as soon as the said officers bad made
themselves a little more comfortable than before in their new posts.

It was so widespread a disturbance that even Peter Graham, most harmless
of men, with plenty of his own fish to fry, was dragged into it, as some
leaf, floating placidly downstream, may be caught and whirled away in an
excited eddy. More definitely, it removed him from Havre and Julie just
when he was beginning to want most definitely to stay there, and of
course, when it happened, he could hardly know that it was to be but a
temporary separation.

He was summoned, then, one fine morning, to his A.C.G.'s office in town,
and he departed on a bicycle, turning over in his mind such indiscretions
of which he had been guilty and wondering which of them was about to trip
him. Pennell had been confident, indeed, and particular.

"You're for it, old bean," he had said. "There's a limit to the patience
even of the Church. They are going to say that there is no need for you
to visit hospitals after dark, and that their padres mustn't be seen out
with nurses who smoke in public. And all power to their elbow, I say."

Peter's reply was certainly not in the Prayer-Book, and would probably
have scandalised its compilers, but he thought, secretly, that there
might be something in what his friend said. Consequently he rode his
bicycle carelessly, and was indifferent to tram-lines and some six inches
of nice sticky mud on parts of the _pave_. In the ordinary course,
therefore, these things revenged themselves upon him. He came off neatly
and conveniently opposite a small _cafe debit_ at a turn in the dock
road, and the mud prevented the _pave_ from seriously hurting him.

A Frenchman, minding the cross-lines, picked him up, and he, madame,
her assistant, and a customer, carried him into the kitchen off the
bar and washed and dried him. The least he could do was a glass of
French beer all round, with a franc to the dock labourer who straightened
his handle-bars and tucked in a loose spoke, and for all this the War
Office--if it was the War Office, for it may, quite possibly, have been
Lord Northcliffe or Mr. Bottomley, or some other controller of our
national life--was directly responsible. When one thinks that in a
hundred places just such disturbances were in progress in ten times as
many innocent lives, one is appalled at their effrontery. They ought to
eat and drink more carefully, or take liver pills.

However, in due tim