no reply, and to the porter idly looking after them they
were soon lost from sight in the gathering dusk of the road.

V

The little town of Millsborough was _en fete_. There was a harvest
festival going on, and the County Agricultural Committee had taken the
opportunity to celebrate the successful gathering of the crops, and the
part taken in it by the woman land-workers under their care. They had
summoned the land lasses from far and wide; in a field on the outskirts
of the town competitions had been in full swing all the morning, and now
there were to be speeches in the market-place, and a final march of land
girls, boy scouts, and decorated wagons to the old Parish Church, where a
service was to be held.

All Millsborough, indeed, was in the streets to look at the procession,
and the crowd was swelled by scores of cadets from a neighbouring camp,
who were good-heartedly keeping the route, and giving a military air to
the show. But the flower-decked wagons were the centre of interest. The
first in the line was really a brilliant performance. It was an old wagon
of Napoleonic days, lent by a farmer, whose forebears had rented the same
farm since William and Mary. Every spoke of the wheels blazed with red
geraniums; there was a fringe of heather along the edge of the cart,
while vegetables, huge marrows, turnips, carrots, and onions dangled from
its sides, and the people inside sat under a nodding canopy of tall and
splendid wheat, mixed with feathery barley. But the passengers were
perhaps the most attractive thing about it. They were four old women in
lilac sunbonnets. They were all over seventy, and they had all worked
bravely in the harvest. The crowd cheered them vociferously, and they
sat, looking timidly out on the scene with smiling eyes and tremulous
lips, their grey hair blowing about their wrinkled, wholesome faces.

Beside the wagon walked a detachment of land girls. One of them was the
granddaughter of one of the old women, and occasionally a word would
pass between them.

"Eh, Bessie, but I'd like to git down! They mun think us old fools,
dizened up this way."

"No, gran; you must ride. You're the very best bit of the show. Why, just
listen how the folk cheer you!"

The old woman sighed.

"I'd like to look at it mysel'," she said with a childish plaintiveness.
But her tall granddaughter, in full uniform, with a rake over her
shoulder, thought this a foolish remark, and made no reply.