e and Harrow on the Hill; morning and noon and
night were real, and getting up and dressing and going to bed; most real
of all the sight and sound and touch of her husband and her children.

Only now and then the vision grew solid and stood firm. Frances carried
about with her distinct images of Maurice, to which she could attach the
rest. Thus she had an image of Long Tom, an immense slender muzzle,
tilted up over a high ridge, nosing out Maurice.

Maurice was shut up in Ladysmith.

"Don't worry, Mummy. That'll keep him out of mischief. Daddy said he
ought to be shut up somewhere."

"He's starving, Dorothy. He won't have anything to eat."

"Or drink, ducky."

"Oh, you're cruel! Don't be cruel!"

"I'm not cruel. If I didn't care so awfully for you, Mummy, I shouldn't
mind whether he came back or didn't. _You_'re cruel. You ought to think
of Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmy and Auntie Edie."

"At the moment," said Frances, "I am thinking of Uncle Morrie."

She was thinking of him, not as he actually was, but as he had been, as
a big boy like Michael, as a little boy like John, two years younger
than she; a little boy by turns spoiled and thwarted, who contrived,
nevertheless, to get most things that he happened to want by crying for
them, though everybody else went without. And in the grown-up Morrie's
place, under the shells of Ladysmith, she saw Nicky.

For Nicky had declared his intention of going into the Army.

"And I'm thinking of Morrie," Dorothy said. "I don't want him to miss
it."

Frances and Anthony had hung out flags for Mafeking; Dorothy and Nicky,
mounted on bicycles, had been careering through the High Street with
flags flying from their handlebars. Michael was a Pro-Boer and flew no
flags. All these things irritated Maurice.

He had come back again. He had missed it, as he had missed all the
chances that were ever given him. A slight wound kept him in hospital
throughout the greater part of the siege, and he had missed the sortie
of his squadron and the taking of the guns for which Ferdie Cameron got
his promotion and his D.S.O. He had come back in the middle of the war
with nothing but a bullet wound in his left leg to prove that he had
taken part in it.

The part he had taken had not sobered Maurice. It had only depressed
him. And depression after prolonged, brutal abstinence broke down the
sheer strength by which sometimes he stretched a period of sobriety
beyond its natural li