lent speech, followed by other
short, stirring addresses, each a trumpet call to the patriotism of
Witanbury. Not one of these speeches incited to violence in any form,
but reference had naturally been made to some of the terrible things
that the Germans had done in Belgium, and one speaker had made it very
plain that should a German invasion take place on the British coast, the
civilian population must expect that the fate of Belgium would be
theirs.

The meeting had come to a peaceful end, and then, an hour later, as soon
as the great personages had all gone and night had begun to fall,
rioting had suddenly broken out, the rioters being led by two women,
both Irish-women, whose husbands were believed to have been cruelly
ill-treated when on their way to a prison camp in Germany.

The story had been published in the local paper, on the testimony of a
medical orderly who had come back to England after many strange
adventures. True, an allusion had been made to the matter in one of the
recruiting speeches, but the speaker had not made very much of it; and
though what he had said had drawn groans from his large audience, and
though the words he had used undoubtedly made it more easy for the
magistrate, when he came to deal with the case of these two women, to
dismiss them with only a caution, yet no one could reasonably suppose
that it was this which led to the riot.

For a few minutes things had looked very ugly. A good deal of damage was
done, for instance, to the boot factory, which was still being managed
(and very well managed too) by a naturalised German and his son. Then
the rioters had turned their attention to the Witanbury Stores. "The
Kaiser," as Alfred Head was still called by his less kindly neighbours,
had always been disliked in the poorer quarters of the town, and that
long before the War. Now was the time for paying off old scores. So the
plate-glass windows were shivered with a will, as well as with pickaxes;
and all the goods, mostly consisting of bacon, butter, and cheese, which
had dressed those windows, had been taken out, thrown among the rioters,
and borne off in triumph. It was fortunate that no damage had been done
there to life or limb.

Alfred Head had fled at once to the highest room in the building. There
he had stayed, locked in, cowering and shivering, till the police,
strongly reinforced by soldiers, had driven the rioters off.

Polly at first had stood her ground. "Cowards! Cowards!"