-

'_Shame on you, mountains and seas!_'

With a swelling throat she told the story. The Squire listened, and
when afterwards she offered the book to him again, he put it back
into her hand, with some muttered words which she interpreted as
bidding her keep it.

She put it away in the drawer of her writing-table, which had been
brought back to its old place only that morning. The Squire himself
went to his own desk.

'Will you sit there?' He pointed to her chair. 'I want to speak to
you.'

Then after a pause he added slowly, 'Will you tell me--what you
think I can now do with my time?'

His voice had a curious monotony--unlike its usual tone. But
Elizabeth divined a coming crisis. She went very white.

'Dear Mr. Mannering--I don't know what to say--except that the
country seems to want everything that each one of us can do.'

'Have you read Haig's Order of the Day?'

'Yes, I have just read it.'

The Squire's eyes, fixed upon her, had a strange intensity.

'You and I have never known--never dreamt--of anything like this.'

'No--never. But England has had her back to the wall before!'

She sat proudly erect, her hands quietly crossed. But he seemed to
hear the beating of her heart.

'You mean when Pitt said, "Roll up the map of Europe"? Yes--that too
was vital. But the people at home scarcely knew it--and it was not a
war of machines.'

'No matter! England will never yield.'

'Till Germany is on her knees?' His long bony face, more lined, more
emaciated than ever, seemed to catch a sombre glow from hers.

'Yes--though it last ten years! But the Americans are hurrying.'

'Are all women like you?'

Her mouth trembled into scorn.

'Oh, think of the women whose shoe-strings I am not worthy to
unloose!--the nurses, the French peasant-women, the women who have
given their husbands--their sons.'

His look showed his agitation.

'So we are to be saved--by boys like Desmond--and women like you?'

'Oh, I am a cypher--a nothing!' There was a passionate humiliation
in her voice. 'I should be nursing in France--'

'If it weren't for your mother and your sister?'

She nodded. There was a pause. Then the Squire said, in a different
tone,

'But you have not answered my question. I should be obliged if you
would answer it. How am I, being I--how is a man of my kind to fill
his time--and live his life? If the country is in deadly peril--if
the ground is shaking beneath our feet--if we are to go on fightin