The visit at last come true had the aspect of romance under the circumstances. It required a certain amount of courage for Dr. and Mrs. Sanford to cross the Atlantic in the midst of submarine activity quite in keeping with ancestral Pilgrim daring in crossing in the seventeenth century. From Jane came an occasional letter on the state of affairs in Longfield. "Things can't be right personally with you away," she wrote. "I am getting too fat and lazy for words. But things exteriorly, as Phil would say when he got hifalutin, are just the same. Garden doing fine except the cauliflowers, which look peaked; but they will pick up, Patrick says, as cauliflowers have a way of looking peaked and ragged before they get a start. No hyphenates and few potato bugs in Longfield this year. I put up thirty jars of currant jelly and it looks licking good. That is more than you can eat; but sure, unless you change your habits, it isn't more than you can give away. I expect you're putting your shoes outside your door every morning to be blacked, like the lords do. Well, when you come home you will find the blacking-brush in the same old place and that Jane has not changed. I am writing a letter to Phil himself. With best regards, "Your truly, JANE." There was one subject which knit the cousinship of the four ever closer--Phil. The local postmaster was convinced that there was no danger of one officer starving, if soldiers could live on cake, judging by the number of packages which went through the parcels post to Second Lieutenant Philip Sanford. Their thoughts were those of hundreds of thousands of other households in England. The pride of it for the vicar and his wife was that they, too, had a son at the front. They would not waive the claim that he was partly theirs and their guests did not ask it. Every day they wrote to Phil, and his cheerful letters in answer, always making sport of the mud and minimising the dangers--long letters when the battery was in billets--brought the four heads into communion of spirit whenever the envelopes arrived. Always there was the fear--the fear over hundreds of thousands of households, no less poignant in each because of the hundreds of thousands of others--the fear which they never mentioned and never forgot. The postman brought Helen's letter, the only one in the post that trip, to Dr. Sanford when he was alone on the lawn, thinking that a point had occurred to him which would give him the better of the argument with the vicar the next time they resumed a certain discussion. After he had opened the envelope and read the first sentence, he folded the sheet and walked away into the garden to be undisturbed. He must think how to break the news to his wife.