"But a hundred thousand isn't enough for garrison duty," I persisted.

"A hundred thousand sound men, not sick boys, go quite a way," said Pigeon.

"We expect the Line to garrison the Mediterranean Ports and thereabouts," said Bayley. "Don't sneer at the mechanic. He's deuced good stuff. He isn't rudely ordered out, because this ain't a military despotism, and we have to consider people's feelings. The Armity usually brackets three Line regiments together, and calls for men for six months or a year for Malta, Gib, or elsewhere, at a bob a day. Three battalions will give you nearly a whole battalion of bachelors between 'em. You fill up deficiencies with a call on the territorial Volunteer battalion, and away you go with what we call a Ports battalion. What's astonishing in that? Remember that in this country, where fifty per cent of the able-bodied males have got a pretty fair notion of soldiering, and, which is more, have all camped out in the open, you wake up the spirit of adventure in the young."

"Not much adventure at Malta, Gib, or Cyprus," I retorted. "Don't they get sick of it?"

"But you don't realise that we treat 'em rather differently from the soldier of the past. You ought to go and see a Ports battalion drawn from a manufacturing centre growin' vines in Cyprus in its shirt sleeves; and at Gib, and Malta, of course, the battalions are working with the Fleet half the time."

"It seems to me," I said angrily, "you are knocking esprit de corps on the head with all this Army-Navy jumble. It's as bad as——"

"I know what you're going to say. As bad as what Kitchener used to do when he believed that a thousand details picked up on the veldt were as good as a column of two regiments. In the old days, when drill was a sort of holy sacred art learned in old age, you'd be quite right. But remember our chaps are broke to drill from childhood, and the theory we work on is that a thousand trained Englishmen ought to be about as good as another thousand trained Englishmen. We've enlarged our horizon, that's all. Some day the Army and the Navy will be interchangeable."

"You've enlarged it enough to fall out of, I think. Now where in all this mess of compulsory Volunteers——?"

"My dear boy, there's no compulsion. You've got to be drilled when you're a child, same as you've got to learn to read, and if you don't pretend to serve in some corps or other till you're thirty-five or medically chucked you rank with lunatics, women, and minors. That's fair enough."

"Compulsory conscripts," I continued. "Where, as I was going to say, does the Militia come in?"

"As I have said—for the men who can't afford volunteering. The Militia is recruited by ballot—pretty comprehensively too. Volunteers are exempt, but most men not otherwise accounted for are bagged by the Militia. They have to put in a minimum three weeks' camp every other year, and they get fifteen bob a week and their keep when they're at it, and some sort of a yearly fee, I've forgotten how much. 'Tisn't a showy service, but it's very useful. It keeps the mass of the men between twenty-five, say, and thirty-five moderately fit, and gives the Armity an excuse for having more equipment ready—in case of emergencies."

"I don't think you're quite fair on the Militia," drawled Verschoyle. "They're better than we give 'em credit for. Don't you remember the Middle Moor Collieries' strike?"

"Tell me," I said quickly. Evidently the others knew.

"We-ell, it was no end of a pitman's strike about eight years ago. There were twenty-five thousand men involved—Militia, of course. At the end of the first month—October—when things were looking rather blue, one of those clever Labour leaders got hold of the Militia Act and discovered that any Militia regiment could, by a two-thirds vote, go on 'heef' in a Military Area in addition to its usual biennial camp. Two-and-twenty battalions of Geordies solemnly applied, and they were turned loose into the Irish and Scotch Areas under an I.G. Brigadier who had private instructions to knock clinkers out of 'em. But the pitman is a strong and agile bird. He throve on snowdrifts and entrenching and draggin' guns through heather. He was being fed and clothed for nothing, besides having a chance of making head-money, and his strike-pay was going clear to his wife and family. You see? Wily man. But wachtabittje! When that 'heef' finished in December the strike was still on. Then that same Labour leader found out, from the same Act, that if at any time more than thirty or forty men of a Militia regiment wished to volunteer to do sea-time and study big guns in the Fleet they were in no wise to be discouraged, but were to be taken on as opportunity offered and paid a bob a day. Accordingly, about January, Geordie began volunteering for sea- time—seven and eight hundred men out of each regiment. Anyhow, it made up seventeen thousand men! It was a splendid chance and the Armity jumped at it. The Home and Channel Fleets and the North Sea and Cruiser Squadrons were strengthened with lame ducks from the Fleet Reserve, and between 'em with a little stretching and pushing they accommodated all of that young division."

