Then there was a slither of chalk as the pair stampeded down the path out of sight, and crashed into the beach beneath. The Colonel let down the blind with a rattle. CHAPTER XXXII THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT Ernie clattered into the kitchen at a busy trot, and stumbled upstairs without a word to his wife at the sink. There was such an air of stir and secret purposefulness about him that Ruth followed him up to the bedroom. There she found him on his knees in a litter of things, packing a bundle frantically. A dish-cloth in her hand, she watched his efforts. "Where away then?" she asked. "Berlin this journey. Hand me them socks!" Her eyes leapt. "Is it war?" "That's it." She sat down ghastly, wrapping her hands in her apron as if they had been mutilated and she wished to hide the stumps. Men abuse the Army when they are in it and take their discharge at the earliest possible moment; but when the call comes they down tools with avidity, and leaving the mill, the mine, the shunting yard, and the shop, they troop back to the colours with the lyrical enthusiasm of those who have re-discovered youth on the threshhold of middle-age. Ern, you may be sure, was no exception to the rule. Packing and unpacking his bundle on his knees, he was busy, happy, important. But there was no such desperate hurry after all: for he did not join the crowds which thronged the recruiting stations in those first days: he waited for the Colonel to arrange matters so that he could join his old battalion at Aldershot direct. Ruth watched him with deep and jealously guarded eyes in which wistfulness and other disturbing emotions met and mingled. Once only she put to him the master question. "What about us, Ern?" He was standing at the time contemplating the patient and tormented bundle. "Who?" "Me and the children." "There's one Above," said Ernie. "He'll see to you." "He don't most in general not from what I've seen of it," answered Ruth. "What if He don't?" There was a moment's pause. Then Ern dropped a word as a child may drop a stone in a well. "Joe." Ruth caught her breath. In those days Ernie grew on her as a mountain looming out of the dawn-mist grows on the onlooker. Joe did not even come to see her; and she was glad. For all his virility and bull-like quality, now that the day of battle had come, Ern was proving spiritually the bigger man.