“Do you like Captain Fort, Nollie?”

“Yes; he’s a nice man.”

“He seems a nice man, certainly; he has a nice smile, but strange views, I’m afraid.”

“He thinks the Germans are not much worse than we are; he says that a good many of us are bullies too.”

“Yes, that is the sort of thing I mean.”

“But are we, Daddy?”

“Surely not.”

“A policeman I talked to once said the same.  Captain Fort says that very few men can stand having power put into their hands without being spoiled.  He told me some dreadful stories.  He says we have no imagination, so that we often do things without seeing how brutal they are.”

“We’re not perfect, Nollie; but on the whole I think we’re a kind people.”

Noel was silent a moment, then said suddenly: 

“Kind people often think others are kind too, when they really aren’t.  Captain Fort doesn’t make that mistake.”

“I think he’s a little cynical, and a little dangerous.”

“Are all people dangerous who don’t think like others, Daddy?”

Pierson, incapable of mockery, was not incapable of seeing when he was being mocked.  He looked at his daughter with a smile.

“Not quite so bad as that, Nollie; but Mr. Fort is certainly subversive.  I think perhaps he has seen too many queer sides of life.”

“I like him the better for that.”

“Well, well,” Pierson answered absently.  He had work to do in preparation for a Confirmation Class, and sought his study on getting in.

Noel went to the dining-room to drink her hot milk.  The curtains were not drawn, and bright moonlight was coming in.  Without lighting up, she set the etna going, and stood looking at the moon-full for the second time since she and Cyril had waited for it in the Abbey.  And pressing her hands to her breast, she shivered.  If only she could summon him from the moonlight out there; if only she were a witch-could see him, know where he was, what doing!  For a fortnight now she had received no letter.  Every day since he had left she had read the casualty lists, with the superstitious feeling that to do so would keep him out of them.  She took up the Times.  There was just enough light, and she read the roll of honour—­till the moon shone in on her, lying on the floor, with the dropped journal....

But she was proud, and soon took grief to her room, as on that night after he left her, she had taken love.  No sign betrayed to the house her disaster; the journal on the floor, and the smell of the burnt milk which had boiled over, revealed nothing.  After all, she was but one of a thousand hearts which spent that moonlit night in agony.  Each night, year in, year out, a thousand faces were buried in pillows to smother that first awful sense of desolation, and grope for the secret spirit-place where bereaved souls go, to receive some feeble touch of healing from knowledge of each other’s trouble....