And so it proved when the Doctor called. He pronounced the crisis passed and had every hope that his patient was now on the road to recovery. Every care was still needed, however, as one could never tell what might happen in the case of such a trying combination as pneumonia and seventy-eight years of age. Dr Rhenius himself was looking somewhat fagged and overworked. He said there was a great deal of sickness about, and set it down to some extent to the general depression of spirits caused by the war. Every house he went into had some connection with it, and the sense of anxiety was widespread,--not, he admitted, as to the ultimate issue, on which all minds were made up, but as to the fate of relatives at the front. For the descriptions which came home of the fierceness of the fighting and the effects of the huge German shells, which dug holes in the ground big enough to bury an omnibus in, seemed to leave small hope of escape to any who might be exposed to them. The stories of the atrocious barbarities practised by the German hordes in Belgium and Northern France depressed them all greatly,--Malines, Termonde, Rheims--there seemed no bounds to the inhumanity of these twentieth-century Huns. They had shed off the thin veneer of their civilisation and reverted to savagery, and the whole world stood aghast. That a nation professedly Christian, and calling on God to assist its nefarious enterprises, could not only descend to such depths but could actually exult in them, was a shock to the moral sense of humanity at large. What chance could there be for any who fell into their vengeful hands? What chance even for those who went out to meet them in fair fight? For trickery and treachery and every mean device were the chosen weapons of their dishonourable warfare. Nothing was sacred if it stood in the way of their winning. They played the game like dirty little gutter-snipes whose intention was to win at all costs, and the fouler the means the more they exulted in the success of them. There were heavy hearts at home in those days, and ‘Missing’ came to be regarded as almost more hopeless than ‘Dead’;--certainly more pregnant of sorrows, for the dead were happily done with it all and could suffer no more. Con was ever in their thoughts. When his mother read the grim accounts of the dastardly ill-treatment meted specially to British prisoners, she was tempted at times to wish his name had been in the fatal list which left no room for further hopes or fears. And Ray,--any day might bring similar word concerning him. Now and again a brief post-card reached them saying he was well and busy. But even as they read the precious words and rejoiced in them, each one knew full well that since they were written the end might have come. When bullets are flying and shells are bursting it takes so little to end a life. And those venomous Germans made a point of picking off every officer they could crawl within range of.