Chicksands sprang up to meet him. 'You've heard? I've just got this. I made his Colonel promise to wire me if--' He pointed to an open telegram on his table: "Desmond badly hit in raid last night. Tell his people. Authorities will probably give permission to come. Well looked after." The two men stared at each other. 'I have wired to my father,' said Mannering, 'and am now going to meet him at King's Cross. Can you go and tell Pamela to get ready--or Margaret? But he'll want Pamela!' Neither was able to speak for a moment, till Mannering said, 'I'll bring my father to Margaret's, and then I'll go and see after the permits.' He lingered a moment. 'I--I think it means the worst.' Chicksands' gesture was one of despair. Then they hurried away from the War Office together. CHAPTER XV It was afternoon at Mannering. Elizabeth was walking home from the village through the park. Still the same dry east-wind weather--very cold in the wind, very warm in the sun. If the German offensive began while these fine days held, they would have the luck of weather as we had never had it. Think of the drenching rains and winds of the Passchendaele attack! In the popular mind the notion of 'a German God' was taking actual concrete shape. A huge and monstrous form, sitting on a German hill, plotting with the Kaiser, and ordering the weather precisely as the Kaiser wished--it was thus that English superstition, aided by Imperial speeches and telegrams, began to be haunted. Yet the world was still beautiful--the silvery stems of the trees, the flitting of the birds, the violet carpets underfoot. On the fighting line itself there was probably a new crop of poets, hymning the Spring with Death for listener, as Julian Grenfell and Rupert Brooke had hymned it, in that first year of the war that seems now an eternity behind us. Moving along a path converging on her own, Elizabeth perceived the Squire. For the first time that morning he had put off their joint session, and she had not seen him all day. Her mind was now always uneasily aware of him--aware, too, of some change in him, for which in some painful way she felt herself responsible. He had grown strangely tame and placable, and it was generally noticed that he looked older. Yet he was more absorbed than ever in the details of Greek research and the labour of his catalogue. Only, of an evening, he read the _Times_ for a couple of hours, generally in complete silence, while Elizabeth and Mrs. Gaddesden talked and knitted.