saying about him.
He imagined meeting people whom he knew, in the Brunford streets, and
the greeting they would give him. He knew it would be a great
home-coming, and yet he had a heavy heart.

It was several months now since he had left Brunford, and he could not
help reflecting on the change that had taken place in him. He still
wore a private's uniform, and carried the mud of the trenches on his
clothes. But the Tom Pollard who had enlisted at the Mechanics'
Institute was not the same lad who now made his way to his Lancashire
home. Since then he had been through strange scenes, and had realised
wonderful experiences. New facts and new forces had come into his
life; day by day he had been face to face with death, and this had led
him to touch the very core of life. Thoughts which were unknown to him
a year before now possessed his being; powers of which he had never
dreamed had been called into life.

Tom could not put these things into words, he didn't even clearly
realise them, but he knew that he was different. The very thought that
he had looked into the face of death made him realise the wondrousness
of life. Tom did not feel that he had been a hero, and yet he knew
that the life he had been living, and the work he had been doing,
especially during the last few months, had called qualities, which lay
latent in his being, into life and action. The war had not made him a
different man, it had only aroused dormant qualities within him. The
fires through which he had passed had cleansed him, and he knew that
life would never be the same again. But more than all that, he, like
thousands of others, had learnt the great secret of life, and realised
that it was only by opening his life to the Eternal Life that the
highest manhood could be known.

And yet he was strangely dissatisfied. He had read his mother's letter
telling him that Alice Lister was engaged to Harry Briarfield, and his
heart was very sore at the thought of it. Never before had he realised
the meaning of the choice he had made, when more than a year before he
had left Alice to walk out with Polly Powell. "And yet I loved Alice
all the time," he reflected, as the train rushed northward. "I never
knew how I did love her till now. I must have been mad and worse than
mad!"

For a long time he had ceased to care for Polly Powell; when he was in
Surrey his mother's letter had opened his eyes to the kind of girl she
really was. He saw her