"We don't know that." He shook his head with the gesture of a tired man. "Nobody knows it." "No, I suppose they don't." Miss Preston read in that somber manner the need for mental readjustment. "But the papers say that General Joffre has the situation in hand." Josiah renounced a plate of mutton broth only half consumed. "Mustn't believe a word you see in the papers, my gel. They don't know much, and half of what they do know they are not allowed to tell." Miss Preston discreetly supposed that it was so. "But things are going better, aren't they?" "We'll hope they are." Josiah's fierce attack upon the joint in front of him seemed to veto the subject. The silence that followed was broken by Maria, whose entrance into the conversation was quite unexpected and rather startling. "Did you know," she said, "that Melia's husband has joined the army?" Josiah suspended operations to poise an interrogatory carving knife. "Who tells you that?" he said frostily. "The boy from Murrell's, the greengrocer's,"--somehow the infrequent voice of Maria had an odd precision--"said to Alice this morning that he heard that Mr. Hollis had gone for a soldier." Josiah returned to the joint, content for the time being with the remark, "that it was a bad lookout for the Germans," a sally that won a timely laugh from his sister-in-law. On the other hand, Maria, who had never been known to laugh at anything in all her anxious days, began to wonder somberly whether Melia would be able to carry on the business. "From all that I hear," growled Josiah, "there ain't a sight o' business to be carried on." In the silence which followed Maria gave a sniff that was slightly lachrymose, and then the strategic Gerty after a veiled glance towards the head of the table, ventured on "Poor Amelia." Josiah was in the act of giving himself what he called "a man's helping" of beans. "She made her own bed," he said in a tone that gained in force by not being forcible, "and now she's got to lie in it." For the first time in many years, however, Maria seemed to be visited by a spark of spirit. "Well, I think it's credible of that Hollis, very creditable." Josiah raised a glass of beer to the light with a connoisseur's disparagement of its color, and then he said, "In my opinion he's running away from his creditors. I hear he owes money all round." "He's going to risk his life, though," ventured Aunt Gerty. "And that's something." "It is--if he risks it," Josiah reluctantly allowed. Maria became so tearful that she was unable to continue her dinner. XVIII