tiful peacock and ivory room protested. Doggie's last night at
Denby Hall was a troubled one.

Aunt Sophia and Peggy accompanied him to London and stayed with him at
his stuffy little hotel off Bond Street, while Doggie got his kit
together. They bought everything in every West End shop that any
salesman assured them was essential for active service. Swords,
revolvers, field-glasses, pocket-knives (for gigantic pockets),
compasses, mess-tins, cooking-batteries, sleeping-bags, waterproofs,
boots innumerable, toilet accessories, drinking-cups, thermos flasks,
field stationery cases, periscopes, tinted glasses, Gieve waistcoats,
cholera belts, portable medicine cases, earplugs, tin-openers,
corkscrews, notebooks, pencils, luminous watches, electric torches,
pins, housewives, patent seat walking-sticks--everything that the man
of commercial instincts had devised for the prosecution of the war.

The amount of warlike equipment with which Doggie, with the aid of his
Aunt Sophia and Peggy, encumbered the narrow little passages of
Sturrocks's Hotel, must have weighed about a ton.

At last Doggie's uniforms--several suits--came home. He had devoted
enormous care to their fit. Attired in one he looked beautiful. Peggy
decreed a dinner at the Carlton. She and Doggie alone. Her mother
could get some stuffy old relation to spend the evening with her at
Sturrocks's. She wanted Doggie all to herself, so as to realize the
dream of many disgusting and humiliating months. And as she swept
through the palm court and up the broad stairs and wound through the
crowded tables of the restaurant with the khaki-clad Doggie by her
side, she felt proud and uplifted. Here was her soldier whom she had
made. Her very own man in khaki.

"Dear old thing," she whispered, pressing his arm as they trekked to
their table. "Don't you feel glorious? Don't you feel as if you could
face the universe?"

Peggy drank one glass of the quart of champagne. Doggie drank the
rest.

On getting into bed he wondered why this unprecedented quantity of
wine had not affected his sobriety. Its only effect had been to stifle
thought. He went to bed and slept happily, for Peggy's parting kiss
had been such as would conduce to any young man's felicity.

The next morning Aunt Sophia and Peggy saw him off to his depot, with
his ton of luggage. He leaned out of the carriage window and exchanged
hand kisses with Peggy until the curve of the line cut her off. Then
he settle