ful for it? In this
world of agony and death, twelve days of life at its fullest is of more
account than a long lifetime of unrecognized benefits and indefinite
happiness."

Meg agreed that the war had taught people to be thankful for what
seemed to her pitifully small mercies; people married for ten days or
for a fortnight at the longest, knowing that for that little time of
forgetfulness their husbands were among the quick; at the end of it
they might be among the dead.

"Then, if I can get a special licence to-morrow, will you marry me the
day after? If I may go back to the Front as your husband, Meg, I think
I can win the war. My life will be more charmed than ever." He
laughed gaily. "What will the boys say? I'm the only one in the
trench who doesn't write to about six girls every day, telling each one
that she is the only girl he loves."

Margaret's answer was in her laugh, which was all love, and in the lips
she held up to meet Michael's kiss. "And it's proud I'll be to be Mrs.
Amory!" she said. "And ye can tell the boys that, if you like." She
broke off suddenly from her mock Irish tones, and said more gravely,
"Isn't it wonderful? Only an hour ago I was alone in London, so lonely
that the very flowers hurt me! I hated the spring in the year--it
laughed at my dull room and humdrum existence. And now----"

"And now," he said, "you are going to be a soldier's wife, you are
going to marry a verminous Tommy in two days' time, you darling!"

Meg looked at her own dark uniform. "I don't see even one," she said,
"but I'll have to be careful. I'll change when I go in. Are you
really as bad as that?"

"I tried to clean myself up a bit," he said. "But I have been awful.
That's the thing I hate most about the whole business. I've got used
to all the other discomforts long ago, and to everything else."

"Even to the killing of human beings, Mike?"

"Yes," he said. "Even to the killing of brave men. I know what you're
saying to yourself--I thought that too, I thought it would send me mad,
I longed to kill myself to get out of it. But, in an attack, when
you've seen your own jolly pals, who have lived in the trenches with
you, bleeding and tattered, spatchcocked against barbed wire, and had
to leave them sticking to it, their eyes haunt you, your blood gets up,
you long for a hundred hands to shoot with, instead of only two. When
you've seen the result of Prussian militarism on decent German
sol