ed. Slowly in the weeks which followed she learned that
nothing was changed. In the fond hope that Gerhardt might be home now
any day, she was taking care that his slippers and some clothes of
David's were ready for him, and the hip bath handy for him to have a
lovely hot wash. She had even bought a bottle of beer and some of his
favourite pickle, saving the price out of her own food, and was taking
in the paper again, letting bygones be bygones. But he did not come. And
soon the paper informed her that the English prisoners were
returning--many in wretched state, poor things, so that her heart bled
for them, and made her fiercely angry with the cruel men who had treated
them so; but it informed her too, that if the paper had its way no
"Huns" would be tolerated in this country for the future. "Send them all
back!" were the words it used. She did not realise at first that this
applied to Gerhardt; but when she did, she dropped the journal as if it
had been a living coal of fire. Not let him come back to his home, and
family, not let him stay, after all they'd done to him, and he never did
anything to them! Not let him stay, but send him out to that dreadful
country, which he had almost forgotten in these thirty years, and he
with an English wife and children! In this new terror of utter
dislocation the bright side so slipped from her that she was obliged to
go out into the back garden in the dark, where a sou'-westerly wind was
driving the rain. There, lifting her eyes to the evening sky she uttered
a little moan. It couldn't be true; and yet what they said in her paper
had always turned out true, like the taking of Gerhardt away, and the
reduction of his food. And the face of the gentleman in the building at
Whitehall came before her out of the long past, with his lips
tightening, and his words: "We have to do very hard things, Mrs.
Gerhardt." Why had they to do them? Her man had never done no harm to no
one! A flood, bitter as sea water, surged in her, and seemed to choke
her very being. Those gentlemen in the papers--why should they go on
like that? Had they no hearts, no eyes to see the misery they brought to
humble folk? "I wish them nothing worse than what they've brought to him
and me," she thought wildly: "nothing worse!"

The rain beat on her face, wetted her grey hair, cooled her eyeballs. "I
mustn't be spiteful," she thought; and bending down in the dark she
touched the glass of the tiny conservatory built aga