John looked out once more with deep emotion at the familiar spot in the golden stillness of the September afternoon.
“I sat here with my wife the last afternoon before I went to the front,” he said in his reedy old man’s voice. “The heather was out as it is now.”
His eyes turned to the peaceful landscape, the wooded uplands, the river, the clustered villages, and far away the city and the tall chimneys of his factories. As he looked he gave a gasp, and his jaw fell.
“The factories aren’t working,” he said.
“Yes, dear, indeed they are.”
“They’re not. Not a sign of smoke. It used to hang like a curtain over the city.”
“Or like a shroud,” said Serena looking fixedly at him. “It hung over the grimy overworked mothers, and the poor grimy fledglings of children in the little huddled houses. The factories consume their own smoke now.”
“There was a law to that effect in my time,” said John, “but nobody obeyed it.”
“No one,” she agreed. “No one.”