Well, the allotment has run to weeds.  I passed it to-day and looked over the hedge and saw the chickweed and the thistles in undisputed possession.  For David has gone.  “It will take a long time to turn him into a soldier,” we said when we saw him leave his thatched roof last spring to join up, and watched him shambling down the lane to the valley and the distant station.  “The war will be over before he gets into the trenches,” I said cheerfully to his wife, his mother, and Aunt Jane as they sat later in the day mingling their tears in the “parlour”—­that apartment sacred to Sundays, funerals, and weddings.  “Poor boy, what’ll he do without his comfortable bed?” moaned his mother.

But by May there came news that David was in France.  By June he was in the trenches, and woe sat heavy on the three women to whom the world without David was an empty place.

Then came silence.  The postman comes up the lane on his bicycle to our straggling hamlet on the hillside twice a day, and after David had gone his visits to the cottages of the three women had been frequent.  Sometimes he put his bicycle at the mother’s gate, sometimes at David’s gate, less often at Aunt Jane’s gate.  For David was an industrious correspondent, even though his letters were a laborious compromise between crosses and “hoping you are well as it leaves me at present.”

But in August the postman ceased to call.  Long before his hour you could see the three women watching for his coming.  I think the postman got to dread turning the corner and facing the expectant women with empty hands.  He could not help feeling that somehow he was to blame.  At first he would stop and point out elaborately the reasons for delay in the post.  Then, when this had become thin with time, he adopted the expedient of riding past the cottages very hard with eyes staring far ahead, as though he was going to a fire or was the bearer of an important dispatch.

But at the end of a fortnight or so he came round the corner one morning more in the old style.  The women observed the change and went out to meet him.  But their faces fell as they looked at the letter and saw that the handwriting was not David’s.  And the contents were as bad as they could be.  The letter was from a lad in the valley who had “joined up” with David.  He wrote from a hospital asking for news of his comrade, whom he had seen “knocked over” in the advance in which he himself had been wounded.

For the rest of the day, it was observed, the cottage doors were never opened.  Nor did any one venture to break in on the misery of the women inside.  The parson’s wife came up in her gig from the valley, having heard the news, but she did not call.  She only talked to the neighbours, who had had the details from the postman.  Every one felt the news like a personal blow, and even the widow Wigley, who lives down in the valley, was full of sympathy.  She had never quite got over her resentment at the funeral of David’s father.  Her own husband had been carried to his grave on a hand-bier, but at the funeral of David’s father there was a horse-drawn hearse and a carriage for the mourners.  “They were always such people for show,” said Mrs. Wigley.  And the memory had rankled.  But now it was buried.