With what agonising anxiety she scanned each long, fateful casualty list as it came out, only those who have done that same can know. Sore, sore on wives and mothers, and on all whose men were at the front, were those days when the desperate German rush on Calais and the coast was stayed by the still greater and more desperate valour of our little army, fighting odds as David fought Goliath of Gath. The mighty deeds done in those days will never be told in full, for in full by one Eyewitness only were they seen, and He speaks not. But doings so Homeric are of necessity costly. Britain and the world at large were delivered from the Menace, but Sorrow swept through the land. Alma continued to receive word of Con, but at irregular intervals and always by the hand of Robert Grant, R.A.M.C., Con himself being still unable to put pen to paper. Mr. Grant, however, wrote with a clerkly hand, and Alma came to know it well and to like it. The words were Con’s own for the most part, but the writer occasionally appended as postscript a few remarks of his own, always hopeful and encouraging, but neither of them at any time gave any clue to the nature of these troublesome wounds which prevented the sufferer using his pen. And this worried Alma not a little. She enquired as to them more than once but received no explicit answers, and the matter began to get somewhat on her nerves. Fortunately they were almost run off their feet at the hospital, and with the certainty that Con was at all events alive she devoted herself heart and soul to her patients, and that left her small time for her own personal anxieties. Lois missed Uncle Tony dreadfully. Her assiduous care of him had occupied her mind and kept her thoughts off her own troubles. Her eyes were opened to the strange guise in which blessings are sometimes vouchsafed to us. But now that Uncle Tony was gone her fears for Ray loomed larger and larger. She envied Alma her over-hard work and her knowledge of the worst. For herself--in spite of herself--she lived in constant fear, and cast about for some engrossing work that should constrain her mind in other directions. She spent much time on her knees these days,--when not bodily, still in heart. And she came to recognise, as never before, the wonderful applicability of the Psalms to all the affairs of human life, especially to those who are in trouble and fearful of the future. She could hardly open her Bible at the Psalms without coming straight on some verse that might have been written for herself and the times. Even the damnatory passages satisfactorily fulfilled her desires, since they obviously applied to the Germans, against whom, as the causers of all the trouble and the imperillers of what she held dearest, her feelings grew ever more bitter.