the Embankment. The
exercise, such as it was, dulled his senses and quieted a little the
tumult of his mind. He found himself thinking of other things. The men
to-day in his Club had been discussing the possibility of war, they had
been planning what they would do; instinctively, since the thought of
Joan and the scene he had just left were too tender for much probing,
his mind turned to that. As he stamped along he resolved, without
thinking very deeply about it, that he would volunteer for active
service, and speculated on the possibility of his getting taken on at
once.

"Doctors will be very needful in this war," one man had said at the
Club.

"Yes, by Gad," another had answered. "We have got some devilish
contrivances these days for killing our brother men."

Looked at from that point of view, the idea seemed strange, and Dick
caught his breath on the thought. What would war mean? Hundreds of men
would be killed--hundreds, why it would be more like thousands. He had
read descriptions of the South African war, he had talked with men who
had been all through it.

"We doctors see the awful side of war, I can tell you," an old doctor
had once told him. "To the others it may seem flags flying, drums
beating, and a fine uplifting spectacle; but we see the horrors, the
shattered bodies, the eyes that pray for death. It's a ghastly affair."

And yet there was something in the thought which flamed at Dick's heart
and made him throw his head up. It was the beating of drums, the call of
the bugles that he heard as he thought of it; the blood tingled in his
veins, he forgot that other pain which had driven him forth so restless
a short hour ago.

The great dark waters of the river had some special message to give him
this evening. He stood for a little watching them; lights flamed along
the Embankment, the bridges lay across the intervening darkness like
coloured lanterns fastened on a string. Over on the other side he could
see the trees of Battersea Park, and beyond that again the huddled pile
of houses and wharfs and warehouses that crowded down to the water's
edge. He was suddenly aware, as he stood there, of a passionate love for
this old, grey city, this slow-moving mass of dark waters. It symbolized
something which the thought of war had stirred awake in his heart. He
had a hot sense of love and pride and pity all mingled, he felt somehow
as if the city were his, and as if an enemy's hand had been stretched
out