Ernie clattered into the kitchen at a busy trot, and stumbled upstairs without a word to his wife at the sink.

There was such an air of stir and secret purposefulness about him that Ruth followed him up to the bedroom. There she found him on his knees in a litter of things, packing a bundle frantically.

A dish-cloth in her hand, she watched his efforts.

"Where away then?" she asked.

"Berlin this journey. Hand me them socks!"

Her eyes leapt. "Is it war?"

"That\'s it."

She sat down ghastly, wrapping her hands in her apron as if they had been mutilated and she wished to hide the stumps.


Men abuse the Army when they are in it and take their discharge at the earliest possible moment; but when the call comes they down tools with avidity, and leaving the mill, the mine, the shunting yard, and the shop, they troop back to the colours with the lyrical enthusiasm of those who have re-discovered youth on the threshhold of middle-age.

Ern, you may be sure, was no exception to the rule.

Packing and unpacking his bundle on his knees, he was busy, happy, important. But there was no such desperate hurry after all: for he did not join the crowds which thronged the recruiting stations in those first days: he waited for the Colonel to arrange matters so that he could join his old battalion at Aldershot direct.

Ruth watched him with deep and jealously guarded eyes in which wistfulness and other disturbing emotions met and mingled.

Once only she put to him the master question.

"What about us, Ern?"

He was standing at the time contemplating the patient and tormented bundle.

"Who?"

"Me and the children."

"There\'s one Above," said Ernie. "He\'ll see to you."

"He don\'t most in general not from what I\'ve seen of it," answered Ruth. "What if He don\'t?"

There was a moment\'s pause. Then Ern dropped a word as a child may drop a stone in a well.

"Joe."

Ruth caught her breath.

In those days Ernie grew on her as a mountain looming out of the dawn-mist grows on the onlooker. Joe did not even come to see her; and she was glad. For all his virility and bull-like quality, now that the day of battle had come, Ern was proving spiritually the bigger man.

And his very absorbtion in the new venture appealed to Ruth even while it wounded. Ern had been "called" as surely as Clem Woolgar, the bricklayer\'s labourer, her neighbour in the Moot, who testified every Sunday afternoon in a scarlet jersey at the Star corner to the clash of cymbals. Clem it was true, spoke of his call as Christ; to Ernie it went by the name of country. In Ruth\'s view the name might differ but the Thing was the same. A voice had come to Ern which had spoken to him as she had not, as the children had not. Because of it he was a new man—"converted," as Clem would say, prepared to forsake father and mother, and wife, and child, and follow, follow.

England was calling; and he seemed deaf to every other voice. She seemed to have gone clean out of his life; but the children had not—she noticed it with a pang of jealousy and a throb of hope. For each of the remaining nights after dark, he went round their cots. She was not to know anything about that, she could see, from the stealthy way in which he stole upstairs when her back was supposed to be turned. But the noises in the room overhead, the murmur of his voice, the shuffling of his feet as he got up from the bedsides betrayed his every action.

On the third night, as he rejoined her, she rose before him in the dusk, laying down her work.

"Anything for me too, Ern," she asked humbly—"the mother of em?"

"What d\'you mean?" he asked almost fiercely.

"D\'you want me, Ern?"

He turned his back on her with an indifference that hurt far more than any brutality, because it signified so plainly that he did not care.

"You\'re all right," he said enigmatically, and went out.

He could ask anything of her now, and she would give him all, how gladly! But he asked nothing.

In another way, too, he was torturing her. It was clear to her that he meant to do his duty by her and the children—to the last ounce; and nothing more. He cared for their material wants as he had never done before. All his spare moments he spent handying about the house, hammer in hand, nails in mouth, doing little jobs he had long promised to do and had forgotten; putting little Ned\'s mail-cart to rights, screwing on a handle, setting a loose slate. She followed him about with wistful eyes, holding the hammer, steadying the ladder, and receiving in return a few off-hand words of thanks. She did not want words: she wanted him—himself.

Then news came through, and he was straightway full of mystery and bustle.

"Join at Aldershot to-morrow. Special train at two," he told Ruth in the confidential whisper beloved of working-men. "Don\'t say nothing to nobody." As though the news, if it reached the Kaiser, would profoundly affect the movements of the German armies.

That evening Ernie went up to the Manor-house to say good-bye.

Mrs. Trupp was far more to him than his god-mother: she was a friend known to him from babyhood, allied to him by a thousand intimate ties, and trusted as he trusted no one else on earth, not even his dad.

Now he unbosomed to her the one matter that was worrying him on his departure—that he should be leaving Ruth encumbered with debt.

Mrs. Trupp met him with steady eyes. It was her first duty, the first duty of every man, woman and child in the nation to see that the fighting-men went off in good heart.

"You needn\'t worry about Ruth," she said, quietly. "She\'ll have the country behind her. All the soldiers\' wives will."

Ernie shook his head doubtfully.

"Ah, I don\'t hold much by the country," he said.

The lady\'s grave face, silver-crowned, twinkled into sudden mischievous life. She rippled off into the delicious laughter he loved so dearly.

"I know who\'s been talking to you!" she cried.

Ernie grinned sheepishly.

"Who............