t,
who happened to know this and was besides something of a sentimentalist,
detected pathos in this departure on a festival morning. It seemed to
him--as she swung round her stern and his quick eye caught the glint of
her gilded name with the muzzle of her six-inch gun on the platform
above, foreshortened in the middle of its white screen like a bull's-eye
in a target--it seemed to him that this holiday throng took little heed
of the three hundred odd men so silently going forth to do England's
work and fight her battles. On her deck yesterday afternoon he had
shaken hands and parted with a friend, a stoker on board, and had seen
some pitiful good-byes. His friend Casey, to be sure, was unmarried--an
un-amiable man with a cynical tongue--with no one to regret him and no
disposition to make a fuss over a three-years' exile. But at the head
of the ship's ladder Gilbart had passed through a group of red-eyed
women, one or two with babies at the breast. It was not a pretty sight:
one poor creature had abandoned herself completely, and rocked to and
fro holding on by the bulwarks and bellowing aloud. This and a vision
of dirty wet handkerchiefs haunted him like a physical sickness.

Gilbart considered himself an Imperialist, read his newspaper
religiously, and had shown great loyalty as secretary of a local
sub-committee at the time of the Queen's Jubilee, in collecting
subscriptions among the dockyardsmen. Habitually he felt a lump in his
throat when he spoke of the Flag. His calling--that of lay-assistant
and auxiliary preacher (at a pinch) to a dockyard Mission--perhaps
encouraged this surface emotion; but by nature he was one of those who
need to make a fuss to feel they are properly patriotic. To his
thinking every yacht in the Sound should have dipped her flag to
the _Berenice_.

Surely even a salute of guns would not have been too much. But no: that
is the way England dismisses her sons, without so much as a cheer!

He felt ashamed of this cold send-off; ashamed for his countrymen.
"What do they know or care?" he asked himself, fastening his scorn on
the backs of an unconscious group of country-people who had raced one
another uphill from an excursion steamer and halted panting and laughing
half-way up the slope. It irritated him the more when he thought of
Casey's pale, derisive face. He and Casey had often argued about
patriotism; or rather he had done the arguing while Casey sneered.
Casey was a stok