The strange tense days went on in August weather serene and lovely as had not been seen for years. Young men vanished from the country-side and older men wistfully wondered what they could do to help. Peter came down from Saturday to Monday, telling them that every officer and every civilian serving in India was recalled, but he had not yet learned when he was to sail. They were sitting in the wrens' garden with the children. "Earley's going," Tony said importantly. "Earley!" Jan exclaimed. "Going where?" "To fight, of course," little Fay chimed in. "Oh, poor dear Earley!" Jan sighed. "Happy, fortunate Earley," said Peter. "I wish I stood in his shoes." Earley joined the Gloucesters because, he said, "he couldn't abear to think of them there Germans comin' anigh Mother and them childring and the ladies; and he'd better go and see as they didn't." Mr. Withells called the men on his place together and told them that every man who joined would have his wages paid to his wife, and his wife or his mother, as the case might be, could stop on in her cottage. And Mr. Withells became a special constable, with a badge and a truncheon. But he worried every soldier that he knew with inquiries as to whether there wasn't a chance for him in _some_ battalion: "I've taken great care of my health," he said. "I do exercises every day after my bath; I'm young-looking for my age, don't you think? And anyway, a bullet might find me instead of a more useful man." No one laughed then at Mr. Withells and his exercises. Five days after the declaration of war Jan got a letter from Hugo Tancred. He was in London and was already a private in a rather famous cavalry regiment. "They didn't ask many questions," he wrote, "so I hadn't to tell many lies. You see, I can ride well and understand horses. If I get knocked out, it won't be much loss, and I know you'll look after Fay's kiddies. If I come through, perhaps I can make a fresh start somewhere. I've always been fond of a gamble, and this is the biggest gamble I've ever struck." Jan showed the letter to Peter, who gave it back to her with something like a groan: "Even the wrong 'uns get their chance, and yet I have to go back and do a deadly dull job, just because it _is_ my job." Peter went up to town and two days after came down again to "The Green Hart" to say good-bye. He had got his marching orders and was to sail in the _Somali_ from Southampton. Some fifteen hundred civilians and officers serving in India were sailing by that boat and the _Dongola_. By every argument he could bring forward he tried to get Jan to marry him before he sailed. Yet just because she wanted to do it so much, she held back. She, too, she kept telling herself, had her job, and she knew that if she was Peter's wife, nothing, not even her dear Fay's children, could be of equal importance with Peter. The children and Meg and the household had by much thinking grown into a sort of Frankenstein's monster of duty.