‘What are you doing, Jim?’ Elizabeth paused beside the boy, who had always appeared to her as a simple, docile creature, not very likely to make much way in a jostling world.

‘Please, Miss, I’m knitting,’ said Jim, raising a flushed face.

‘Knitting!  Knitting what?’

’Knitting a sock for my big brother.  He’s in France, Miss.  Mother learnt me.’

Elizabeth was silent a moment, watching the clumsy fingers as they struggled with the needles.

‘Are you very fond of your brother, Jim?’ she asked at last.

‘Yes, Miss,’ said the boy, stooping a little lower over his work.  Then he added, ’There’s only him and me—­and mother.  Father was killed last year.’

‘Do you know where he is?’

’No, Miss.  But Mr. Desmond told me when he was here he might perhaps see him.  And I had a letter from Mr. Desmond ten days ago.  He’d come across Bob, and he wrote me a letter.’

And out of his pocket he pulled a grimy envelope, and put it into Elizabeth’s hands.

‘Do you want me to read it, Jim?’

‘Please, Miss.’  But she was hardly able to read the letters for the dimness in her eyes.  Just a boyish letter—­from a boy to a boy.  But it had in it, quite unconsciously, the sacred touch that ’makes us men.’

A little later she was in the village, where a woman she knew—­one Mary Wilson—­was dying, a woman who had been used to come up to do charing work at the Hall, before the last illness of a bed-ridden father kept her at home.  Mary was still under fifty, plain, clumsy, and the hardest worker in the village.  She lived at the outbreak of war with her father and mother.  Her brother had been killed at Passchendaele, and Mary’s interest in life had vanished with him.  But all through the winter she had nursed her father night and day through a horrible illness.  Often, as Elizabeth had now discovered, in the bitterest cold of the winter, she had had no bed but the flagstones of the kitchen.  Not a word of complaint—­and a few shillings for both of them to live upon!

At last the father died.  And the night he died Mary staggered across to the wretched cottage of a couple of old-age pensioners opposite.  ‘I must rest a bit,’ she said, and sitting down in a chair by the fire she fainted.  Influenza had been on her for some days, and now pneumonia had set in.  The old people would not hear of her being taken back to her deserted cottage.  They gave up their own room to her; they did everything for her their feeble strength allowed.  But the fierce disease beat down her small remaining strength.  Elizabeth, since the story came to her knowledge, had done her best to help.  But it was too late.

She went now to kneel at the beside of the dying woman.  Mary’s weary eyes lifted, and she smiled faintly at the lady who had been kind to her.  Then unconsciousness returned, and the village nurse gave it as her opinion that the end was near.