to be afraid of going to bed alone. Frances, at Vera's request, had had
her cot moved up into the night nursery.

VIII

Anthony had begun to wonder where on earth he should send Morrie out to
this time, when the Boer War came and solved his problem.

Maurice, joyous and adventurous again, sent himself to South Africa, to
enlist in the Imperial Light Horse.

Ferdie Cameron went out also with the Second Gordon Highlanders,
solving, perhaps, another problem.

"It's no use trying to be sorry, Mummy," Dorothy said.

Frances knew what Anthony was thinking, and Anthony knew it was what
Frances thought herself: Supposing this time Morrie didn't come back?
Then that problem would be solved for ever. Frances hated problems when
they worried Anthony. Anthony detested problems when they
bothered Frances.

And the children knew what they were thinking. Dorothy went on.

"It's all rot pretending that we want him to come back."

"It was jolly decent of him to enlist," said Nicky.

Dorothy admitted that it was jolly decent. "But," she said, "what else
could he do? His only chance was to go away and do something so jolly
plucky that _we_'re ashamed of ourselves, and never to come back again
to spoil it. You don't want him to spoil it, Mummy ducky, do you?"

Anthony and Frances tried, conscientiously and patriotically, to
realize the Boer War. They said it was terrible to have it hanging over
them, morning, noon and night. But it didn't really hang over them. It
hung over a country that, except once when it had conveniently swallowed
up Morrie, they had never thought about and could not care for, a
landscape that they could not see. The war was not even part of that
landscape; it refused to move over it in any traceable course. It simply
hung, or lay as one photographic film might lie upon another. It was not
their fault. They tried to see it. They bought the special editions of
the evening papers; they read the military dispatches and the stories of
the war correspondents from beginning to end; they stared blankly at the
printed columns that recorded the disasters of Nicholson's Nek, and
Colenso and Spion Kop. But the forms were grey and insubstantial; it was
all fiat and grey like the pictures in the illustrated papers; the very
blood of it ran grey.

It wasn't real. For Frances the brown walls of the house, the open wings
of its white shutters, the green garden and tree of Heaven were real; so
were Jack Straw's Castl