itedly, savagely, to win. She couldn't hide
her annoyance when he beat her.

"What was I to do?" he said. "You don't like it when I beat you. But if
I was beaten you wouldn't like _me_."

ii

Adeline's only hope was not realized. They hadn't had time to tire of
each other before the War broke out. And Colin insisted on marrying
before he joined up. Their engagement had left him nervous and unfit,
and his idea was that, once married, he would present a better
appearance before the medical examiners.

But after a month of Queenie, Colin was more nervous and unfit than
ever.

"I can't think," said Adeline, "what that woman does to him. She'll wear
him out."

So Colin waited, trying to get fitter, and afraid to volunteer lest he
should be rejected.

Everybody around him was moving rapidly. Queenie had taken up motoring,
so that she could drive an ambulance car at the front. Anne had gone up
to London for her Red Cross training. Eliot had left his practice to his
partner at Penang and had come home and joined the Army Medical Corps.

Eliot, home on leave for three days before he went out, tried hard to
keep Colin back from the War. In Eliot's opinion Colin was not fit and
never would be fit to fight. He was just behaving as he always had
behaved, rushing forward, trying insanely to do the thing he never could
do.

"Do you mean to say they won't pass me?" he asked.

"Oh, they'll pass you all right," Eliot said. "They'll give you an
expensive training, and send you into the trenches, and in any time from
a day to a month you'll be in hospital with shell-shock. Then you'll be
discharged as unfit, having wasted everybody's time and made a damned
nuisance of yourself....I suppose I ought to say it's splendid of you to
want to go out. But it isn't splendid. It's idiotic. You'll be simply
butting in where you're not wanted, taking a better man's place, taking
a better man's commission, taking a better man's bed in a hospital. I
tell you we don't want men who are going to crumple up in their first
action."

"Do you think I'm going to funk then?" said poor Colin.

"Funk? Oh, Lord no. You'll stick it till you drop, till you're
paralyzed, till you've lost your voice and memory, till you're an utter
wreck. There'll be enough of 'em, poor devils, without you, Col-Col."

"But why should I go like that more than anybody else?"

"Because you're made that way, because you haven't got a nervous system
that can stand the r