The old woman shrieked. The colonel looked. There was blood upon the dog's coat. The old woman drew herself up, held the colonel's eyes. "_Murderer!_" she cried with the intensity of a curse, and fainted. The colonel strode on. * * * * * On a bitter day in December, three months later, the colonel returned from his morning tour of the trenches for which he was responsible. They were trenches in another landscape, far from those whose memory lay like a sear across his soul. At the entrance to the sandbagged, wrecked farmhouse which served him as a home the soldier-_courrier_ was in the act of extracting letters from his wallet. The colonel took the bundle destined for him. At the sight of the topmost envelope he stopped as though he had seen a ghost. With trembling fingers he tore it open, read: "My hero! _I understood! I understood!_ Oh, didn't you know I understood? How grand you are--more than a man! All these weary months of imprisonment, trial, release and travel, I have been hungering to tell you this. Home once more, France is more than ever France to me since you ennobled me in sacrifice. Beloved!----" The colonel hurried into his quarters to read the letter in solitude. None might see his face. THEY COME BACK Whittingham Street, N., had benefited by the war. The long vista of its windows flush with the pavement was decent with curtains of a cleanness unwonted before the cataclysm. There were strange dots of reflected sunlight from brass door-handles and knockers that were polished. These things were symbols of the newly realised importance of Whittingham Street's inhabitants in the scheme of society, an importance which, swiftly translated into self-esteem, expressed itself with a uniformity natural to life in a mean street. That house was poor indeed which did not possess its gramophone. The womenfolk were curiously predominant to those who remembered the old-time loungers at the corner "pubs," and that womenfolk, disdainful of the feathers of the long ago, was arrayed in startlingly smart, well-emphasized, cheap copies of the latest fashions, oddly incongruous with the tall, smoke-vomiting chimneys of Messrs. Hathaway's great factory which closed the vista of the street. The sparseness of the men, immediately remarked, received a solemn significance from the flag-hung shrine on the wall of the Council School. The children who played in front of it--paper helmet, tin-can drum and wooden sword--were vividly cognizant that this was a time of War.