Jimmy and Geordie, hammering away in one end of the room, took little part in the debate. Good workmen both of them, and friends, perhaps because of the difference of their temperaments, for Jimmy was the type of red-haired, blue-eyed, tall, lithe Scot, he of the _perfervidum ingenium_, and Geordie was a thick-set, black-haired, dour and silent man. Both of them read the war news, and Jimmy, when he read, commented loudly, bringing down his fist upon the paper, exclaiming, “Weel done, Gordons!” or “That was a richt gude charge upon the trenches by the Sutherlands.” Geordie would answer shortly, “Aye, no sae bad,” and go on hammering. One morning, after a reverse, Jimmy did not appear, and Geordie sat alone working away as usual, but if possible more dourly and more silently. Towards midday it began to be whispered in the shop that Jimmy had enlisted, and men turned to Geordie to ask if he knew anything about it, and the silent workman, brushing the sweat off his brow with his coat-sleeve, rejoined: “Aye, ou aye, I went wi’ him yestreen to the headquarters o’ the Camerons; he’s joined the kilties richt eneugh. Ye mind he was a sergeant in South Africa.” Then he bent over to his work and did not join in the general conversation that ensued. Days passed, and weeks, and his fellow-workmen, in the way men will, occasionally bantered Geordie, asking him if he was going to enlist, and whether he did not think shame to let his friend go off alone to fight. Geordie was silent under abuse and banter, as he had always been under the injustices of life, and by degrees withdrew into himself, and when he read his newspaper during the dinner-hour made no remark, but folded it and put it quietly into the pocket of his coat. Weeks passed, weeks of suspense, of flaring headlines in the Press, of noise of regiments passing down the streets, of newsboys yelling hypothetic victories, and of the tension of the nerves of men who know their country’s destiny is hanging in the scales. Rumours of losses, of defeats, of victories, of checks and of advances, of naval battles, with hints of dreadful slaughter filled the air. Women in black were seen about, pale and with eyelids swollen with weeping, and people scanned the reports of killed and wounded with dry throats and hearts constricted as if they had been wrapped in whipcord, only relaxing when after a second look they had assured themselves the name they feared to see was absent from the list.