shire accent,
replied:

"Well, we've got to beat them. They're such a wicked lot. I daresay it's
'ard on you, but we've got to beat them."

"But _we_ never did nothing," cried Mrs. Gerhardt; "it isn't us that's
wicked. We never wanted the war; it's nothing but ruin to him. They did
ought to let me have my man, or my boy, one or the other."

"You should 'ave some feeling for the Government, Dora; they 'ave to do
'ard things."

Mrs. Gerhardt, with a quivering face, had looked at her friend.

"I have," she said at last in a tone which implanted in Mrs. Clirehugh's
heart the feeling that Dora was "bitter."

She could not forget it; and she would flaunt her head at any mention of
her former friend. It was a blow to Mrs. Gerhardt, who had now no
friends, except the deaf and bedridden aunt, to whom all things were the
same, war or no war, Germans or no Germans, so long as she was fed.

About then it was that the tide turned, and the Germans began to know
defeat. Even Mrs. Gerhardt, who read the papers no longer, learned it
daily, and her heart relaxed; that bright side began to reappear a
little. She felt they could not feel so hardly towards her "man" now as
when they were all in fear; and perhaps the war would be over before her
boy went out. But Gerhardt puzzled her. He did not brighten up. The iron
seemed to have entered his soul too deeply. And one day, in the bazaar,
passing an open doorway, Mrs. Gerhardt had a glimpse of why. There,
stretching before her astonished eyes, was a great, as it were,
encampment of brown blankets, slung and looped up anyhow, dividing from
each other countless sordid beds, which were almost touching, and a
whiff of huddled humanity came out to her keen nostrils, and a hum of
sound to her ears. So that was where her man had dwelt these thirty
months, in that dirty, crowded, noisy place, with dirty-looking men,
such as those she could see lying on the beds, or crouching by the side
of them, over their work. He had kept neat somehow, at least on the days
when she came to see him--but _that_ was where he lived! Alone again
(for she no longer brought the little Violet to see her German father),
she grieved all the way home. Whatever happened to him now, even if she
got him back, she knew he would never quite get over it.

And then came the morning when she came out of her door like the other
inhabitants of Putney, at sound of the maroons, thinking it was an air
raid; and, catching the smil