“It is very easy for you to speak,” said Lady Greenfield, and I believe she thought so; “but Clare and I feel differently--he is not a relation of yours.” “I pray for the dear boy, night and morning, all the same. God bless him, at this moment, wherever he may be!” said Miss Polly. I was conscious of a quick, sudden movement as the words fell, soft and grave, from her dear old lips. It was Alice who had left the room. She could not bear it any longer. _She_ did not belong to him--she was not old enough to speak like Miss Polly--she durst not flutter forth her anxiety for her old playfellow as Clara did. Her heart was throbbing and burning in her young warm breast. She did not say a word or ask a question; but when the tender old woman bade God bless him, Alice could stand quiet no longer. I knew it, though she had not a word to say. CHAPTER XV. This time of anxiety was one which, in that great common interest and grief, drew many people together who had little sympathy with each other in ordinary times. Many a close, private, confidential talk, deluged with tears, or tremulous with hope, I had within these days with many a troubled woman, who up to that time had been only an acquaintance, or very slightly known to me, but who was now ready, at the touch of this magical sympathy, to take me into her heart. Derwent’s custom of riding to the railway for the earliest perusable news, and an occasional message by telegraph, which came to him when any important intelligence arrived, made our house besieged by anxious people, to whom the greatest joy of their lives was to find no mention in these breathless dispatches of the individual or the place in which they were interested. Nugents, whom I had never heard of, started up everywhere, asking from me information about Bertie and his family. The girls who had been brought up at Estcourt deluged me with letters asking after him. I am not sure that our entire household did not feel, amid all its anxiety, a little pride in the consciousness of thus having a share in the universal national sympathy which was bestowed so warmly and freely upon all who had friends in India. As for little Derwie, he devoted himself entirely now to the business of carrying news. He knew already by heart the list of all the families--I had almost said in all the county, certainly between Hilfont and Simonborough--who had soldier-sons; and Derwie and his pony flew along all the country roads for days together when news came, the child carrying in his faithful childish memory every detail of the dispatch to the cottage women, who had no other means of hearing it. The people about--that is to say, Miss Reredos and the important people of the village--called my boy the telegraph-boy, and I am not quite sure that I was not rather proud of the name. Whether his news-carrying always did good I will not say--perhaps it was little comfort to the mother of a nameless rank-and-file man to hear that another battle had