shadow of
death. At least she could run the cook and the servants, wrestle
with the food difficulties, and keep the Squire's most essential
business going.

But afterwards? She shivered at the word. Yes, afterwards she would
go! And Pamela should reign.

Suddenly, in a back passage, leading from her office to the
housekeeper's room, she came upon a boy of fourteen, Forest's
hall-boy, really a drudge-of-all-work, on whom essential things
depended. He was sitting on a chair beside the luggage lift absorbed
in some work, over which his head was bent, while an eager tip of
tongue showed through his tightened lips.

'What are you doing, Jim?' Elizabeth paused beside the boy, who had
always appeared to her as a simple, docile creature, not very likely
to make much way in a jostling world.

'Please, Miss, I'm knitting,' said Jim, raising a flushed face.

'Knitting! Knitting what?'

'Knitting a sock for my big brother. He's in France, Miss. Mother
learnt me.'

Elizabeth was silent a moment, watching the clumsy fingers as they
struggled with the needles.

'Are you very fond of your brother, Jim?' she asked at last.

'Yes, Miss,' said the boy, stooping a little lower over his work.
Then he added, 'There's only him and me--and mother. Father was
killed last year.'

'Do you know where he is?'

'No, Miss. But Mr. Desmond told me when he was here he might perhaps
see him. And I had a letter from Mr. Desmond ten days ago. He'd come
across Bob, and he wrote me a letter.'

And out of his pocket he pulled a grimy envelope, and put it into
Elizabeth's hands.

'Do you want me to read it, Jim?'

'Please, Miss.' But she was hardly able to read the letters for the
dimness in her eyes. Just a boyish letter--from a boy to a boy. But
it had in it, quite unconsciously, the sacred touch that 'makes us
men.'

A little later she was in the village, where a woman she knew--one
Mary Wilson--was dying, a woman who had been used to come up to do
charing work at the Hall, before the last illness of a bed-ridden
father kept her at home. Mary was still under fifty, plain, clumsy,
and the hardest worker in the village. She lived at the outbreak of
war with her father and mother. Her brother had been killed at
Passchendaele, and Mary's interest in life had vanished with him.
But all through the winter she had nursed her father night and day
through a horrible illness. Often, as Elizabeth had now discovered,
in the bitterest cold of th