Their local weekly paper arranged for a telephonic news-service with a London paper, and posted in its windows irregular bulletins, the more startling the better. Whoever went into the village was expected to bring back the latest rumours. Mrs Dare, when she went, was content to carry the items of any importance in her mind. The Colonel, and Noel, and Honor, and Victoria Luard invariably bought latest editions as well, sometimes of half-a-dozen different papers, in the hope that one or other would contain something illuminating which had escaped the rest. And in the anxious search for that illuminating item they read the same news over and over again in all the papers, till, as Noel said, they “got fairly fed up with chewing the same bit till there was no taste in it.” Yet the exercise seemed only to leave them the hungrier for more startling later editions. They all, in fact, had a pretty severe attack of news-fever, and it grew worse with every day that passed and with all the thin and unsatisfying pabulum it fed upon. Noel and the girls and young Gregor MacLean spent much time on the links. There was no talk of going away for holidays this year, not at all events while things were in their present unsettled condition. The Luards had planned to spend September in Switzerland, at Saas-Fée and Zermatt. Noel and Honor were to have gone with them, and Mr and Mrs Dare had intended making a round of visits in Scotland. Connal Dare and Alma Luard, if they could get off at the same time, had been going to friends on Dartmoor not far from Postbridge. As for Miss Mitten, she never would hear a word about going away. No place was as comfortable as home, she averred,--she had everything there that she wanted, so why should she make a change which could only be for the worse? But all plans had had to be given up, and the younger folk consoled themselves with much golf and tennis, and flung themselves into these things with the gusto of players whose time might be short. But, among them all, bad as things looked, there was still--except in the mind of the Colonel, and perhaps also of Mr Dare,--a strong undercurrent of feeling that so incredible a catastrophe as a general European war, in this year of grace 1914, was impossible. Things had looked threatening before, time and again, and the clouds had rolled by without breaking. The men at the head of affairs, Mr Asquith and Sir Edward Grey, were eminently safe and experienced, and pre-eminently set on peace. It was all mighty interesting, thrilling indeed at times, though the thrills of the evening were not seldom found to have been wasted when they eagerly scanned the more sedate morning papers. But it would--they could not but believe--all end in smoke, as it had so often done before.