
which he had striven to make worthy of the occasion, he felt a thrill of
satisfaction as his eyes suddenly lighted on the man whom he still
instinctively thought of by his old name of "Manfred Hegner."

Yes, there they were, Hegner and his wife, at the end of a row of
chairs, a long way down; she looking very pretty and graceful,
instinctively well-dressed in her grey muslin Sunday gown and wide
floppy hat--looking, indeed,