CHAPTER XV.
It was afternoon at Mannering.
Elizabeth was walking home from the village through the park.

Still the same dry east-wind weather--very cold in the wind, very warm in the sun.

If the German offensive began while these fine days held, they would have the luck of weather as we had never had it.

Think of the drenching rains and winds of the Passchendaele attack! In the popular mind the notion of 'a German God' was taking actual concrete shape.

A huge and monstrous form, sitting on a German hill, plotting with the Kaiser, and ordering the weather precisely as the Kaiser wished--it was thus that English superstition, aided by Imperial speeches and telegrams, began to be haunted.
Yet the world was still beautiful--the silvery stems of the trees, the flitting of the birds, the violet carpets underfoot.