ivening to sit and pass recruits all day
long."

"No," she agreed. "One wants to be up and doing. I hope I am not awfully
disloyal or dreadfully selfish, but I cannot help being glad that my
baby is a baby. Mother has knitted countless woollies for you"--she
changed the subject abruptly; "it has added to poor Tom's discontent. He
has to try on innumerable sleeping-helmets and wind-mufflers round his
neck to see if they are long enough. Yesterday he talked rather
dramatically of enlisting as a stretcher-bearer and going, out with
you, but they wouldn't have him, would they?"

Dick laughed, but he could realize the bitterness of the other man's
position when Tom spoke to him that night over their port wine.

"Mabel is so pleased at keeping both her men under her wing," he
confided, "that she doesn't at all realize how galling it is to be out
of things. I would give most things, except Mabel and the boy, to be ten
years younger."

"Still, you have Mabel and the boy," Dick reminded him. "It comes
awfully hard on the women having to give up their men."

"That's beyond the point," Tom answered. "And bless you, don't you know
the women are proud to do it?"

"But pride doesn't mend a broken life," Dick tried to argue against his
own conviction.

Tom shook his head. "It helps somehow," he said. "Mabel was talking to
some woman in the village yesterday, who has sent three sons to the war,
and whose eldest, who is a married man and did not go, died last week.
'I am almost ashamed of him, Mum,' the woman told Mabel; 'It is not as
if he had been killed at the war.' Oh, well, what's the use of grousing;
here I am, and here I stick; but if the Germans come over, I'll have a
shot at them whatever regulations a grandmotherly Government may take
for our protection. And you're all right, my lad, you are not leaving a
woman behind you."

That night, after he had gone up to his own room, the thought of Joan
came to haunt Dick. For two months he had not let himself think of her;
work and other interests had more or less crowded her out of his heart.
But the sudden, though long expected, call to action brought him, so to
speak, to the verge of his own feeling. Other things fell away; he was
face to face once again with the knowledge that he loved her, and that
one cannot even starve love to death. He wanted her, he needed her; what
did other things, such as anger and hurt pride, count against that. He
had only kissed her once in his