w?--as if we were--well, sort of the same at heart. I
mean, of course, if he hadn't been German. War is queer," he continued,
lamely, raising his cropped head and looking off at the horizon.
"Awfully queer," he murmured, watching a dark cloud steal across the
water, tarnishing all its bright surface.

Presently he spoke again.

"So many men have been killed--Englishmen I mean; almost all the men I
went to school with." He started to count as if by rote: "Don and
Robert, and Fred Sands, and Steve, and Philip and Sandy." His voice was
muffled in the sand. "Benjamin Robb and Cyril and Eustis, Rupert and Ted
and Fat--good old Fat!"

Lying close to Marjorie on the sand, his mighty young body still hot
from the joyous contact of the noonday sun, his eyes, full of an
uncomplaining and uncomprehending agony, sought hers; and Marjorie
looked dumbly back with a feeling of desolation growing within her as
vast and dreary as the gray expanse lapping beside them, for it seemed
to her that Leonard was groping, pleading--oh, so silently--for an
explanation, an inspiration deeper than anything he had known before--a
something immense that would make it all right, this gigantic
twentieth-century work of killing; square it with the ideals and ideas
that this most enlightened century had given him.

Marjorie strangled a fierce tide of feeling that welled up within her,
and her eyes, bent on Leonard, were fierce because she loved him most
and she had nothing, nothing to give him. For he had to go back, oh, he
had to go back to-morrow, and he hated it so--they all hated it--the
best of them! How clearly she saw through the superb, pitiful bluff,
that it was all sport, "wonderful"! Wonderful? She knew, but she would
never dare let Leonard see that she knew.

And still Leonard counted, his head in his arms: "Arnold and Allen, and
Rothwood, and Jim Douglas, and Jack and--Oh, Christ! I can't count them
all!" His voice trailed away and was lost in the sand, and the big
clouds, spreading out faster and faster, swept over them.

IV

They came up to London in a first-class compartment. Any one could have
told they were on their honeymoon, for they wore perfectly new clothes,
and on their knees between them they balanced a perfectly new
tea-basket. They were making tea and sandwiches, and although it was all
rather messy, it gave them the illusion of house-keeping. The lumbering
local seemed to them to be racing, and the country sped