and exchange news with the officer in charge, who, having done all he
could, had now nothing to do but stand by and wait for the next move from
a War Office that had either forgotten his existence or discovered some
hitch in its plans. They had a couple of lectures from people who were
alleged to know all about such topics as the food shortage at home or the
new plans for housing, but who invariably turned out to be waiting
themselves for the precise information that was necessary for successful
lectures. After such they would stroll out through the town into the
fields, and Langton would criticise the thing in lurid but humorous
language, and they would come back to the club and sit or read till
lunch.

The club was one of the best in France, it was an old house with lovely
furniture, and not too much of it, which stood well back from the street
and boasted an old-fashioned garden of shady trees and spring flowers and
green lawns. Peter could both read and write in its rooms, and it was
there that he finally wrote to Hilda, but not until after much thought.

After his day with Julie at Caudebec one might have supposed that there
was nothing left for him to do but break off his engagement to Hilda. But
it did not strike him so. For one thing, he was not engaged to Julie or
anything like it, and he could not imagine such a situation, even if
Julie had not positively repudiated any desire to be either engaged or
married. He had certainly declared, in a fit of enthusiasm, that he loved
her, but he had not asked if she loved him. He had seen her since, but
although they were very good friends, nothing more exciting had passed
between them. Peter was conscious that when he was with Julie she
fascinated him, but that when he was away--ah! that was it, when he was
away? It certainly was not that Hilda came back and took her place; it
was rather that the other things in his mind dominated him. It was a
curious state of affairs. He was less like an orthodox parson than he had
ever been, and yet he had never thought so much about religion. He
agonised over it now. At times his thoughts were almost more than he
could bear.

It came, then, to this, that he had not so much changed towards Hilda as
changed towards life. Whether he had really fundamentally changed in such
a way that a break with the old was inevitable he did not know. Till then
Hilda was part of the old, and if he went back to it she naturally took
her old place i