The avalanche, once started, was moving fast now. The Irish Nationalists who had lost faith in the power of the Government and the will of the Army to protect them, had decided at last to arm in view of the default of the law that they might resist invasion from the North-East.

On the very day after the parade of insurrectionaries in Belfast a famous Irishman, soldier, sailor, statesman, man of letters, who in his young manhood had served throughout the long-drawn South African War the Empire which had refused liberty to his country alone of all her Colonies, and in the days to come, though now in his graying years, was to be the hero of one of the most desperate ventures of the Great War, ran the little Asgarde, her womb heavy with strange fruit, into Howth Harbour while the Sunday bells peeled across the quiet waters, calling to church.

The arms were landed and marched under Nationalist escort towards Dublin. The police and a company of King\'s Own Scottish Borderers met the party and blocked the way. After a parley the Nationalists dispersed and the soldiers marched back to Dublin through a hostile demonstration. Mobbed, pelted, provoked to the last degree, at Bachelor\'s Walk, on the quay, where owing to the threatening attitude of the crowd they had been halted, the men took the law into their own hands and fired without the order of their officer. Three people were killed.

The incident led to the first quarrel that had taken place between Ernie and Joe Burt in a friendship now of some years standing.

"Massacre by the military," said Joe. "That\'s what it is."

The old soldier in Ernie leapt to the alert.

"Well, what would you have had em do?" he cried hotly. "Lay down and let emselves be kicked to death?"

"If the soldiers want to shoot at all let em shoot the armed rebels," retorted Joe.

"Let em shoot the lot, I says," answered Ernie. "I\'m sick of it. Ireland! Ireland! Ireland all the time. No one\'s no time to think of poor old England. Yet we\'ve our troubles too, I reck\'n."

Joe went out surlily without saying good-night. When he was gone, Ruth who had been listening, looked up at Ernie, a faint glow of amusement, interest, surprise, in her eyes.

"First time ever I knaw\'d you and Joe get acrarst each other," she said.

Ernie, biting home on his pipe, did not meet her gaze.

"First," he said. "Not the last, may be."

She put down dish-cloth and dish, came to him, and put her hand on his shoulder.

"Let me look at you, Ern!"

His jaw was set, almost formidable: he did not speak.

"Kiss me, Ern," she said.

For a moment his eyes hovered on her face.

"D\'you mean anything?" he asked.

"Not that," she answered and dropped her hand.

"Then to hell with you!" he cried with a kind of desperate savagery and thrust her brutally away. "Sporting with a man!"

He put on his cap and went out.

In a few minutes he was back. Paying no heed to her, he sat down at the kitchen-table and wrote a note, which he put on the mantel-piece.

"You can give this to Alf next time he comes round for the rent," he said.

"What is it?" asked Ruth.

"Notice," Ern answered. "We\'re going to shift to the Colonel\'s garage."

Ruth gave battle instantly.

"Who are?" she cried, facing him.

He met her like a hedge of bayonets.

"I am," he answered. "Me and my children."


The volley fired on Bachelor\'s Walk, as it echoed down the long valleys of the world, seemed to serve the purpose of Joshua\'s trumpet. Thereafter all the walls of civilisation began to crash down one after another with the roar of ruined firmaments.

Forty-eight hours later Austria declared war.

On Thursday Mr. Asquith, speaking in a crowded and quiet house, proposed the postponement of the Home Rule Bill.

Even the hotheads were sober now.

Stanley Bessemere discarded his uniform of an Ulster Volunteer in haste, and turned up at the club in chastened mood. He was blatant still, a little furtive, notably less truculent. The martial refrain Smith and I had given place to the dulcet coo We must all pull together.

"Is he ashamed?" Mrs. Lewknor asked her husband, hushed herself, and perhaps a little guilty.

"My dear," the Colonel replied. "Shame is not a word known to your politician. He\'s thoroughly frightened. All the politicians are. There\'re bluffing for all they\'re worth."

On the Saturday morning the Colonel went to the club. The junior member for Beachbourne, who was there, and for once uncertain of himself, showed himself childishly anxious to forget and forgive.

"Now look here, Colonel!" he said, charming and bright. "If there\'s an almighty bust-up now, shall you really blame it all on Ulster? Honest Injun!"

The Colonel met him with cold flippancy.

"Every little helps," he said. "A whisper\'ll start an avalanche, as any mountaineer could tell you."

He took up the Nation of August 1st and began to read the editor\'s impassioned appeal to the country to stand out. The Colonel read the article twice over. There could be no question of the white-hot sincerity of the writer, and none that he voiced the sentiments of an immense and honest section of the country.

He put the paper down and walked home.

"If we don\'t go in," he said calmly to his wife at luncheon, "all I can say is, that I shall turn my back on England for ever and go and hide my head for the rest of my days on the borders of Thibet."

In those last days of peace good men and true agonised in their various ways. Few suffered more than the Colonel; none but his wife knew the agony of his doubt.

Then Mr. Trupp telephoned to say that Germany had sent an ultimatum to Russia, and that France was mobilising. Mr. Cambon had interviewed the King. The Government was still wavering.

The Colonel\'s course was evident. The little organisation for which he was responsible must express itself, if only in the shrill sharp voice of a mosquito. A meeting of the League must be convened. Tingling with hope, doubt, fear, shame, he set off in the evening to interview Alfred Caspar. Swiftly he crossed the golf-links and turned into Saffrons Croft. There he paused.

It was one of those unforgettable evenings magnificently calm, which marked with triumphant irony the end of the world. The green park with its cluster of elms presented its usual appearance on a Saturday afternoon. The honest thump of the ball upon the bat, so dear to English hearts, resounded on every side: the following cry—Run it out! the groups of youths sprawling about the scorers, the lounging spectators. Not a rumour of the coming storm had touched those serene hearts. Close to him a bevy of women and children were playing a kind of rounders. The batter was a big young woman whom he recognised at once as Ruth.

One of the the fielders was little Alice scudding about the surface of green on thin black legs like a water-beetle on a pond. Then Ernie saw him and came sauntering towards him, a child clinging solemnly to one finger of each hand. There was an air of strain about the old Hammer-man, as of one waiting on the alert for a call, that distinguished him, so the Colonel thought, from the gay throng.

"What about it, sir?" he asked gravely.

"It\'s coming, Caspar," the Colonel answered. "That\'s my belief."

"And I shan\'t be sorry if it does," said Ernie with a quiet vindictiveness.

"Shall you go?" asked the Colonel. He knew the other\'s time as a reservist was up.

"Sha\'n\'t I?" Ernie answered with something like a snort.

The Colonel was not deceived. It was not the patriot, not the old soldier, who had uttered that cry of distress: it was the human being, bruised and suffering, and anxious to vent his pain in violence on something or somebody, no matter much who.

"Yes, sir, I shall go, if it\'s only as cook in the Army Service Corps."

The Colonel shook his head.

"If it comes," he said, "every fighting man\'ll be wanted in his right place. Would you like to rejoin the old battalion at Aldershot, if I can work it for you? Then you\'d go out with the Expeditionary Force."

Ernie\'s eyes gleamed.

"Ah, just wouldn\'t I?" he said.

Just then there was a shout from the players. Ruth was out and retired. She came towards them, glowing, laughing, her fingers touching her hair to order. She was thirty now, but at that moment she did not look twenty-five. Then she saw the Colonel and deliberately turned away. Susie and Jenny pursued their mother.

The Colonel walked off through the groups of white-clad players towards Alf\'s garage in the Gof............