e. It was so when we were
children together. Now I've grown very fond of Peggy. Put on the right
track, she might turn into a very fine woman."

"I don't think we need discuss Peggy, Oliver," said Marmaduke.

"I do. She is sticking to you very loyally." Oliver was a bit of an
idealist. "The time may come when she'll be up the devil's own tree.
She'll develop a patriotic conscience. If she sticks to you while you
do nothing she'll be miserable. If she chucks you, as she probably
will, she'll be no happier. It's all up to you, James Doggie
Marmaduke, old son. You'll have to gird up your loins and take sword
and buckler and march away like the rest. I don't want Peggy to be
unhappy. I want her to marry a man. That's why I proposed to take you
out with me to Huaheine and try to make you one. But that's over. Now,
here's the real chance. Better take it sooner than later. You'll have
to be a soldier, Doggie."

His pipe not drawing, he was preparing to dig it with the point of a
dessert-knife, when Doggie interposed hurriedly.

"For goodness' sake, don't do that! It makes cold shivers run down my
back!"

Oliver looked at him oddly, put the extinct pipe in his dinner-jacket
pocket and rose.

"A flaw in the dainty and divine ordering of things makes you shiver
now, old Doggie. What will you do when you see a fellow digging out
another fellow's intestines with the point of a bayonet? A bigger flaw
there somehow!"

"Don't talk like that. You make me sick," said Doggie.

CHAPTER VI

During the next few months there happened terrible and marvellous
things, which are all set down in the myriad chronicles of the time;
which shook the world and brought the unknown phenomenon of change
into the Close of Durdlebury. Folks of strange habit and speech walked
in it, and, gazing at the Gothic splendour of the place, saw through
the mist of autumn and the mist of tears not Durdlebury but Louvain.
More than one of those grey houses flanking the cathedral and sharing
with it the continuity of its venerable life, was a house of mourning;
not for loss in the inevitable and not unkindly way of human destiny
as understood and accepted with long disciplined resignation--but for
loss sudden, awful, devastating; for the gallant lad who had left it
but a few weeks before, with a smile on his lips, and a new and
dancing light of manhood in his eyes, now with those eyes unclosed and
glazed staring at the pitiless Flanders sky. Not one