he famous Admiral with his attendant nymphs, or wander down
the winding streets that skirt the ancient church and give glimpses of
its unfinished tower.

Peter found it very good to be there in the days that followed the death
of Jenks. True, it was now nearer to the seat of war than it had been for
years, and air-raids began to be common, but in a sense the sound of the
guns fitted in with his mood. So great a battle was being fought within
him that the world could not in any case have seemed wholly at peace, and
yet in the quiet fields, or sauntering of an afternoon by the river, he
found it easier than at Havre to think. Langton was almost his sole
companion, and a considerable intimacy had grown up between them. Peter
found that his friend seemed to understand a great deal of his thoughts
without explanation. He neither condoled nor exhorted; rather he watched
with an almost shy interest the other's inward battle.

They lodged at the Hotel de l'Angleterre, that hostelry in the street
that leads up and out of the town towards Saint Riquier, which you
enter from a courtyard that opens on the road and has rooms that you
reach by means of narrow, rickety flights of stairs and balconies
overhanging the court. The big dining-room wore an air of gloomy
festivity. Its chandeliers swathed in brown paper, its faded paint, and
its covered upholstery, suggested that it awaited a day yet to be when it
should blossom forth once more in glory as in the days of old. Till then
it was as merry as it could be. Its little tables filled up of an evening
with the new cosmopolitan population of the town, and old Jacques bustled
round with the good wine, and dropped no hint that the choice brands were
nearly at an end in the cellar.

Peter and Langton would have their war-time apology for _petit dejeuner_
in bed or alone. Peter, as a rule, was up early, and used to wander out a
little and sometimes into church, coming back to coffee as good as ever,
but war-time bread instead of rolls on a small table under a low balcony
in the courtyard if it were fine. He would linger over it, and have
chance conversation with passing strangers of all sorts, from clerical
personages belonging to the Church Army or the Y.M.C.A. to officers who
came and went usually on unrevealed affairs. Then Langton would come
down, and they would stroll round to the newly-fitted-up office which had
been prepared for the lecture campaign and glance at maps of districts,