and the blowziness of their forerunners.  Walking in Piccadilly or Bond Street or the Park, you might nowadays fancy yourself in Paris ...  Why indeed should he not be playing tennis at that hour?  The month was August.  The apparatus of pleasure was there.  Used or unused, it would still be there.  It could not be destroyed simply because the times were grave.  And there was his health; he would work better after the exercise.  What purpose could there be in mournful inactivity?  Yet continuously, as he ran about the court, and smiled at Gladys, and called out the score, and exclaimed upon his failures in precision, the strange, physical weight oppressed his stomach.  He supposed that nearly everybody carried that physical weight.  But did Sir Isaac?  Did the delicious Gladys?  The youth on the other side of the net was in the highest spirits because in a few days he would be entering Sandhurst.

A butler appeared from the French window of the ground floor of the M.P.’s house, walked down the curving path screened by a pergola, and came near the court with a small white paper in his solemn hand.  At a suitable moment he gave the paper to the young master, who glanced at it and stuffed it into his pocket; the butler departed.  A few minutes later the players changed courts.  While the girls chatted apart, the youth leaped over the net, and, drawing the paper from his pocket, showed it furtively to George.  It bore the words: 

“Namur has fallen.”

The M.P.’s household received special news by telephone from a friend at the War Office.

The youth raised his eyebrows, and with a side-glance seemed to say that there could be no object in telling the women immediately.  The next instant the game was resumed with full ardour.

George missed his strokes.  Like thousands of other people, untaught by the episode of Liege, he had counted upon Namur.  Namur, the bastion, the shoulder of the newly forming line, if not impregnable, was expected to hold out for many days.  And it had tumbled like a tin church, and with it the brave edifice of his confidence.  He saw the Germans inevitably in Paris, blowing up Paris quarter by quarter, arrondissement by arrondissement, imposing peace, dictating peace, forcing upon Europe unspeakable humiliations.  He saw Great Britain compelled to bow; and he saw worse than that.  And the German officer, having struck across the face with his cane the soldier standing at attention, would go back to Germany in triumph more arrogant than ever, to ogle adoring virgins and push cowed and fatuous citizens off the pavement into the gutter.  The solid houses of Elm Park Gardens, with their rich sun-blinds, the perfect sward, the white-frocked girls, the respectful gardeners, the red motor-buses flitting past behind the screen of bushes in the distance, even the butler in his majestic and invulnerable self-conceit—­the whole systematized scene of correctness and tradition trembled as if perceived through the quivering of hot air.  Gladys, reliant on the male and feeling that the male could no longer be relied on, went ‘off her game,’ with apologies; the experience of Miss Horton asserted itself, and the hard-fought set was lost by George and his partner.  He reminded the company that he had only come for a short time, and left in a mood of bitter blackness.