I could find no adequate reply.

Towards the end of the month comes Boyce to Wellingsford, this time not
secretly; for the day after his arrival he drove his mother through the
town and incidentally called on me. A neglected bullet graze on the
neck had turned septic. An ugly temperature had sent him to hospital.
The authorities, as soon as the fever had abated and left him on the
high road to recovery, had sent him home. A khaki bandage around his
bull-throat alone betokened anything amiss. He would be back, he said,
as soon as the Medical Board at the War Office would let him.

On this occasion, for the first time since South African days, I met
him without any mistrust. What had passed between Betty and himself, I
did not know. Relations between man and woman are so subtle and
complicated, that unless you have the full pleadings on both sides in
front of you, you cannot arbitrate; and, as often as not, if you
deliver the most soul-satisfying of judgments, you are hopelessly
wrong, because there are all important, elusive factors of personality,
temperament, sex, and what not which all the legal acumen in the world
could not set down in black and white. So half unconsciously I ruled
out Betty from my contemplation of the man. I had been obsessed by the
Vilboek Farm story, and by that alone. Reggie Dacre--to say nothing of
personages in high command--had proved it to be a horrible lie. He had
Marshal Ney's deserved reputation--le brave des braves--and there is no
more coldly critical conferrer of such repute than the British Army in
the field. To win it a man not only has to do something heroic once or
twice--that is what he is there for--but he has to be doing it all the
time. Boyce had piled up for himself an amazing record, one that
overwhelmed the possibility of truth in old slanders. When I gripped
him by the hand, I felt immeasurable relief at being able to do so
without the old haunting suspicion and reservation.

He spoke, like thousands of others of his type--the type of the fine
professional English soldier--with diffident modesty of such personal
experiences as he deigned to recount. The anecdotes mostly had a
humorous side, and were evoked by allusion. Like all of us
stay-at-homes, I cursed the censorship for leaving us so much in the
dark. He laughed and cursed the censorship for the opposite reason.

"The damned fools--I beg your pardon, Mother, but when a fool is too
big a fool even for this world, h