the last few minutes her point of view, her attitude to
her friend, her kind, considerate, courteous friend, had
altered. She no longer looked at him with indulgent
half-contempt as an idle man, a man who, though he
was very good to his mother, and sometimes very useful
to herself, had always led, excepting during the
South African War (and that was a long time ago),
an idle, useless kind of life. He was going now to
face real danger, perchance -- but her mind shrank from
_that_ thought, from that dread possibility -- death itself.
Somehow the fact that Major Guthrie was going with
his regiment to France brought the War perceptibly
nearer to Mrs. Otway, and made it for the first time
real.

He quietly took the easy chair she had motioned
him to take, and she sat down too.

"Well, I have to confess that you were right and
I wrong! You always thought we should fight the
Germans." She tried to speak playfully, but there
was a certain pain in the admission, for she had always
scorned his quiet prophecies and declared him to be,
in this one matter, prejudiced and unfair.

"Yes," he said, "that's quite true! But, Mrs. Otway?
I'm very, very sorry to have been proved right.
And I fear that you must feel it very much, as you
have so many German friends."

"I haven't many German friends now," she said
quickly. "I had as a girl, and of course I've kept up
with two or three of them, as you know. But it's
true that the whole thing is a great shock and -- and a
great pain to me. Unlike you, I've always thought very
well of Germans."

He said quietly, "So have I."

[[94]]

p093 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p094w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p095

v?