Page:Comin' Thro' the Rye (1898).djvu/494

486 on his lips, words that I thank Heaven he never spoke to me nor I listened to.

Silvia came and wished me good-bye; false to the last, she put her hand in mine (he had not touched it then), and wished me well. And I held my peace and said nothing. I let her think I had never suspected all her vile plots, for if I had spoken the words that lay at my heart, how should I have been able to see Wattie, whom, like any other fashionable, heartless mother, she was leaving to the care of servants? She bade her people bring him to me whenever I liked to have him, and he has come nearly every day. Mr. and Mrs. Vasher went away together, but she was going on some visits, to return here in September, while he was to join the Tempests and papa, later, in Argyllshire; he is with them now, I suppose, as the twelfth is already past. (When he comes back in September I shall be gone to Alice, and it will be a long, long while before I come back again.)

And while our sportsmen are shooting away so contentedly at the grouse, with no other object than to prove themselves good shots, and make a good meal off the poor birds, other men are shooting, hacking, and hewing at each other like madmen, watering the fair lands of France with blood, until they reek, sowing the meadows and valleys with dead bodies thick as the grain of the sower in spring-time For the greed and pride of two men, for the errors in diplomacy of a few more, the land is made one hideous gaping sepulchre, that opens wide its scarlet mouth, and sends its murdered cry of tens of thousands up before God How the brain reels and the heart sickens as one reads, day by day, of the success of the infernal weapons forged by man to dash out all semblance of humanity in that which God created in his own image. Is not life sweet to those poor fellows who have to lay it down because one crowned head covets his neighbour's vineyard? Oh! a million desolate wives and mothers, weeping for