"Well, war or no war," said Mrs. Manning, "we must have tea. Where is Lillian. I never could bear that German language; it always sounds as if they were spitting at one another like two cats. Where's Lillian?"
Presently Lillian came out, calm and without a sign of having passed through a storm of emotion. "Tea ready?" she said. Then she went to the arbor, took down the Union Jack and stuck it in the vase of flowers which ornamented the centre of the table. The two young men, with heads held high, saluted. Mr. Kirkby removed his hat. "God save the State," he said, reverently.
CHAPTER XV
The News of a Day
By the next morning Aunt Manning's mind had swung back into its usual orbit. When the others came into the breakfast room she was reading the morning papers with many sniffs and humphs, then, after unbottling a vial of wrath to pour out upon the Germans, she declared that this talk of England's going to war was all humbug. "Ernest Kirkby is so sensational," she maintained. "He likes to make a telling point as if he lived continually in the pulpit. What's war on the Continent to do with us? Haven't we bother enough with Ireland without this cry of war? I don't see why you were all so excited and melodramatic over Ernest's heroics. It will be time enough to fly into hysterics when war is declared." No one ventured to remark that Aunt Manning was as excited as anyone at the news Mr. Kirkby brought, but Tibbie, coming in with fresh toast, and hearing the remarks of her "mistus," looked around with a smile of smug triumph. Had she not been the first to make her protest against premature alarm?
Aunt Manning's statements had the effect of raising everyone's spirits. Anita and her mother were willing enough to believe she was right, while Lillian's forebodings began to assume the complexion of mere conjecture, so that she became quite gay and happy. "It is a fine cool day," she said to Anita, "what do you say to our taking that walk to Chichester to see Aunt Betsy Potter? We'll never get there if we don't decide in a hurry, and we've been talking about it all summer. Will you go, too, Cousin Katharine?"
But Mrs. Beltrán decided otherwise, though Anita agreed that there was no time like the present. Therefore, soon after breakfast they set off on their walk.
"We can't take the dogs, worse luck," said Lillian, as they were starting out, "for Aunt Bets has a prejudice against them, some queer sort of notion, one can't tell exactly what. Oh, she is a funny one."
Anita was curious to see this odd character who lived in that quaintest of almshouses known as St. Mary's Hospital. To reach this the girls passed behind other houses, entered a courtyard and came upon a set of little dwellings like a collection of small doll houses within a larger one. Each of these tiny places was given to the use of some worthy old woman, and yet the whole was beneath one roof.
At the door of one of these small abodes Lillian knocked and the two were immediately admitted into a cozy room by Aunt Betsy herself. She was a little, dried up, old person with shrewd, peering eyes, a skin like an apple which has begun to wither, a nose slightly hooked and a slightly protruding under lip which she moistened frequently. "Come in, come right in," she said, hospitably. "I knew a stranger was coming for I dropped a dishclout this marnin'."