She looked at him and smiled. "It's quite easy," she answered. "I
always see her as she lay there with all the sorrow gone from her. She
looked so beautiful and kind."

He rose and took the letter from where he had placed it on the
mantelpiece. He stooped and held it out above the fire and a little
flame leaped up and seemed to take it from his hand.

They neither spoke during the short walk between the two hotels. But at
the door she turned and held out her hands to him.

"Thank you," she said, "for being so kind--and wise. I shall always love
and honour her."

He kissed her, promising to take care of himself.

She ran against Phillips, the next day, at one of the big stores where
she was shopping. He had obtained a commission early in the war and was
now a captain. He had just come back from the front on leave. The
alternative had not appealed to him, of being one of those responsible
for sending other men to death while remaining himself in security and
comfort.

"It's a matter of temperament," he said. "Somebody's got to stop behind
and do the patriotic speechifying. I'm glad I didn't. Especially after
what I've seen."

He had lost interest in politics.

"There's something bigger coming," he said. "Here everything seems to be
going on much the same, but over there you feel it. Something growing
silently out of all this blood and mud. I find myself wondering what the
men are staring at, but when I look there's nothing as far as my field-
glasses will reach but waste and desolation. And it isn't only on the
faces of our own men. It's in the eyes of the prisoners too. As if they
saw something. A funny ending to the war, if the people began to think."

Mrs. Phillips was running a Convalescent Home in Folkestone, he told her;
and had even made a speech. Hilda was doing relief work among the ruined
villages of France.

"It's a new world we shall be called upon to build," he said. "We must
pay more heed to the foundation this time."

She seldom discussed the war with her father. At the beginning, he had
dreamed with Greyson of a short and glorious campaign that should weld
all classes together, and after which we should forgive our enemies and
shape with them a better world. But as the months went by, he appeared
to grow indifferent; and Joan, who got about twelve hours a day of it
outside, welcomed other subjects.

It surprised her when one evening after dinner he introduced it himsel