“Cheer up, John,” he would exhort. “There’s a lot of life and work in you yet----” “I feel sometimes as if I’d like to go to sleep and never wake up again.” “I know. I’ve been there, but I’m glad now that I thought better of it and waked up as usual. Things’ll pull round all right. Darkest hour before the dawn, you know.” “That’s the trouble. It’s all dark and I see no dawn.” “It’s there all the same, man. Thousands of other men feeling just same, but you’ll all come up smiling again in the end.” But he was harder to beguile of his morbidity than his wife. And, indeed, with a carefully-built business crumbled to nothing at a stroke, and five-and-fifty years behind him, it was not easy to regard the future with much confidence. It was not to be wondered at that he was terribly depressed, and at times a little irritable. Life was touching him on the raw, and he found it hard to bear. “Well, we’ll have tea,” said Auntie Mitt, breaking the half-hour’s silence and ringing the bell. “I hoped Sir Anthony would be in by this time. Perhaps he will bring us some good news from town.” “I’ve almost lost the expectation of hearing good news,” said Mrs Dare. “It would be a refreshing novelty to hear something cheerful again.” “We must never lose hope, my dear. While there’s life,--you know.” “That’s just it. I can’t help fearing he’s dead all this time----” “Who, my dear? Sir Anthony?” “I was thinking of Con. He’s in my thoughts all the time.” “Sir Anthony seems to feel certain he will be all right. If--if the worst had happened, he says, we should certainly have heard before this.” But Mrs Dare shook her head. “I don’t know. This war seems different from any other war. They do such dreadful things. They seem to respect nobody.” “They are certainly behaving very badly, if one can believe all the papers say. I sometimes think they exaggerate a little, you know,--make the worst of things and the best, just as they think it will please people. The papers are very different from what I remember them.” “They have changed a bit in the last seventy years or so, haven’t they, Auntie Mitt?” said the Colonel, who had come quietly in behind the maid with the tea-tray. “Oh--Sir Anthony! Seventy years! They have changed terribly in the last twenty years.” “Of course they have. When you and I first knew them---- Thanks!” as she thrust a cup of tea at him. “Any good news?” asked Mrs Dare. “In the papers--none. Confidentially, I hear that the tide is about to turn. They’re not to get to Paris anyway.” “I’m glad of that. It would have been hateful. They would have crowed so. And Paris has suffered from them before. What is going to happen?” “Oh, having drawn them on, now we’re going to roll them back.” “Wouldn’t it have been better to keep them out?” “Yes, if we could have done so, but we couldn’t. They were too strong for us. But we’ve been getting stronger every day and now we’re going to turn and rend them.”