ghts, but mysteriously and from
somewhere a long way off.

* * * * *

She turned to nod and smile at Frances who was coming through the door
with her basket, and it was then that she saw Nicholas.

He stood on something that looked like a low wall, raised between her
and the ash-tree; he stood motionless, as if arrested in the act of
looking back to see if she were following him. His eyes shone, vivid and
blue, as they always shone when he was happy. He smiled at her, but
with no movement of his mouth. He shouted to her, but with no sound.

Everything was still; her body and her soul were still; her heart was
still; it beat steadily.

She had started forwards to go to him when the tree thrust itself
between them, and he was gone.

And Frances was still coming through the door as Veronica had seen her
when she turned. She was calling to her to come in out of the sun.

XXIV

The young men had gone--Morton Ellis, who had said he was damned if he'd
fight for his country; and Austin Mitchell who had said he hadn't got a
country; and Monier-Owen, who had said that England was not a country
you could fight for. George Wadham had gone long ago. That, Michael
said, was to be expected. Even a weak gust could sweep young Wadham off
his feet--and he had been fairly carried away. He could no more resist
the vortex of the War than he could resist the vortex of the arts.

Michael had two pitiful memories of the boy: one of young Wadham
swaggering into Stephen's room in uniform (the first time he had it on),
flushed and pleased with himself and talking excitedly about the "Great
Game"; and one of young Wadham returned from the Front, mature and hard,
not talking about the "Great Game" at all, and wincing palpably when
other people talked; a young Wadham who, they said, ought to be arrested
under the Defence of the Realm Act as a quencher of war-enthusiasms.

The others had gone later, one by one, each with his own gesture:
Mitchell and Monier-Owen when Stephen went; Ellis the day after
Stephen's death. It had taken Stephen's death to draw him.

Only Michael remained.

He told them they were mistaken if they thought their going would
inspire him to follow them. It, and Stephen's death, merely intensified
the bitterness he felt towards the War. He was more than ever determined
to keep himself pure from it, consecrated to his Forlorn Hope. If they
fell back, all the more reason why be shoul