o hopelessly futile to Vane. He began to feel that only
over the water lay Reality; that here, at home, he had discovered a
Land of Wild Imaginings. . . .

Though he refused to admit it to himself, there was another, even more
potent, factor to account for his restlessness. Like most Englishmen,
however black the outlook, however delirious the Imagining, he had,
deep down in his mind, the ingrained conviction that the country would
muddle through somehow. But the other factor--the personal
factor--Joan, was very different. Try as he would he could not dismiss
her from his mind entirely. Again and again the thought of her came
back to torment him, and he began to chafe more and more at his forced
inaction. Where large numbers of officers are continually passing
through a depot, doing light duty while recovering from wounds, there
can be nothing much for the majority to do. Twice he had begun a
letter to Margaret, to tell her that after all she had been right--that
it had been nervous tension--that it wasn't her after all. And twice
he had torn it up after the first few lines. It wasn't fair, he
pacified his conscience, to worry her when she was so busy. He could
break it far more easily by degrees--when he saw her. And so the
restlessness grew, and the disinclination to do anything but sit in the
mess and read the papers. His arm was still too stiff for tennis, and
the majority of the local people bored him to extinction. Occasionally
he managed to get ten minutes' work to do that was of some use to
somebody; after that his time was his own.

One day he tried his hand at an essay, but he found that the old easy
style which had been his principal asset had deserted him. It was
stiff and pedantic, and what was worse--bitter; and he tore it up
savagely after he had read it through. He tried desperately to recover
some of his old time optimism--and he failed. He told himself again
and again that it was up to him to see big, to believe in the future,
and he cursed himself savagely for not being able to.

There was a woman whom he had met at lunch on one of his periodical
visits to London. She was a war widow, and a phrase she had used to
him rang in his brain for many days after. It seemed to him to express
so wonderfully the right feeling, the feeling which in another form he
was groping after.

"It wouldn't do," she had said very simply, "for the Germans to get a
'double casualty.'" It was the sort of