ern man. And I knew I had only to put it
to her and she would have let me go.... Not because she did not love me!

"Only I did not want to go; my will was all the other way about. I had
so newly thrown off the incubus of responsibility: I was still so fresh
a renegade from duty that the daylight clearness of what I OUGHT to do
had no power at all to touch my will. My will was to live, to gather
pleasures and make my dear lady happy. But though this sense of vast
neglected duties had no power to draw me, it could make me silent and
preoccupied, it robbed the days I had spent of half their brightness and
roused me into dark meditations in the silence of the night. And as I
stood and watched Evesham's aeroplanes sweep to and fro--those birds
of infinite ill omen--she stood beside me watching me, perceiving the
trouble indeed, but not perceiving it clearly her eyes questioning my
face, her expression shaded with perplexity. Her face was grey because
the sunset was fading out of the sky. It was no fault of hers that she
held me. She had asked me to go from her, and again in the night time
and with tears she had asked me to go.

"At last it was the sense of her that roused me from my mood. I turned
upon her suddenly and challenged her to race down the mountain slopes.
'No,' she said, as if I jarred with her gravity, but I was resolved to
end that gravity, and made her run--no one can be very grey and sad who
is out of breath--and when she stumbled I ran with my hand beneath
her arm. We ran down past a couple of men, who turned back staring in
astonishment at my behaviour--they must have recognised my face.
And halfway down the slope came a tumult in the air, clang-clank,
clang-clank, and we stopped, and presently over the hill-crest those war
things came flying one behind the other."

The man seemed hesitating on the verge of a description.

"What were they like?" I asked.

"They had never fought," he said. "They were just like our ironclads are
nowadays; they had never fought. No one knew what they might do, with
excited men inside them; few even cared to speculate. They were great
driving things shaped like spearheads without a shaft, with a propeller
in the place of the shaft."

"Steel?"

"Not steel."

"Aluminium?"

"No, no, nothing of that sort. An alloy that was very common--as common
as brass, for example. It was called--let me see--." He squeezed his
forehead with the fingers of one hand. "I am forgetting ev