while he's got 'er. They offered him soldiers, and ee
wouldn't have 'em."

* * * * *

"Silly, sentimental young woman," said a tall man, with a pipe in his
mouth, who had just lounged up to the outskirts of the crowd, from a side
street. "Who's she going to take in here? What's the good of talking
poetry about farming to a lot of country people? A London shop-girl, I
guess. What does she know about it?"

"You bets she knows a lot," said a young man beside him, who, to judge
from his uniform, was one of the Canadians employed at Ralstone camp.
He had been taken with the "sentimental young woman," and was annoyed by
the uncivil remarks of his neighbour. "Wonder what farm she's on?"

"Oh, you know these parts?" said the other, removing his pipe for a
moment and looking down on his companion.

"Well, not exactly." The reply was hesitating. "My grandfather went out
to Canada from a place near here sixty years ago. I used to hear him and
my mother talk about Millsborough."

"Beastly hole!" said the other, replacing his pipe.

"I don't agree with you at all," said the other angrily. "It's as nice a
little town of its size as you'd find anywhere."

The other shrugged his shoulders. A man a few yards off in the crowd
happened at that moment to be looking in the direction of the two
speakers. It was the ticket-collector at the station, enjoying an
afternoon off. He recognized the taller of the two men as the "dook" he
had seen at Millsborough station about a week ago. The man's splendid
carriage and iron-grey head were not to be mistaken--also his cadaverous
and sickly look, and his shabby clothes. The ticket-collector saw that
the man was holding the dark-eyed, "furrin-looking" child by the hand,
which the woman he met had brought down with her. "Furriners," he
supposed, all of them; part of that stream of fugitives from air raids
that had been flowing out of London during the preceding winter, and was
now flowing out again, as the next winter approached, though in less
volume. Every house and lodging in Millsborough was full, prices had gone
up badly, and life in Millsborough was becoming extremely uncomfortable
for its normal inhabitants--"all along o' these panicky aliens!" thought
the ticket-collector, resentfully, as he looked at the tall man.

The tall man, however, was behaving as though the market-place belonged
to him, talking to his neighbours, who mostly looked at him askance, a