eople cannot sit next one another at dinner for long
without letting some course get cold. Unless one of them happens to be
dumb. . . .

But were they totally incompatible? That seemed to be the crux of the
whole matter. To the soldiers, pulling together, unselfishness,
grinning when the sky is black, that is the new philosophy. One
hesitates to call it new. It existed once, we are given to
understand--or at any rate it was preached and practised in days gone
by. Since then it has become unfashionable. . . .

And what about _les autres_--who have kept the home fires burning? For
a moment Vane stopped and stared in front of him; then he laughed
aloud. As has been said, he was jangled--so perhaps he may be forgiven.

It was on the other side of the dunes that he suddenly found Margaret.
She had her back towards him as he came over the top, and in the sand
his footsteps made no noise. And so she continued her pursuit of
throwing stones at a bottle a few yards away, in ignorance of the fact
that she had an audience. It is a lazy occupation at the best of times
and her rendering of it was no exception to the rule. For whole
minutes on end she would sit quite still gazing out to sea; and then,
as if suddenly realising her slackness, she would continue the
bombardment furiously.

For a while Vane watched her thoughtfully. Was she the answer? To go
right away with her somewhere--right away from the crowd and the strife
of existence: to be with her always, watching her grow from the wife to
the mother, seeing her with his children, feeling that she was his and
no one else's. God! but to think of the peace of it. . . .

He watched the soft tendrils of hair curling under the brim of her hat;
the play of her body as she picked up the stones and threw them.
Around him the coarse grass bent slightly in the breeze and the murmur
of the sea came faintly over the dunes. Away in front of him stretched
the sand, golden in the warm sun, the surface broken every now and then
by the dark brown wooden groins. Not a soul was in sight, and save for
some gulls circling round they two seemed the only living things. . . .
With a sudden smile he stooped down and picked up a stone--several, in
fact, and fired a volley. There was a tinkling noise, and the bottle
fell. Then he waited for her to look round. For just a little while
there was silence, and then she turned towards him with a smile. . . .
And in that moment it seem