Laura, promising not to excite herself by talking to Ellen, when Ellen, obviously also under orders, dusted the room, did not even shrug a shoulder. Aunt Adela had always loved making a mystery. She was not curious. She had her own mystery to occupy her, the mystery of the dead weight upon her mind that was connected with the names that were for ever on Aunt Adela’s tongue—Justin—Mrs. Cloud—familiar names that hurt her to hear spoken. It was not that she had really forgotten things, of course ... but for the moment, only for the moment, the precise significance of certain far-away actions of her own had evaded her, as well as the exact relation to herself of this Justin.... Justin—and Mrs. Cloud—who was—who, of course, was Justin’s mother.... Now Justin—now she and Justin.... But it hurt her head to remember all that she knew about Justin. But one morning Aunt Adela, called out of the room to entertain callers—morning calls had never quite gone out of fashion in Brackenhurst—left the paper she was reading flung down upon the bed, and Laura’s eye was caught by such enormous headlines as she had never seen before, headlines that blared through the room like trumpets. England—she turned sideways that the paper might catch the light—England was at war. England had been at war three days. War? In the egotism of her weakness it seemed a trifling thing. War ... war.... There had been the Boer War too.... She dropped the paper indifferently. But a thought, not of the unrealized present, but of that dreamlike far past, remained with her, stirring her mind to exertion. The Boer War.... She could just remember the red-white-and-blue ribbons in shops and the picture buttons of Redvers Buller, and Sir George White, and Kitchener, that she used to buy with her pennies. Father—that shadow of a shadow—had been killed in the Boer War.... He had left his business to volunteer ... that was why they were poor.... She remembered—and the memory stabbed like a sudden light in a dark room—the beady rasp of carpet against her bare knees as she twisted round from her dolls’ house at the sound of voices, at her Aunt Adela’s voice— “Pure selfishness in a married man, I call it—though he is my brother. What’s the army for?” And then—not her mother’s answer, but her mother’s soft, angry, beautiful face.... It was like Aunt Adela not to realize that decent men were bound to volunteer when there was a war on, like the Boer War.... _The Great War_ by Conan Doyle.... She had the book somewhere ... it had lasted three years—that great war.... Of course, this business—— She picked up the paper again and began to read.