ng to
feel oneself alive?"

But poor Doggie of the flabby muscles felt half dead.

* * * * *

The fateful letter burdening Doggie with the King's commission arrived
a few weeks later: a second lieutenancy in a Fusilier battalion of the
New Army. Dates and instructions were given. The impress of the Royal
Arms at the head of the paper, with its grotesque perky lion and
unicorn, conveyed to Doggie a sense of the grip of some uncanny power.
The typewritten words scarcely mattered. The impress fascinated him.
There was no getting away from it. Those two pawing beasts held him in
their clutch. They headed a Death Warrant, from which there was no
appeal.

Doggie put his house in order, dismissed with bounty those of his
servants who would be no longer needed, and kept the Peddles, husband
and wife, to look after his interests. On his last night at home he
went wistfully through the familiar place, the drawing-room sacred to
his mother's memory, the dining-room so solid in its half-century of
comfort, his own peacock and ivory room so intensely himself, so
expressive of his every taste, every mood, every emotion. Those
strange old-world musical instruments--he could play them all with the
touch or breath of a master and a lover. The old Italian theorbo. He
took it up. How few to-day knew its melodious secret! He looked
around. All these daintinesses and prettinesses had a meaning. They
signified the magical little beauties of life--things which asserted a
range of spiritual truths, none the less real and consolatory because
vice and crime and ugliness and misery and war co-existed in ghastly
fact on other facets of the planet Earth. The sweetness here expressed
was as essential to the world's spiritual life as the sweet elements
of foodstuffs to its physical life. To the getting together of all
these articles of beauty he had devoted the years of his youth....
And--another point of view--was he not the guardian by inheritance--in
other words, by Divine Providence--of this beautiful English home, the
trustee of English comfort, of the sacred traditions of sweet English
life that had made England the only country, the only country, he
thought, that could call itself a Country and not a Compromise, in the
world?

And he was going to leave it all. All that it meant in beauty and
dignity and ease of life. For what?

For horror and filthiness and ugliness, for everything against which
his beau