And then the winter came on, and the gardens were bleak in the Sheldrake Road. And Lily ran away and married a young tobacconist, who was earning twenty-five shillings a week. And old Tom was dismissed from the gas-works. His work was not proving satisfactory. And he sat about at home and moped. And in the meantime the price of foodstuffs was going up, and coals were a luxury. And so in the early morning Mrs. Ward would go off and work for Mrs. Abbot at the wash-tub, and she would earn eight or twelve shillings a week. It is difficult to know how they managed during those days, but one could see that Mrs. Ward was buoyed up by some poignant hope. She would not give way. Eventually old Tom did get some work to do at a stationer’s. The work was comparatively light, and the pay equally so, so Mrs. Ward still continued to work for Mrs. Abbot. My next vision of Mrs. Ward concerns a certain winter evening. I could not see inside the kitchen, but the old man could be heard complaining. His querulous voice was rambling on, and Mrs. Ward was standing by the door leading into the garden. She had returned from her day’s work and was scraping a pan out into a bin near the door. A train shrieked by, and the wind was blowing a fine rain against the house. Suddenly she stood up and looked up at the sky; then she pushed back her hair from her brow, and frowned at the dark house next door. Then she turned and said: “Oh, I don’t know, Tom, if we’ve got to do it, we _must_ do it. If them others can stand it, we can stand it. Whatever them others can do, we can do.” And then my visions jump rather wildly. And the war becomes to me epitomized in two women. One in this dim doorway in our obscure suburb of Dalston, scraping out a pan, and the other perhaps in some dark high house near a canal on the outskirts of Bremen. Them others! These two women silently enduring. And the trains rushing by, and all the dark, mysterious forces of the night operating on them equivocally. Poor Mrs. Frow Stelling! Perhaps those boys of hers are “missing, believed killed.” Perhaps they are killed for certain. She is as much outside “the things going on” as Mrs. Ward. Perhaps she is equally as patient, as brave. And Mrs. Ward enters the kitchen, and her eyes are blazing with a strange light as she says: “We’ll hear to-morrow, Tom. And if we don’t hear to-morrow, we’ll hear the next day. And if we don’t hear the next day, we’ll hear the day after. And if we don’t ... if we don’t never hear ... again ... if them others can stand it, we can stand it, I say.” And then her voice breaks, and she cries a little, for endurance has its limitations, and—the work is hard at Mrs. Abbot’s.