“It’s all rot pretending that we want him to come back.”

“It was jolly decent of him to enlist,” said Nicky.

Dorothy admitted that it was jolly decent.  “But,” she said, “what else could he do?  His only chance was to go away and do something so jolly plucky that we’re ashamed of ourselves, and never to come back again to spoil it.  You don’t want him to spoil it, Mummy ducky, do you?”

Anthony and Frances tried, conscientiously and patriotically, to realize the Boer War.  They said it was terrible to have it hanging over them, morning, noon and night.  But it didn’t really hang over them.  It hung over a country that, except once when it had conveniently swallowed up Morrie, they had never thought about and could not care for, a landscape that they could not see.  The war was not even part of that landscape; it refused to move over it in any traceable course.  It simply hung, or lay as one photographic film might lie upon another.  It was not their fault.  They tried to see it.  They bought the special editions of the evening papers; they read the military dispatches and the stories of the war correspondents from beginning to end; they stared blankly at the printed columns that recorded the disasters of Nicholson’s Nek, and Colenso and Spion Kop.  But the forms were grey and insubstantial; it was all fiat and grey like the pictures in the illustrated papers; the very blood of it ran grey.

It wasn’t real.  For Frances the brown walls of the house, the open wings of its white shutters, the green garden and tree of Heaven were real; so were Jack Straw’s Castle 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.