ing craft in extrication.
That in itself repelled me. But it lost its value in the light that he
had cast on the never-ceasing torment that consumed him. At any rate he
was at death-grips with himself, strangling the devils of fear and
dishonour with a hand relentlessly certain. He appeared to me a tragic
figure warring against a doom.

At first I expected every day to receive an agonised message from Mrs.
Boyce announcing his death. Then, as is the way of humans, the keenness
of my apprehension grew blunted, until, at last, I took his continued
existence as a matter of course. I wrote him a few friendly letters, to
which he replied in the same strain. And so the months went on.

Looking over my diary I find that these months were singularly
uneventful as far as the lives of those dealt with in this chronicle
were concerned. In the depths of our souls we felt the long-drawn-out
agony of the war, with its bitter humiliations, its heartrending
disappointments. In our daily meetings one with another we cried aloud
for a great voice to awaken the little folk in Great Britain from their
selfish lethargy--the little folk in high office, in smug burgessdom,
in seditious factory and shipyard. They were months of sordid
bargaining between all sections of our national life, in the murk of
which the glow of patriotism seemed to be eclipsed. And in the
meantime, the heroic millions from all corners of our far-flung Empire
were giving their lives on land and sea, gaily and gallantly, too often
in tragic futility, for the ideals to which the damnable little folk at
home were blind. The little traitorous folk who gambled for their own
hands in politics, the little traitorous folk who put the outworn
shibboleths of a party before the war-cry of an Empire, the little
traitorous folk who strove with all their power to starve our navy of
ships, our ships of coal, our men in the trenches of munitions, our
armies of men, our country of honour--all these will one day be
mercilessly arraigned at the bar of history. The plains of France, the
steeps of Gallipoli, the swamps of Mesopotamia, the Seven Seas will
give up their dead as witnesses.

We spoke bitterly of all these things and thought of them with raging
impotence; but the even tenor of our life went on. We continued to do
our obscure and undistinguished work for the country. It became a
habit, part of the day's routine. We almost forgot why we were doing
it. The war seemed to make li