The Town Hall was crowded.

The Mayor, who was in the chair, had spoken on behalf of the Prince of Wales\'s Fund and announced that subscriptions would be received by the Town Clerk.

Thereafter an indescribable orgie of patriotism had taken place. Red-necked men outbid fat women. The bids mounted; the bidders grew fiercer; the cheers waxed. And all the while a little group of Trade unionists at the back of the hall kept up a dismal chaunt—

We don\'t want charity,
We won\'t have charity.


Then a little dapper figure in the blue of a chauffeur rose in the body of the hall.

"I\'m only a workin chauffeur," he said, wagging his big head, "but I got a conscience, and I got a country. And I\'m not ashamed of em eether. I can\'t do much bein only a worker as you might say. But I can do me bit. Put me down for fifty guineas, please, Mr. Town-clerk."

He sat down modestly amidst loud applause.

"Who\'s that?" whispered the Colonel on the platform.

"Trupp\'s chauffeur," the Archdeacon, who had a black patch over his eye, answered with a swagger—"my sidesman, Alfred Caspar. Not so bad for a working-man?" He cackled hilariously.

Then a voice from Lancashire, resonant and jarring, came burring across the hall.

"Mr. Chairman, are you aware that Alfred Caspar is turning his sister-in-law out of his house with four children."

Alf leapt to his feet.

"It\'s a lie!" he cried.

A big young woman sitting just in front of Joe rose on subdued wings. She was bare-headed, be-shawled, a dark Madonna of English village-life.

"Yes, you are, Alf," she said, and sat down quietly as she had risen.

There was a dramatic silence. Then the Archdeacon started to his feet and pointed with accusing claw like a witch-doctor smelling out a victim.

"I know that woman!" he cawed raucously.

A lady sitting in the front row just under the platform rose.

"So do I," she said.

It was Mrs. Trupp, and her voice, still and pure, fell on the heated air like a drop of delicious rain.

She sat down again.

The Archdeacon too had resumed his seat, very high and mighty; and Bobby Chislehurst was whispering in his ear from behind.

The Colonel had risen now, calm and courteous as always, in the suppressed excitement.

"Am I not right in thinking that Mrs. Caspar is the wife of an old Hammer-man who joined up at once on the declaration of war and is at this moment somewhere in France fighting our battles for us?"

The question was greeted with a storm of applause from the back of the hall.

"Good old Colonel!" some one called.

"Mr. Chairman, d\'you mean to accept that man\'s cheque?" shouted Joe. "Yes or no?"

In the uproar that followed, Alf rose again, white and leering.

"I\'d not have spoken if I\'d known I was to be set upon like this afore em all for offering a bit of help to me country. As to my character and that, I believe I\'m pretty well beknown for a patriot in Beachbourne."

"As to patriotism, old cock," called Joe, "didn\'t you sack your cleaners without notice on the declaration of war?"

"No, I didn\'t then!" shouted Alf with the exaggerated ferocity of the man who knows his only chance is to pose as righteously indignant.

The retort was greeted with a howl of Tip! There was a movement at the back of the hall; and suddenly an old man was lifted on the shoulders of the Trade unionists there. Yellow, fang-less, creased, he looked, poised on high above the crowd against the white background of wall, something between a mummy and a monkey. As always he wore no tie; but he had donned a collar for the occasion, and this had sprung open and made two dingy ass-like ears on either side of his head.

"Did he sack you, Tip?" called Joe.

"Yes, he did," came the quivering old voice. "Turned us off at a day. Told us to go to the Bastille; and said he\'d put the police on us."

The tremulous old voice made people turn their heads. They saw the strange figure lifted above them. Some tittered. The ripple of titters enraged the men at the back of the hall.

"See what you\'ve made of him!" thundered Joe. "And then jeer! ... Shame!"

"Shame!" screamed a bitter man. "Do the Fats know shame?"

"Some of em do," said a quiet voice.

