left lying
between the lines?"

"With a good many others, English and German.

"There was a fellow near me that hadn't a scratch. He was
frightened--mad with fear: he lay up in the long grass and wept
most of the day. I never hated any one so much in my life. I
could have shot him with pleasure."

"German, of course?"

Hyde smiled. "German, of course."

"If he had been English he would have deserved to be shot," said
Isabel briefly: then, reverting to a subject in which she was far
more deeply interested, "Rowsley--my second brother--said I
wasn't to cross-examine you: but it was a great temptation,
because one never can get anything out of Val. And after all
we've the right to be proud of him! Even then, when every one
was so brave, you would say, wouldn't you, that Val earned his
distinction? It really was what the Gazette called it, 'conspicuous
gallantry'?"

"It was a daring piece of work," said Lawrence, reddening to his
hair. He fought down a sensation so unfamiliar that he could
scarcely put a name to it, and forced himself on: "We were all proud
of him and we none of us forget it. Don't tell him I said so,
though. It isn't etiquette. You won't think I'm trying to minimize
what Val did, will you, if I say that we who were through the
fighting saw so many horrible and ghastly things . . ." Again his
voice failed. He was aware of Isabel's bewilderment, but he was
seeing more ghosts than he had seen in all the intervening years of
peace, and they came between him and the sunlit landscape and
Isabel's young eyes. War! always war! human bodies torn to rags in a
moment, and the flowers of the field wet with a darker moisture than
rain: the very smell of the trenches was in his nostrils, their odour
of blood and decay. What in heaven's name had brought it all back,
and, stranger still, what had moved him to speak of it and to betray
feelings whose very existence was unknown to him and which he had
never betrayed before?

The silence was brief though to Lawrence it seemed endless. He
drove the ghosts back to quarters and finished quietly: "Well, we
won't talk about that, it's not a pleasant subject. Only give
Val my love and tell him if he doesn't look me up soon I shall
come and call on him. We're much too old friends to stand on
ceremony."

"All right, I will," said Isabel.

There was a shrub of juniper close by, and she felt under its
sharp branches. "Do you like honeysuckle?" She held