she answered, and to her
surprise there came a queer lump in her throat. "Why is everything
different now?"

He looked round at her with an air of genuine surprise, and, yes, of
indignation, in his steady grey eyes. And under that surprised and
indignant look, so unlike anything there had ever been before from him
to her, the colour flushed all over her face.

"You mean," she faltered, "you mean because--because England is at war?"

He nodded.

"But I thought--of course I don't know anything about it, Jervis, and I
daresay you'll think me very ignorant--but from what the Dean said this
morning I thought that only our fleet is to fight the Germans."

"The Dean is an old----" and then they both laughed. Jervis Blake went
on: "If we don't go to the help of the French and the Belgians, then
England's disgraced. But of course we're going to fight!"

Rose Otway was thinking--thinking hard. She knew a good deal about
Jervis, and his relations with the father he both loved and feared.

"Look here," she said earnestly. "We've always been friends, you and I,
haven't we, Jervis?"

And again he simply nodded in answer to the question.

"Well, I want you to promise me something!"

"I can't promise you I won't enlist."

"I don't want you to promise me that. I only want you to promise me to
wait just a few days--say a week. Of course I don't know anything about
how one becomes a soldier, but you'd be rather sold, wouldn't you, if
you enlisted and then if your regiment took no part in the fighting--if
there's really going to be fighting?"

Rose Otway stopped short. She felt a most curious sensation of fatigue;
it was as though she had been speaking an hour instead of a few moments.
But she had put her whole heart, her whole soul, into those few simple
words.

There was a long, long pause, and her eyes filled with tears. Those who
knew her would have told you that Rose Otway was quite singularly
self-possessed and unemotional. In fact she could not remember when she
had cried last, it was so long ago. But now there came over her a
childish, irresistible desire to have her way--to save poor, poor Jervis
from himself. And suddenly the face of the young man looking at her
became transfigured.

"Rose," he cried--"Rose, do you really care, a little, what happens to
me? Oh, if you only knew what a difference that would make!"

And then she pulled herself together. Jervis mustn't become what she in
her own mind called "sill