Instantly she closed her lips, as if fearful that more might leak from them. Fancy remained discreetly silent. She comforted herself with this reflection: faith in works sustained this unhappy old woman. She laboured abundantly for others at Pomfret Court, and tended her garden diligently so that she might have fruit and flowers and vegetables to bestow upon poorer neighbours. In church, her responses were clear and regular, her deportment irreproachable, but she never discussed the sermon, once a favourite mental exercise, and Fancy came to the conclusion that she no longer listened to it, too much obsessed by her own perplexities. About this time Nether-Applewhite was electrified out of its apathy by an extraordinary event, something so unexpected that Hamlin himself, who had foreshadowed such a remote possibility in his sermon on Patriotism, began to wonder if he had been inspired. George Mucklow won the Victoria Cross! This heavy, stolid young man, who shut both eyes when his shins were imperilled by a cricket-ball, who was "afeard wi' maids," who had been driven to the colours before the toe of a thick boot, performed one of those deeds that thrill an Empire. Fortunately for him, the tremendous opportunity of which Hamlin had spoken came at a moment when Authority was looking on, and able to record what took place. George confessed afterwards that at the time he didn't know what he did, or how he did it. Out of some subconscious zone surged the irresistible impulse blindly obeyed. A shell fell in the trenches at a moment when the officer on duty was making his rounds. Not an "Archie" or a "Black Maria" but something smaller than a football. Dozens of men were close to it. George darted past the officer and hurled himself upon it. _It didn't explode!_ Within a week, George's photograph was given pride of place in half-a-dozen newspapers. And then the supreme decoration was conferred. He returned home on leave; the King pinned to his tunic the bronze cross; Jane Mucklow and Uncle witnessed the ceremony; George came back to Nether-Applewhite with his parents, and was the hero of another function when Sir Geoffrey Pomfret presented him with a gold watch and chain, a tribute from the Squire of the parish, and a well-lined purse, the gift of the parishioners. The effect on Uncle may be imagined. For ever after he associated himself with George as owning an undivided half interest in the cross, and in describing the glorious deed he assumed the royal plural, and with it some of the attributes of a monarch.