ly visit, but she urged him if
his name did appear to appeal against repatriation. It was with the
greatest difficulty that she roused in him the energy to promise. "Look
on the bright side, Max," she implored him. "You've got a son in the
British army; they'll never send you. They wouldn't be so cruel. Never
say die, old man."

His name appeared but was taken out, and the matter hung again in awful
suspense, while the evil face of the recurrent nightmare confronted
Mrs. Gerhardt out of her favourite journal. She read that journal again,
because, so far as in her gentle spirit lay, she hated it. It was slowly
killing her man, and all her chance of future happiness; she hated it,
and read it every morning. To the monthly rose and straggly little
brown-red chrysanthemums in the tiny hothouse there had succeeded spring
flowers--a few hardy January snowdrops, and one by one blue scillas, and
the little pale daffodils called "angels' tears."

Peace tarried, but the flowers came up long before their time in their
tiny hothouse against the kitchen flue. And then one wonderful day there
came to Mrs. Gerhardt a strange letter, announcing that Gerhardt was
coming home. He would not be sent to Germany--he was coming home!
To-day, that very day--any moment he might be with her. When she
received it, who had long received no letters save the weekly letters of
her boy still in the army, she was spreading margarine on auntie's bread
for breakfast, and, moved beyond all control, she spread it thick,
wickedly, wastefully thick, then dropped the knife, sobbed, laughed,
clasped her hands on her breast, and without rhyme or reason, began
singing: "Hark! the herald angels sing." The girls had gone to school
already, auntie in the room above could not hear her, no one heard her,
nor saw her drop suddenly into the wooden chair, and, with her bare arms
stretched out one on either side of the plate of bread and margarine,
cry her heart out against the clean white table. Coming home, coming
home, coming home! The bright side! The little white stars!

It was a quarter of an hour before she could trust herself to answer the
knocking on the floor, which meant that "auntie" was missing her
breakfast. Hastily she made the tea and went up with it and the bread
and margarine. The woman's dim long face gleamed greedily when she saw
how thick the margarine was spread; but little Mrs. Gerhardt said no
word of the reason for that feast. She just watched