“Ah--if it only were!” said Mrs Dare, with the tears running unheeded down her cheeks. “We must try to bear it as bravely as Honor does. It will be a great blow to your father too. But we have forecasted it. It seemed impossible that all of them should come back to us....” They heard the front door close quietly as Honor let herself out. “... My heart is very sore for Gregor’s mother,” she said softly. “He was all she had. I am still rich. She loses all. But if anyone can comfort her it is Honor.” “And to think--that a million, perhaps many million, women are feeling as we are, and suffering as we are--and all because of a little handful of evil ambitious men! Mother,--it is terrible that any men should have such evil power. I cannot help wishing they may suffer in their turn. But they can never suffer enough.” “They will suffer,” said Mrs Dare quietly. “Since God is a just God. We may leave them to Him, dear,--and trust the outcome to Him too.... It is sad to think of our dear lad cut off so soon. But--I have thought much in the night, when I could not sleep for thinking of them all,--he is better so, Lois, than growing up like some we know. Oh, far better so.” “Yes, indeed, dear!”--It was good, she felt, for her mother to talk. She would have all the rest of her life for thinking. “Your father was telling me, a night or two ago, how he came down in the train with young Nemmowe,--you know,--of ‘The Hollies.’ He had been drinking, but he was not drunk--only assertive. Someone in the carriage asked him when he was going to the front. And he chuckled and said, ‘Not me! Not my line at all. I’m a man of peace. Besides we’ve got too much on. Can’t spare me at this end.’ They’re big army contractors, you know, and are making a huge fortune out of the war, it is said. And the man who had asked him, said, ‘If I was as young as you, and as strong as you, I’d sooner die out there ten times over than stop rotting here. If England came to grief you’d wring a profit out of it some way, I presume.’ And the Nemmowe boy laughed and said, ‘Shouldn’t wonder if you’d like some of the pickings yourself.’ And since then no one will pass a word with him. Better to be lying dead in French soil than like that, dear.” “Far, far better, Mother dear. It is well with our boys. But--oh, it is sad to have them go! And any day Ray may be with them,” and she fell on her knees and laid her head in her mother’s lap as she had done when a child. “It is in God’s hands,” said her mother, gently stroking her hair. “But, thanks be to Him, our boys are proving themselves men.” XXXIII Honor walked quickly, with bent head to keep the sleet out of her eyes. She despised umbrellas and enjoyed braving the weather, when circumstances permitted her, as now, to wear a knitted toque and a rainproof. The bite of the sleet was in accord with her feelings. She would have liked to tramp against it for hours.