e are doing nothing wrong!" Honor pleaded.

"The wrong lies in the lack of moral courage to deal drastically with
the wound. If poison remains, it is bound to fester. Captain Dalton
should go away."

"We were obliged to let ourselves down gently. It has been so
miserable!" Down went Honor's head on her mother's shoulder, and the
tears fell fast.

Tears also fell on her dark head. Mrs. Bright's heart was wrung with
pity. She had said enough for the present, so now devoted herself to
soothing her beloved child's sorrow with her never-failing sympathy.
Honor was a good girl, and to be trusted entirely to look her trouble
squarely in the face and conquer it; and the mother's heart was lifted
in prayer that she might be enabled to aid and strengthen her child.

It was very shortly after this that war broke out, and there was so much
to think of and talk about in the Station, that private affairs were
temporarily set aside. The newspapers were read eagerly in detail;
correspondence with dear ones over the seas was quickened with new
interest; and everyone, even in such a little place as Muktiarbad, found
plenty to do to help in the common cause. War-work parties were
organised, at which the ladies engaged in knitting woollen comforts for
the troops, and in making up parcels to be dispatched to the front and
to prisoners in Germany; and every member had some bit of war news to
discuss with the others at the Club as they rested from their games
under the waving _punkha_.

"It will drive me silly," Tommy had said from the first, "if I have to
loaf about in a place like this when all my pals and school
contemporaries have volunteered, or are in the thick of it, doing their
bit."

"You are doing your bit, just as any one who is killing Germans," said
Mrs. Ironsides who had returned from Darjeeling. "What is to become of
us all, if all medically fit civil officers are sent to fight? Why, we
should be murdered in our beds, if it were not for the Police!"

Tommy thought he would cheerfully risk Mrs. Ironsides being murdered in
her bed, if the Government would only allow him to serve "for the
duration"; and he continued to send in applications for leave to join
up, with a persistency worthy of the Great Cause, in the hopes that
constant dripping would wear away the stony indifference with which they
were treated.

One evening, towards the end of September, Captain Dalton sought Honor
at the Club. He had news for her, the gra