ANOTHER stimulus to the patriotic consciousness of Edward Albert was those newly arrived Belgian refugees from Antwerp, always sitting together in a bunch, watchful to behave well, and talking of their affairs and hopes with the utmost freedom, to anyone whom on the slightest provocation they imagined might understand their French. In a little while the Germans would be driven out of Belgium again and they would return. Miss Pooley and the widow lady who had first spoken to Edward Albert really did have a working knowledge of French, and so it fell to them to hear and hand on their account of what in those milder days were regarded as the horrors of war.

They seemed pretty dreadful then to everyone. Antwerp had been shelled and scores of civilians had been killed. One story was of a human shoulder-blade lying in the street far away from the heap of clothes and the pool of blood that had once been its body, and the other was of a man who just stepped out on a balcony to see what was happening. His wife called out to him to come in for his coffee, and, getting no answer, went out to find him — headless!

That sort of thing. It was strange to listen to people who could not speak three words of English talking so freely and quickly in their own difficult tongue.

Harold Thump was disposed to be critical of those Belgians from the first, and cast a doubt, some indefinite sort of doubt, upon them. They constituted a rival attraction and he could not bear it. He would make a humorous face and discover Edward Albert was not looking at him. He tried to recover that attention by affecting to jump and be alarmed at Monsieur Harcourt’s more emphatic gestures, and watching him with extreme caution and looking round at him suddenly, as if he was something that might explode at any moment. This succeeded partially. But only partially.

Because Tewler was listening most of the time for bits of Elementary French and hoping against hope that he might be able to cut in. But it was just gabble, gabble, so that at times he doubted if it really was French at all.

Never once did he hear of Lar mair, ler frair, that ever — present tante, the gardener, the books of my uncle, the house that is ours, the dog, the cat, and all that curious world which pullulates round and round and round the foundations laid for the French language in English.

Did these Belgians really............