‘That’ll do,’ said the Squire presently; ’I’ll look over them myself!’

Forest went away.  After shutting the door he saw Elizabeth coming along the library passage, and stopped to speak to her.

‘The things have just come from France, Miss,’ he said in a low voice.

Elizabeth hesitated, and was turning back, when the library door opened and the Squire called her.

‘Yes, Mr. Mannering.’

‘Will you come here, please, a moment?’

She entered the room, and the Squire closed the door behind her, pointing mutely to the things on the floor.

The tears sprang to her eyes.  She knelt down to look at them.

‘Do you remember anything about this?’ he said, holding out a little book.  It was the pocket Anthology she had found for Desmond on the day of his going into camp.  As she looked through it she saw a turned-down leaf, and seemed still to hear the boy’s voice, as he hung over her shoulder translating the epigram—­

‘Shame on you, mountains and seas!’

With a swelling throat she told the story.  The Squire listened, and when afterwards she offered the book to him again, he put it back into her hand, with some muttered words which she interpreted as bidding her keep it.

She put it away in the drawer of her writing-table, which had been brought back to its old place only that morning.  The Squire himself went to his own desk.

‘Will you sit there?’ He pointed to her chair.  ’I want to speak to you.’

Then after a pause he added slowly, ’Will you tell me—­what you think I can now do with my time?’

His voice had a curious monotony—­unlike its usual tone.  But Elizabeth divined a coming crisis.  She went very white.

’Dear Mr. Mannering—­I don’t know what to say—­except that the country seems to want everything that each one of us can do.’

‘Have you read Haig’s Order of the Day?’

‘Yes, I have just read it.’

The Squire’s eyes, fixed upon her, had a strange intensity.

‘You and I have never known—­never dreamt—­of anything like this.’

‘No—­never.  But England has had her back to the wall before!’

She sat proudly erect, her hands quietly crossed.  But he seemed to hear the beating of her heart.

’You mean when Pitt said, “Roll up the map of Europe”?  Yes—­that too was vital.  But the people at home scarcely knew it—­and it was not a war of machines.’

‘No matter!  England will never yield.’

‘Till Germany is on her knees?’ His long bony face, more lined, more emaciated than ever, seemed to catch a sombre glow from hers.

‘Yes—­though it last ten years!  But the Americans are hurrying.’

‘Are all women like you?’

Her mouth trembled into scorn.

’Oh, think of the women whose shoe-strings I am not worthy to unloose!—­the nurses, the French peasant-women, the women who have given their husbands—­their sons.’