The tocsin was about to sound that was to call millions of rosy lads from their mothers, splendid youths from their girls, sober middle-aged men away from their accustomed place in church and chapel, from the office stool, from the warm companionable bed and the lovely music of children's voices, to strange destinies in unknown seas, on remote deserts, beside alien rivers; calling them in a voice that was not to be denied to lay their bones far from the village church-yard and the graves of innumerable ancestors, in rotting swamps, on sun-bleached mountains, with none to attend their obsequies save the nosing jackal and raw-necked vulture. Early in the morning the Colonel walked across to Old Town to see Bobby Chislehurst, and put the curb on him if possible; for the _Daily Citizen_ had come out with a full-page appeal to lovers of peace to attend an anti-war demonstration in Trafalgar-square. On his way the Colonel gleaned straws of news; and the gleaning was not hard. The most reserved were expansive; the most exclusive sociable. For the moment all barriers of class were down. By the time he had reached the _Star_ he was _au courant_ with all the happenings, local and general. The Archdeacon who, when he put his snuff-box aside, and took the gloves off, could be really moving, had from his hill thundered a magnificent call to arms--"purely pagan, of course." Mr. Trupp, whom he met, told the Colonel, "but fine for all that." Mr. Geddes in the plain had answered back in an appeal which had moved many to tears on behalf of Him, Whose sad face on the Cross looks down on This after the passion of a thousand years. The Fleet had gone to war-stations; the Territorials had been mobilised. Haldane had returned to the War Office. As the Colonel dropped down the steep pitch to Church-street, under the chesnuts of the Manor-house garden, he met a couple of toddlers climbing the hill shepherded by an efficient little maiden of seven or eight, who smiled at him with familiar eyes. "Hullo, little Alice," he said. "Where you off to so busily with your little flock?" "Saffrons Croft for the day--me and my little ones," she answered, not without a touch of self-importance. "I got the dinner here. Dad and Mother's taking baby a drive on the bus to see Granny at Auston." She turned and waved to her mother, who was standing at the top of Borough Lane with Ernie, amongst a little group opposite the _Star_, where was one of the char-a-bancs of the Touring Syndicate picking up passengers from the Moot. The Colonel walked down the hill towards them. Ruth, seeing him approach, climbed to her place on the char-a-banc. Ernie handed little Ned to her, and then turned to meet the Colonel.