f the little
parlour....

Mr. Direck had been stirred deeply by the tragic indignation of this
explosion, and the ring of torment in Mr. Britling's voice. He had stood
up also, but he did not follow his host.

"It's his boy," said Mr. Direck at last, confidentially to the
writing-desk. "How can one argue with him? It's just hell for him...."

Section 20

Mr. Direck took his leave of Mrs. Britling, and went very slowly towards
the little cottage. But he did not go to the cottage. He felt he would
only find another soul in torment there.

"What's the good of hanging round talking?" said Mr. Direck.

He stopped at the stile in the lane, and sat thinking deeply. "Only one
thing will convince her," he said.

He held out his fingers. "First this," he whispered, "and then that.
Yes."

He went on as far as the bend from which one sees the cottage, and stood
for a little time regarding it.

He returned still more sorrowfully to the junction, and with every step
he took it seemed to him that he would rather see Cecily angry and
insulting than not see her at all.

At the post office he stopped and wrote a letter-card.

"Dear Cissie," he wrote. "I came down to-day to see you--and thought
better of it. I'm going right off to find out about Teddy. Somehow I'll
get that settled. I'll fly around and do that somehow if I have to go up
to the German front to do it. And when I've got that settled I've got
something else in my mind--well, it will wipe out all this little
trouble that's got so big between us about neutrality. And I love you
dearly, Cissie."

That was all the card would hold.

Section 21

And then as if it were something that every one in the Dower House had
been waiting for, came the message that Hugh had been killed.

The telegram was brought up by a girl in a pinafore instead of the boy
of the old dispensation, for boys now were doing the work of youths and
youths the work of the men who had gone to the war.

Mr. Britling was standing at the front door; he had been surveying the
late October foliage, touched by the warm light of the afternoon, when
the messenger appeared. He opened the telegram, hoping as he had hoped
when he opened any telegram since Hugh had gone to the front that it
would not contain the exact words he read; that it would say wounded,
that at the worst it would say "missing," that perhaps it might even
tell of some pleasant surprise, a brief return to home such as the last
let