After a moment she speaks to him, and he tells her what the block is--the base of a cross to the men of the district who fell in the war. It is to be set up outside the gate of the parish church at Peel. The ceremony of unveiling it is to be on Easter Monday--that is to say, the day after to-morrow. The time is to be nine in the morning, because that is the hour when the boys of Peel and Patrick who have survived the war are expected to return home by the steamer that is to leave Liverpool on Sunday night. The Lord Bishop of the Island is to unveil the memorial, and all the clergy and Town Commissioners and big people of the two parishes are to be present. All the men, too, and their mothers and wives and children. “It will be a grand sight, girl. I suppose you won’t be going, though?” Mona catches her breath and answers: “No.” After another moment she begins to look over the names. All four sides of the base are full of them, and the mason seems to be lettering the last. She tries to find her brother’s name and cannot do so. At length, not without an effort, she says: “But where is Robbie’s name?” The mason pauses in his work, and then answers: “Robbie Craine’s? Well, to tell you the truth, it is not on the list they made out for me.” “They--who are they?” “Well, the Bishop and the clergy and the Town Commissioners and so on.” “But my brother died in the war, and won the Victoria Cross, didn’t he?” “Maybe he did.” “You know he did. Then what has he done that his name is not in the list with the rest?” The mason, preparing to resume his work, replies: “Maybe it’s what somebody else has done that has kept him out of it.” The word falls on her like a blow on the brain, and she goes off hurriedly. As she turns the corner of the road she hears the thin ring of the mason’s chisel, and it sounds like the thud of doom. Is she, and everybody who has ever belonged to her, to be wiped out of living memory? What has she done to deserve it? But after a moment of fierce anger her former helplessness comes back on her and she begins to cry. “I can’t tell in the world why good people should be so unkind.” Later in the day a new strength, the strength of defiance, comes over her. Oskar may say it is the war, and even the peace, that has poisoned people’s souls, but if it was God who put it into her heart to love Oskar, and into Oskar’s heart to love her, it is for God to see them through. He will, too--certainly He will. If she has to become a servant girl herself and scrub her fingers to the bone, why shouldn’t she? God will open people’s eyes some day, and then the Bishop and the clergy and the Town Commissioners will have to be ashamed of themselves. “I’m a good woman--why shouldn’t they?”