"No one was in the room when it happened. No one heard it fall. Didn't break the frame or the glass or anything. Just the snapping of the cord." "War cord, I expect." Josiah's voice was grim. "Need a cord of a better quality to hang a certain party. Better have it put up again. Young Nixey tells me that picture may be worth a sight o' money." Melia promised that it should be put up again. _He_ always set such great store by it. Of a sudden, Sally, who had been wholly absorbed in the contemplation of James, said, "Tell me, Father, when did you last see young Nixey?" "Thursday--Friday. Happened to look in Friday morning as I was passing." "How was he?" "Wonderfully cheerful considerin'. Tries to gammon his old mother, but I guess the old lady knows...." "... he'll never...." "No, poor fellow. Wonderful pluck. Tells me he's plannin' a cathedral ... a cathedral, mark you ... and stone blind." Sally sighed a little and turned again to look at Jim. Aunt Gerty laid a white-gloved hand gently on the Mayor's sleeve. "Ten minutes to eleven, Josiah. Won't do to be late--_you_ of all people. Will it Maria?" LIII Maria and Aunt Gerty, carrying respectability to the verge of fashion, led the way by the path across the green to the village church. Josiah, walking with his daughters, followed ten paces behind. Wearing the tall hat of public life he looked imposing, but four and a quarter years of war had chastened him. The roll and the swagger were not what they were; four and a quarter years of incessant but fruitful labor for the common weal had molded his mind, had modified an aggressive personality. The church, although in excess of the local requirements as a rule, was very full this morning in November. It was an hour of Thanksgiving. The goal had been reached. Victory, complete and final, had come almost like a thief in the night. And its coming had revealed, in a manner transcending even the awful dramas of old, the omnipotence of the moral law. Yet again the God of Righteousness had declared Himself in Sovereign power. Grim perils had been surmounted by the devotion of the sons and daughters of the race, but very much remained to do. Behind the humble gratitude to the Giver of Victory, behind the sense of exultation so rightly uppermost this Sabbath morning, was in every heart a desolating sense of the cost in human lives and a deep anxiety for the future. The Vicar of the parish, by name the Reverend Corfield Stanning, was a white-haired man who had given soul and kin freely to the Cause. He was a son of the soil, a type of the almost extinct squarson who survives here and there in England, half landowner, half patriarch, less a scholar than a sportsman and a man of the world. For that reason, perhaps, he had the practical wisdom that books do not give. He had the instinct for affairs which men of his type seldom lack.