e as new as it was delightful. Hitherto,
as far as any real fellowship was concerned he had lived a life of
comparative isolation among his fellow officers, and while they were
careful to preserve the conventions and courtesies imposed by their
mutual relations, he had ever been made to feel that in that circle he
was an outsider.

Among the officers who came to call upon him, none surprised him more
than did Major Bayne. While that officer had always been careful to
maintain an attitude toward him, at once correct and civil, there had
never been any approach to friendliness. As a matter of fact, Major
Bayne was too entirely occupied with his own interests to have either
the leisure or the inclination for anything but a casual concern for the
chaplain and his affairs. That was not to be wondered at. Life in the
army, notwithstanding all its loyalties and its fine unselfishnesses,
is, in some of its phases, a brutally self-centred form of existence.
Its routine consists in the continual performance of "duties" under an
authority ruthless in its exactions and relentless in its penalties.
Only after months of experience of its iron rigidity does the civilian,
accustomed as he is to self-determination, with a somewhat easygoing
regard for the conventions of his community, arrive at the state of mind
in which unconsciously and as a matter of second nature he estimates the
quality of the most trivial act by its relation to the standard set by
the Military High Command. Like a spectre does that solemn, impalpable,
often perfectly unreasonable omniscient and omnipotent entity lurk in
the shadow ready to reach out a clutching hand, and for some infraction
of regulations, wilful or inadvertent, hale the luckless and shivering
defaulter to judgment. It therefore behooves a man to take heed to
himself and to his ways, for, with the best intention, he may discover
that he has been guilty of an infraction, not of a regulation found in
K. R. & O., with which he has painfully made himself familiar and which
he has diligently exercised himself to observe, but of one of those
seventeen hundred and sixty-nine "instructions" and "informations" which
from time to time have appeared in those sacred writings known as Army,
Divisional, Brigade, or Battalion Orders.

In consequence, an officer with a conscience toward his duty, or an
ambition for promotion, gives himself so completely to the business of
"watching his step" that only by a defin