he dropped recklessly
onto the wet pine needles at her feet, and spoke with imbecile delight
again of nature--of how wonderful were its protean manifestations, and
how its beauties were not meant to be enjoyed alone but in mystic
communion with another who understood.

It was curious, too, but this stuff seemed to appeal to her, some
commonplace chord within her evidently responding. She sighed and
looked at the mountains. They really were miracles of colour--masses
of purest cobalt, now, along the horizon.

But perhaps the trite things they uttered did not really matter;
probably it made no difference to them what they said. And even if he
had murmured: "There are milestones along the road to Dover," she
might have responded: "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe";
and neither of them would have heard anything at all except the rapid,
confused, and voiceless conversation of two youthful human hearts
beating out endless questions and answers that never moved their
smiling lips. There was the mystery, if any--the constant wireless
current under the haphazard flow of words.

There was no wind in the pines; meadow and pasture, woodland and swale
stretched away at their feet to the distant, dark-blue hills. And all
around them hung the rain-washed fragrance of midsummer under a still,
cloudless sky.

"It seems impossible that there can be war anywhere in the world," she
said.

"You know," he began, "it's getting on my nerves the way those swine
from the Rhine are turning this decent green world into a bloody
wallow! Unless we do something about it pretty soon, I think I'll go
over."

She looked up:

"Where?"

"To France."

She remained silent for a while, merely lifting her dark eyes to him
at intervals; then she grew preoccupied with other thoughts that left
her brows bent slightly inward and her mouth very grave.

He gazed reflectively out over the fields and woods:

"Yes, I can't stand it much longer," he mused aloud.

"What would you do there?" she inquired.

"Anything. I could drive a car. But if they'll take me in some
Canadian unit--or one of the Foreign Legions--it would suit me.... You
know a man can't go on just living in the world while this beastly
business continues--can't go on eating and sleeping and shaving and
dressing as though half of civilisation were not rolling in agony and
blood, stabbed through and through----"

His voice caught--he checked himself and slowly passed his han