It was true too. Mrs. Trupp was looking pale and miserable in the front-row, so was the Colonel on the platform, Bobby Chislehurst and others. The titterers, indeed, howled into silence by the storm of indignation their action had aroused, wore themselves the accusing air of those who hope thereby to fix the blame for their mistake on others.

In the silence a baggy old gentleman rose in the body of the hall, slewed round with difficulty, and mooned above his spectacles at the strange idol seated on men\'s shoulders behind him.

"And He was lifted up," he said in a musing voice more to himself than to anybody else.

The phrase, audible to many, seemed to spread a silence about it as a stone dropped in a calm pond creates an ever-broadening ripple.

In the silence old Tip slid gently to the ground and was lost once more amid the crowd of those who had raised him for a brief moment into fleeting eminence.

The meeting broke up.

Outside the hall stood Mr. Trupp\'s car, Alf at the wheel: for the old surgeon\'s regular chauffeur had been called up.

Mrs. Trupp, coming down the steps, went up to Ruth who was standing on the pavement.

"So glad you spoke up, Ruth," she said, and pressed her hand.

"Come on!" said Mr. Trupp. "We\'ll give you a lift home, Ruth."

Alf was looking green. The two women got in, and the old surgeon followed them. He was grinning, Mrs. Trupp quietly malicious, and Ruth amused. The people on the pavement and streaming out of the hall saw and were caught by the humour of the situation, as their eyes and comments showed.

Then Colonel Lewknor made his way to the car.

"Just a word, Mrs. Caspar!" he said. "Things are squaring up. Mrs. Lewknor\'s taking the women and children in hand. Could you come and see her one morning at Under-cliff?"


The hostel that Mrs. Lewknor had built upon the cliff boomed from the start. It was full to over-flowing, winter and summer; and Eton was in sight for Toby when war was declared.

Then things changed apace.

Beachbourne, for at least a thousand years before William the Norman landed at Pevensey on his great adventure, had been looked on as the likeliest spot for enemy invasion from the Continent. Frenzied parents therefore wired for their children to be sent inland at once; others wrote charming letters cancelling rooms taken weeks before. In ten days the house was empty; and on the eleventh the mortgagee intimated his intention to fore-close.

It was a staggering blow.

The Colonel, with that uncannie cat-like intuition of his she knew so well, prowled in, looked at her with kind eyes, as she sat in her little room the fatal letter in her hand, and went out again.

Throughout it had been her scheme, not his, her responsibility, her success; and now it was her failure.

Then Mr. Trupp was shown in, looking most unmilitary in his uniform of a Colonel of the Royal Army Medical Corps.

"It\'s all right," he said gruffly. "I know. Morgan and Evans rang me up and told me. Unprofessional perhaps, but these are funny times. I let you in. You built the hostel at my request. I shall take over the mortgage."

"I couldn\'t let you," answered the little lady.

"You won\'t be asked," replied the other. "I ought to have done it from the start; but it wasn\'t very convenient then. It\'s all right now." The old man didn\'t say that the reason it was all right was because he was quietly convinced in his own mind that his boy Joe would need no provision now.

Just then the Colonel entered, looking self-conscious. He seemed to know all about it, as indeed he had every right to do, seeing that Mr. Trupp had informed him at length on the telephone half an hour before.

"You know who the mortgagee is?" he asked.

"Who?" said both at once.

The Colonel on tiptoe led them out into the hall, and showed them through a narrow window Alf sitting at his wheel, looking very funny.

"Our friend of the scene in the Town Hall yesterday," he whispered. "When I went to the bank yesterday to insure the house against bombardment, the clerk looked surprised and said—You know it\'s already insured. I said—Who by? He turned up a ledger and showed me the name."

Mr. Trupp got into his car, wrapping himself round with much circumstance.

"To Morgan and Evans," he said to Alf.

In the solicitors\' office he produced his cheque-book.

"I\'ve been seeing Mrs. Lewknor," he said. "I\'ll pay off your client now and take over the ............