For a moment his eyes hovered on her face.
"Not that," she answered and dropped her hand.
"Then to hell with you!" he cried with a kind of desperate savagery and thrust her brutally away. "Sporting with a man!"
In a few minutes he was back. Paying no heed to her, he sat down at the kitchen-table and wrote a note, which he put on the mantel-piece.
"You can give this to Alf next time he comes round for the rent," he said.
"Notice," Ern answered. "We're going to shift to the Colonel's garage."
"I am," he answered. "Me and my children."
The volley fired on Bachelor's Walk, as it echoed down the long valleys of the world, seemed to serve the purpose of Joshua's trumpet. Thereafter all the walls of civilisation began to crash down one after another with the roar of ruined firmaments.
Forty-eight hours later Austria declared war.
On Thursday Mr. Asquith, speaking in a crowded and quiet house, proposed the postponement of the Home Rule Bill.
Stanley Bessemere discarded his uniform of an Ulster Volunteer in haste, and turned up at the club in chastened mood. He was blatant still, a little furtive, notably less truculent. The martial refrain _Smith and I_ had given place to the dulcet coo _We must all pull together_.
"Is he ashamed?" Mrs. Lewknor asked her husband, hushed herself, and perhaps a little guilty.
"My dear," the Colonel replied. "Shame is not a word known to your politician. He's thoroughly frightened. All the politicians are. There're bluffing for all they're worth."
On the Saturday morning the Colonel went to the club. The junior member for Beachbourne, who was there, and for once uncertain of himself, showed himself childishly anxious to forget and forgive.
"Now look here, Colonel!" he said, charming and bright. "If there's an almighty bust-up now, shall you _really_ blame it all on Ulster? Honest Injun!"
"Every little helps," he said. "A whisper'll start an avalanche, as any mountaineer could tell you."
He took up the _Nation_ of August 1st and began to read the editor's impassioned appeal to the country to stand out. The Colonel read the article twice over. There could be no question of the white-hot sincerity of the writer, and none that he voiced the sentiments of an immense and honest section of the country.