After some hesitation, Fancy narrated, with many details, her psychic experiences not only with her mother but with the four Evangelists. The girl's mordant anxiety that the astounding tale should be believed bit deep into the elder woman's heart. To Fancy's delight no incredulity was expressed. And Mrs. Yellam's face remained calm and kind. Solomon listened, also, with singular alertness and an eager intelligence which, to Fancy, indicated full belief. Indeed, Solomon seemed to be saying to himself: "Yes, yes, we know about that. We see things every day that would astonish all of you, if we were allowed to talk about them." And, in the middle of the story, the dog, that never showed any affection for others in the presence of his mistress, leapt suddenly into Fancy's lap and remained there. Long afterwards, Mrs. Yellam admitted that this mark of confidence upon Sol's part had impressed her. Inwardly she explained things quite to her satisfaction. She beheld Fancy as a four-year-old, a tiny mite, all eyes, physically weak, the victim of a perfervid imagination. Her own little girl, Lizzie, physically robust, would invent somewhat similar stories about tramps and sweeps quite as apocryphal as these tales of communings with Matthew and Mark. She remembered smacking Lizzie, and telling her that she was a little liar. No doubt, Fancy's father, rather a weakling, has encouraged the mite. Since Alfred's engagement, Mrs. Yellam had met Mr. Broomfield, and summed him up trenchantly as half a man.
However, she kept such thoughts to herself, saying quietly:
"You be a strange girl, Fancy, but you speaks what you believes to be sober truth, and I love 'ee."
Fancy had to be satisfied with this.
The first year of the war came to an end.
So far, Nether-Applewhite had been fortunate. None of the young men had been killed; none had been seriously wounded. And it was generally held that "Fritz" couldn't stick another winter. Alfred became a sergeant. Mrs. Yellam appeared in her pew, next Sunday, wearing a new bonnet. But, coming out of church, she met William Saint, and cut him dead. She now thought of him, habitually, as a "Prooshian," out for world-dominion. When her Alfred returned from the wars, he would smash William Saint. The triumph of such a "sneak" must be short-lived. Like the Kayser, he had sold himself, body and soul, to Satan. Satan would claim his own in God A'mighty's good time. Renewed belief in a Personal Deity had crept back into a heart less indurated. But He remained there, so to speak, on sufferance. At any moment, He might be driven out, as before. Omnipotence, so Mrs. Yellam argued during many vigils, could not be reasonably regarded as such if Satan triumphed unduly. It is to be feared that a daily motor-'bus service to Salisbury and back under the auspices of William Saint would have been regarded as a Satanic triumph. But such a service, as yet, had not been inaugurated.
Alfred wrote home once a week, alternately to Fancy and his mother. The life agreed with him. Obviously he accepted rough and smooth philosophically, regarding himself as a part of a vast machine that would "rampage" on with or without him. Although he was careful to keep from his mother and Fancy the horrors which they heard from the wounded soldiers, now and again some careless phrase would reveal, illuminatingly, everything that the good fellow wished to suppress.
"You enjoy your food as never was," he wrote, "when you know that any square meal may be the last. A chum of mine got it yesterday. And he was smoking a Woodbine I gave him. The man next him, as told me all about it, finished the Woodbine. I couldn't help laughing."
"Sometimes," said Mrs. Yellam, deliberately, "I thinks they be all mad." She turned almost fiercely upon Fancy. "Why did he laugh, my boy as hated to kill a fly?"
Fancy hazarded a conjecture.