“It was a frail plant,” I answered, “and is now no more. First the Catholics came, and said to me, will you please be giving up that work for its after converting our children to Protestantism you are. Then the Protestants came and said they to me, will you be after giving that up, please, for it’s converting our children to Rome you have in mind. The plant was frail and it died.” “Why didn’t you go home?” “We stopped to write a book.” He grunted and said, “What do you write?” I showed him the MS. on the table. “This is some of our stuff.” He came across and took up some of it, and looked through it as if he thought very little of it. He flopped it down on the table and stalked out on to the landing, and called down the stairs in a great voice-- “Hi, two more of you fellows come up here. There seems to be the only man in the house in this room, and not a damn one of you looking after him.” A good-looking, refined and most dapper little man answered this request. He came into the room and, finding a woman there, seemed considerably embarrassed. He began a perfunctory search of our belongings; but when the man in khaki went to the top of the house, he looked behind a picture or two and sank into a chair. The door had been shut. A depressing silence fell. The little man in the chair was the neatest Auxiliary I ever saw, and in spite of the rake of his Balmoral bonnet might have appeared in any drawing-room. By his voice he was quite well bred. “I’m fed up with this job,” he announced, breaking the strained silence, and giving my wife the benefit of most of his attention, “but I’ve had no say in it. I’m a major in the Regular Army in India and came home on leave, and then they bunged me over here, and made me join up in the Auxiliaries. I sent for my wife then, and we were among the people called on by the Shinners on the November Sunday. I was out, and they insulted and intimidated my wife, who was going to have a child. She has been semi-paralysed since, and I’m waiting to do in one or two Shinners before returning home.” “There’s a catch in that story somewhere,” I thought, and the result of my scepticism was that we all sank into another silence, hearing only the movement of many people trampling overhead. There seemed a great deal of talking below, and occasionally the high, quick voice of Mrs. Fitzgerald. I knew they would find it a case of Mother Hubbard with her, unless some brilliant searcher of seditious papers had discovered the secret of the infant Fergus. But let that secret rest!