The sun was shining cheerfully as I wended my way through the gaping crowds which had come from God knows where, getting a sympathetic word and grip here and there from familiar friends.
And presently I came to the North House gate, Oh Cornelia!
It all looked so piteous in the clear sunlight, the shell of the dear home; the inextricable mass of plaster and bricks and broken wood work and all the belongings of a house. The crowds, there seemed to be millions of them, everywhere fell back to let me go in. Himself met me, smiling bravely, but a little grim about the eyes.
"We are going to breakfast at the Odell’s," he said, "and after that you and Effie go off to Scotland; it is all arranged."
It was no use protesting—you know how Himself can look, and what it means when he says a thing has got to be done.
We hung about a little, and I had a sort of resentment because the public were all over the place where my house had been. They were not our own townsfolk, but incomers, who had arrived in motors, in horse traps, on bicycles from miles away. The North road was simply black with them. We went off presently in a cab to our kind neighbour’s house, where we had a good breakfast and much sympathy, which seemed to put fresh heart into us. When we got back, it was to get ready for our journey to Scotland.
Somebody found my clothes; people I had never seen before seemed to be packing them up in trunks, not ours, which appeared mysteriously from the outside. Kind hands brought us lunch, already prepared, and so we got ready to go away. But before the end I had a hard task. Poor Tubby, the lovely old mother chow, had gone mad, or at least become dangerous through sheer terror. You know how sensitive she was. She had to be shot and nobody could get her out of the kennel but me. I went and dragged her forth and put the collar around her neck and took her to the place of execution, where the man with the gun was waiting.
How did I do it? God knows, Cornelia. But it was absolutely necessary for the safety of human creatures, and I know she has forgiven me in the happy hunting ground where she has gone. She knew I loved her; but when I heard the report of the gun the iron seemed to enter into my soul. Wang has gone too, and Satan, the impish and delicious Persian cat that became an inmate of this animal-loving house after you left, was found stark by the edge of the immense crater made in the front garden by the bursting shell. It wiped out his favorite laurel bush, under which we suppose he had been sleeping when the terror came.