To-day Mr. Trubshaw preached a topical sermon about the Irish situation. His was the gospel of the _Morning Post_, slightly tempered by Christianity. It was our duty, he said, to pray for the Irish first of all, and if that had no effect upon recruiting, why, then, we must conscribe them as zealously as we had prayed before. Jacobsen leaned back in his pew with a sigh of contentment. A connoisseur, he recognized that this was the right stuff. "Well," said Mr. Petherton over the Sunday beef at lunch, "how did you like our dear Vicar?" "He was splendid," said Jacobsen, with grave enthusiasm. "One of the best sermons I've ever heard." "Indeed? I shall really have to go and hear him again. It must be nearly ten years since I listened to him." "He's inimitable." Marjorie looked at Jacobsen carefully. He seemed to be perfectly serious. She was more than ever puzzled by the man. The days went slipping by, hot blue days that passed like a flash almost without one's noticing them, cold grey days, seeming interminable and without number, and about which one spoke with a sense of justified grievance, for the season was supposed to be summer. There was fighting going on in France--terrific battles, to judge from the headlines in the _Times_; but, after all, one day's paper was very much like another's. Marjorie read them dutifully, but didn't honestly take in very much; at least she forgot about things very soon. She couldn't keep count with the battles of Ypres, and when somebody told her that she ought to go and see the photographs of the _Vindictive_, she smiled vaguely and said Yes, without remembering precisely what the _Vindictive_ was--a ship, she supposed. Guy was in France, to be sure, but he was an Intelligence Officer now, so that she was hardly anxious about him at all. Clergymen used to say that the war was bringing us all back to a sense of the fundamental realities of life. She supposed it was true: Guy's enforced absences were a pain to her, and the difficulties of housekeeping continually increased and multiplied.