He came at last, in a violent hurry, shouting an order to Keith and springing clean over the prostrate Bobs. Bel followed more leisurely, flushed a little, but controlled. Then the hovering servants came forward and Helen slipped quietly into her husband’s study. There, at last, Mark came to her—followed by an apparently tailless Bobs. Somehow she contrived to smile. Then his arms were round her, crushing her to him. ‘God bless you,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t fret. It’s going to be all right. And—if it isn’t ... it’ll _still_ be all right.’ Then he kissed her again and let her go. From the threshold he waved to her, smiling resolutely, though tears stood in his eyes. She waved back to him. The door shut between them. He was gone. As she stood motionless, fighting back her grief, she was startled by that sharp, familiar pang in the region of her heart, and a momentary darkness as if a raven’s wing had brushed across her eyes. She shivered and kneeled hastily down to comfort the desolate Bobs, while her tears fell, unchecked now, upon his rough brown head. CHAPTER XV. ‘Here is the hard paradox: war ... this devilish, bestial, senseless thing, produces in masses—as peace distinctly does not produce them—brothers and sisters to Christ.’—G. A. B. DEWAR. Wynchcombe Friars without Mark was no place to tarry in, but there seemed no end to the delays; and Keith turned even these to good account by teaching Sheila to drive the Forsyth-Macnair car. Two drivers with one orderly would get through twice the work. It was near the middle of October when, at last, they found themselves speeding towards Folkestone. Keith, who had laid aside philosophy ‘for the duration of the war,’ delighted in his own small ark of salvation as a captain delights in his ship. From ‘stem to stern’ she was perfect as skill and money could make her; fitted up with four stretchers and bedding; crammed to the limit of her capacity with first-aid appliances and a minimum of luggage. Here and there autumn had laid a fiery finger on the woods. Birches and elms were tipped with gold. Otherwise the October sun, riding in a cloudless heaven, suggested high summer. Mark had been gone nearly a fortnight. Two brief cheerful letters assured his mother he was alive and well. Till she could see him again, those simple facts were all that vitally concerned herself; though pessimists prophesied invasion by Zeppelin and transport; and over there across the Channel, Belgium continued her heroic stand against the all-devouring, all-defiling German Army.