You will be forthwith despatched to the Naval Depot and should bring with you any necessary articles.
Should absence from home prevent your receiving this notice in time to attend at once or at the hour specified, you should on its receipt proceed forthwith to the Mercantile Marine Office named.
Failure to report yourself without delay will render you liable to arrest as a Deserter.
Note.—Reasonable expenses incurred in travelling from your home will be allowed.
By command,
Joshua Johns, Registrar.
Dated this Second day of August 1914.
CHAPTER IV.
THE FIRST SERMON.
Some ten minutes after the brakes had departed, Mrs Polsue and Miss
Oliver, bound for divine service, encountered at the corner where
Jolly Hill unites with Bridge Street, and continued their way
together up the Valley road.
"Good-morning! This is terrible news," said Miss Oliver, panting a little, for she had tripped down the hill in a great hurry.
"I have been expecting it for a long while," responded Mrs Polsue darkly. Like some other folks in this world, she produced much of her total effect by suggesting that she had access to sources of information sealed to the run of mankind. She ever managed to convey the suggestion by phrases—and, still more cleverly, by silences— which left the evidence conveniently vague. To be sure, a great-uncle of hers had commanded in his time a Post-Office Packet plying between Falmouth and Surinam, and few secrets of the Government had been withheld from him: but he was now, as Mrs Polsue had to confess, "no more," and when you came to reflect on it (as you sometimes did after taking leave of her), the sort of knowledge she had been intimating could hardly have been telegraphed from another and better world. She had also a cousin in London, "in a large way of drapery business," who communicated to her—or was supposed to communicate—"what was wearing": an advantage which she used, however, less to refresh her own toilettes than to discourage her neighbours'. Moreover, there was a brother-in-law somewhere "in the Civil Service," to whom she made frequent allusion. But the knowledge she derived from him concerning State secrets or high politics could, at the best, but be far from recent, because as a fact the pair had not been on terms of intercourse by speech or letter since her husband's decease twelve years ago. (There had been some unpleasantness over the Will.)