Mr and Mrs Dare were noticeably quiet. She, because, in spite of herself, her heart was depressed at all this close approximation of the Juggernaut of War. It was impossible to close her mind to the fears that beat blindly at it. Con gone already--possibly gone for good. Ray going,--he might well never come back. Noel and Gregor longing to go,--they would jump at any chance that offered. They too might never come back, and she had fathomed Gregor’s feeling for Honor, from the shy anxious glances he cast at her whenever opportunity offered. About Noel and Vic she was not so sure; their manner towards one another puzzled her. But already she forecasted all the boys lying dead and all the girls left broken-hearted. Mr Dare had his own reasons for withdrawing into his shell. Business, of course, for one thing. And for another,--Noel. XXI Noel, embryo warrior, was a very different personage from the Noel of six weeks ago looking forward without enthusiasm to the stool in St Mary Axe. The sudden enlargement of his horizon to the boundless possibilities of military life and active warfare had, unconsciously, and perhaps unavoidably, wrought changes in him. From being a boy, dependent on his father for both present and future, he had become suddenly a man, independent, and at times somewhat resentful of either control or advice. His whole heart and mind were given with his active body to his new duties. He was soldier first, and anything else afterwards. To Honor it was quite understandable. He was jovially patronising to her and she held her own by chaffing him royally when chance offered. To his father and mother it was understandable also, but none the less somewhat of a trial at times. Their boy was no longer wholly theirs. He had suddenly become a soldier and considered himself a man. They rejoiced in the better points of his manly development, but both felt keenly their deprivation in him; Mr Dare perhaps the most. They saw very little of him. He was away early and home late. He was making many new acquaintances. Home and its associations counted for less with him. There was a general loosening of the old ties. They felt it, indeed, a beginning of the end that might find its consummation out there in the battle-smoke. “We are losing him already,” said Mr Dare with a sigh, one night when a telegram had come from Noel saying that as he had to be on orderly duty early next morning he would sleep at the Soldiers’ Home opposite Head-Quarters. He had hinted at the possibility once or twice, but they had not taken it very seriously. “We must not lose him,” said Mrs Dare quietly. “He is keeping all right, John, I feel sure. He said he might have to stop now and then, you know. He’s got to take his turn with the rest.” “I know, I know,” said Mr Dare, a trifle irritably. “All the same I feel as if we were losing our hold on him.”