a
generous broad-mindedness in their attitude towards the foe. England
was a great civilised nation, and so was Germany. The war would be
fought in an honourable, straightforward manner, as between high-souled
enemies. Christian charity enjoined on us to be especially kind and
considerate to those Germans who happened to be caught by this sad state
of things, in our midst. He had heard these people spoken of that
morning as "alien enemies." For his part he would not care to describe
by any such offensive terms those Germans who were settled in England in
peaceful avocations. The war was not of their making, and those poor
foreigners were caught up in a terrible web of tragic circumstance. He
himself had many dear and valued friends in Germany, professors whose
only aim in life was the spread of "Kultur," not perhaps quite the same
thing as we meant by the word culture, for the German "Kultur" meant
something with a wider, more universal significance. He hoped the time
would come, sooner perhaps than many pessimists thought possible, when
those friends would acknowledge that England had drawn her sword in a
righteous cause and that Germany had been wrong to provoke her.

CHAPTER III

While Mrs. Otway had been thinking over the now rather painful problem
of her good old Anna, the subject of her meditations, that is Anna
herself, from behind the pretty muslin curtain which hid her kitchen
from the passers-by, was peeping out anxiously on the lawn-like stretch
of green grass, bordered on two sides by high elms, which is so pleasant
a feature of Witanbury Close.

Her knitting was in her hands, for Anna's fingers were never idle, but
just now the needles were still.

When your kitchen happens to be one of the best rooms on the ground
floor, and one commanding not only the gate of your domain but the road
beyond, it becomes important that it should not be quite like other
people's kitchens. It was Mrs. Otway's pride, as well as Anna's, that at
any moment of the day a visitor who, after walking into the hall, opened
by mistake the kitchen door, would have found everything there in
exquisite order. The shelves, indeed, were worth going some way to see,
for each shelf was edged with a beautiful "Kante" or border of
crochet-work almost as fine as point lace. In fact, the kitchen of the
Trellis House was more like a stage kitchen than a kitchen in an
ordinary house, and the way in which it was kept was the more
merito