Their uniforms were lying ready on one of the schoolroom tables.

She helped the girls to put them on, laughing, chatting, admiring--ready besides with a dozen homely hints on how to keep well--how to fend for themselves, perhaps in a lonely cottage--how to get on with the farmer--above all, how to get on with the farmer's wife.

Her sympathy made everything worth while--put colour and pleasure into this new and strange adventure, of women going out to break up and plough and sow the ancient land of our fathers, which the fighting men had handed over to them.

Elizabeth decked the task with honour, so that the girls in their khaki stood round her at last glowing, though dumb!--and felt themselves--as she bade them feel--the comrades-in-arms of their sweethearts and their brothers.
Then with the March twilight she was again at Mannering.

She changed her bicycling dress, and six o'clock found her at her desk, obediently writing from the Squire's dictation.
He put her through a stiff series of geographical notes, including a number of quotations from Homer and Herodotus, bearing on the spread of Greek culture in the Aegean.