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By Root 3816 0

knots round the entrance to the alleys of ghost-pyramids...Then there were no more, and he drifted with regret across the plain towards his country street of huts. One of them had a coarse evergreen rose growing over it. He picked a leaf, pressed it to his lips and threw it up into the wind...'That's for Valentine,' he said meditatively. 'Why did I do that?...Or perhaps it's for England...' He said: 'Damn it all, this is patriotism?...This is patriotism...' It wasn't what you took patriotism as a rule to be. There were supposed to be more parades, about that job!...But this was just a broke to the wide, wheezy, half-frozen Yorkshireman, who despised every one in England not a Yorkshireman, or from more to the North, at two in the morning picking a leaf from a rose-tree and slobbering over it, without knowing what he was doing. And then discovering that it was half for a pug-nosed girl whom he presumed, but didn't know, to smell like a primrose; and half for...England!...At two in the morning with the thermometer ten degrees below zero...Damn, it was cold!...

And why these emotions?...Because England, not before it was time, had been allowed to decide not to do the dirty on her associates!...He said to himself: 'It is probably because a hundred thousand sentimentalists like myself commit similar excesses of the subconscious that we persevere in this glorious but atrocious undertaking. All the same, I didn't know I had it in me!' A strong passion!...For his girl and his country!...Nevertheless, his girl was a pro-German...It was a queer mix-up...Not of course a pro-German, but disapproving of the preparation of men, like bullocks, with sleek healthy skins for the abattoirs in Smithfield...Agreeing presumably with the squits who had been hitherto starving the B.E.F. of men...A queer mix-up...

At half-past one the next day, in chastened winter sunlight, he mounted Schomburg, a coffin-headed, bright chestnut, captured from the Germans on the Marne by the second battalion of the Glamorganshires. He had not been on the back of the animal two minutes before he remembered that he had forgotten to look it over. It was the first time in his life that he had ever forgotten to look at an animal's hoofs, fetlocks, knees, nostrils and eyes, and to take a pull at the girth before climbing into the saddle. But he had ordered the horse for a quarter to one and, even though he had bolted his cold lunch like a cannibal in haste, there he was three-quarters of an hour late, and with his head still full of teasing problems. He had meant to clear his head by a long canter over the be-hutted downs, dropping down into the city by a bypath.

But the ride did not clear his head--rather, the sleeplessness of the night began for the first time then to tell on him after a morning of fatigues, during which he had managed to keep the thought of Sylvia at arm's length. He had to wait to see Sylvia before he could see what Sylvia wanted. And morning had brought the common-sense idea that probably she wanted to do nothing more than pull the string of the showerbath--which meant committing herself to the first extravagant action that came into her head--and exulting in the consequences.

He had not managed to get to bed at all the night before. Captain McKechnie, who had had some cocoa--a beverage Tietjens had never before tasted--hot and ready for him on his return from the lines, had kept him till past half-past four, relating with a male fury his really very painful story. It appeared that he had obtained leave to go home and divorce his wife, who, during his absence in France, had been living with an Egyptologist in Government service. Then, acting under conscientious scruples of the younger school of the day, he had refrained from divorcing her. Campion had in consequence threatened to deprive him of his commission...The poor devil--who had actually consented to contribute to the costs of the household of his wife and the Egyptologist--had gone raving mad and had showered an extraordinary torrent of abuse at the decent old fellow that Campion was...A