ill. Aubrey says it is very
fair. Mannering goes to him, of course. You know that Elizabeth
refused to witness the codicil father wrote last October
disinheriting Aubrey, when he was so mad with Sir Henry? It was
the first thing that made father take real notice of her. She
had only been six weeks here!

'Good-night, my dearest, dearest Arthur! Don't be too much
disappointed in me. I shall grow up some day.'

A few days later the Squire came back from Fallerton to find nobody
in the house, apparently, but himself. He went through the empty
hall and the library, and shut himself up there. He carried an
evening paper crumpled in his hand. It contained a detailed report
of the breaking of the Portuguese centre near Richebourg St. Vaast
on April 10, and the consequent retreat, over some seven miles,
since that day of the British line, together with the more recent
news of the capture of Armentieres and Merville. Sitting down at his
own table he read the telegrams again, and then in the stop-press
Sir Douglas Haig's Order of the Day--

'_There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every
position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement.
With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our
cause, each one of us must fight to the end. The safety of our homes
and the freedom of mankind depend alike upon the conduct of each one
of us at this critical moment._'

The Squire read and re-read the words. He was sitting close to the
tall French window where through some fine spring days Desmond had
lain, his half-veiled eyes wandering over the woods and green spaces
which had been his childhood's companions. There--submissive for
himself, but, for England's sake, and so that his mind might receive
as long as possible the impress of her fate, an ardent wrestler with
Death through each disputed hour--he had waited; and there, with the
word _England_ on his lips, he had died. The Squire could still see
the marks made on the polished floor by the rolling backward of the
bed at night. And on the wall near there was a brown mark on the
wall-paper. He remembered that it had been made by a splash from a
bowl of disinfectant, and that he had stared at it one morning in a
dumb torment which seemed endless, because Desmond had woke in pain
and the morphia was slow to act.

_England_! His boy was dead--and his country had its back to the
wall. And he--what had he d