“I am inclined to agree with you,” said her father, with another shake for old Alice. “But it’s gradually coming home to the nation. Rather than give in we shall fight to the last man and the last shilling, and unless they have altered since the days of Frederick the Great they will do the same.” “But it can’t go on indefinitely. It means extermination.” “The end of civilization at any rate,” said the vicar mournfully. “The clock has already been put back a century.” “Sooner or later something must surely happen.” “But what can happen? We don’t begin to look like downing them, and it’s unthinkable that they can down us.” “There’s God,” said Edith, in a voice of sudden, throbbing softness. “I’m convinced that He must put an end to it soon.” Before the vicar continued the conversation he gave Alice a little touch of the whip. “Have you ever thought, my dear girl, what an awful weight of sin there is upon the human race? Instead of expecting God to put an end to it soon, it will be little short of miraculous if He ever puts an end to it at all.” “But think of the awful suffering which falls for the most part on those who are the least to blame.” “There is Biblical precedent for all that has happened, nay for far more than has happened. It is a judgment on the world, and the innocent have to suffer with the guilty.” Edith was silent a little while. “It all seems so horribly unfair,” she said at last, in a deep, palpitating tone which the vicar had not heard her use before. “It is not the people who have made the war who are really suffering by it.” “They who question!” and the vicar shook up old Alice yet again. A long silence followed, through which old Alice jogged in her placid way. Hardly a ripple stirred the evening air. It was very difficult to realize what was happening within a hundred miles. “I can’t help thinking of that man,” Edith suddenly remarked. “What man?” said her father. For the moment his thoughts were far away. An unwritten sermon was looming up at the back of his brain. “John Smith. I can’t tell you what a curious impression he has left upon me. Somehow I have done nothing but think of him ever since the thing happened.” It was a wrench for the vicar to quit the sequence of ideas which was being formed so painfully in his mind. And for the time he had had quite enough of the subject of John Smith, nay, was in process of suffering a reaction from it. Besides it was such a vexatiously disagreeable matter that he had no wish to discuss it more than was absolutely necessary. “I should forget the man if I were you,” was his counsel to Edith. “Somehow I can’t. He’s made a most curious impression upon me. I begin to feel now that I had no right to take for granted that what he said was meant for blasphemy.”