his first return from the front a bluff friendliness
had been the keynote of our intercourse. Nothing more. Now he came and
without warning enmeshed me in this intimate net of love and death. I
promised to do his bidding--I could not do otherwise. I was in the
position of an executor according to the terms of a last will and
testament. Our comradeship in arms--those of our old Army who survive
will understand--forbade refusal. Besides, his intensity of purpose won
my sympathy and admiration. But I loved him none the more. To my
cripple's detested sensitiveness, as he stood over me, he loomed more
than ever the hulking brute. His semi-confessions and innuendoes
exacerbated my feelings of distrust and repulsion. And yet, at the same
tune, I could not--nor did I try to--repress an immense pity for the
man; perhaps less for the man than for the soul in pain. At the back of
his words some torment burned at red heat, remorselessly. He sought
relief. Perhaps he sought it from me because I was as apart as a woman
from his physical splendour, a kind of bodiless creature with just a
brain and a human heart, the ghost of an old soldier, far away from the
sphere of poor passions and little jealousies.

I felt the tentacles of the man's nature blindly and convulsively
groping after something within me that eluded them. That is the best
way in which I can describe the psychology of these strange moments.
The morning sun streamed into my little oak-panelled dining-room and
caught the silver and fruit on the breakfast table and made my frieze
of old Delft glow blue like the responsive western sky. With his back
to the vivid window, Leonard Boyce stood cut out black like a
silhouette. That he, too, felt the tension, I know; for a wasp crawled
over his face, from cheek-bone, across his temples, to his hair, and he
did not notice it.

Instinctively I said the words: "Your record. Are you quite certain
that I know it?"

With what intensity, with what significance in my eyes, I may have said
them, I know not. I repeat that I had a subconsciousness, almost
uncanny, that we were souls rather than men, talking to each other. He
sat down once more, drawing the chair to the table and resting his
elbow on it.

"My record," said he. "What about it?"

Again please understand that I felt I had the man's soul naked before
me. An imponderable hand plucked away my garments of convention.

"Some time ago," said I, "you spoke of my attitude towar