"Yes, but you've forgotten how we lied to the Continent about it. All Europe wanted to know what the dooce we were at," said Boy Bayley, "and the wretched Cabinet had to stump the country in the depths of winter explaining our new system of poor-relief. I beg your pardon, Verschoyle."

"The Armity improvised naval manoeuvres between Gib and Land's End, with frequent coalings and landings; ending in a cruise round England that fairly paralysed the pitmen. The first day out they wanted the fleet stopped while they went ashore and killed their Labour leader, but they couldn't be obliged. Then they wanted to mutiny over the coaling—it was too like their own job. Oh, they had a lordly timel They came back—the combined Fleets anchored off Hull—with a nautical hitch to their breeches. They'd had a free fight at Gib with the Ports battalion there; they cleared out the town of Lagos; and they'd fought a pitched battle with the dockyard-mateys at Devonport. So they'd done 'emselves well, but they didn't want any more military life for a bit."

"And the strike?"

"That ended, all right enough, when the strike-money came to an end. The pit-owners were furious. They said the Armity had wilfully prolonged the strike, and asked questions in the House. The Armity said that they had taken advantage of the crisis to put a six months' polish on fifteen thousand fine young men, and if the masters cared to come out on the same terms they'd be happy to do the same by them."

"And then?"

"Palaver done set," said Bayley. "Everybody laughed."

"I don't quite understand about this sea-time business," I said. "Is the Fleet open to take any regiment aboard?"

"Rather. The I.G. must, the Line can, the Militia may, and the Volunteers do put in sea-time. The Coast Volunteers began it, and the fashion is spreading inland. Under certain circumstances, as Verschoyle told you, a Volunteer or Militia regiment can vote whether it 'heefs' wet or dry. If it votes wet and has influence (like some F.S. corps), it can sneak into the Channel or the Home Fleet and do a cruise round England or to Madeira or the North Sea. The regiment, of course, is distributed among the ships, and the Fleet dry nurse 'em. It rather breaks up shore discipline, but it gives the inland men a bit of experience, and, of course, it gives us a fairish supply of men behind the gun, in event of any strain on the Fleet. Some coast corps make a specialty of it, and compete for embarking and disembarking records. I believe some of the Tyneside engineerin' corps put ten per cent of their men through the Fleet engine rooms. But there's no need to stay talking here all the afternoon. Come and see the I.G. in his lair—the miserable conscript driven up to the colours at the point of the bayonet."

PART II

The great hall was emptying apace as the clocks struck two, and we passed out through double doors into a huge reading and smoking room, blue with tobacco and buzzing with voices.

"We're quieter as a rule," said the Boy. "But we're filling up vacancies to-day. Hence the anxious faces of the Line and Militia. Look!" There were four tables against the walls, and at each stood a crowd of uniforms. The centres of disturbance were noncommissioned officers who, seated, growled and wrote down names.

"Come to my table," said Burgard. "Well, Purvis, have you ear-marked our little lot?"

"I've been tellin' 'em for the last hour we've only twenty-three vacancies," was the sergeant's answer. "I've taken nearly fifty for Trials, and this is what's left." Burgard smiled.

"I'm very sorry," he said to the crowd, "but C Company's full."

"Excuse me, Sir," said a man, "but wouldn't sea-time count in my favour? I've put in three months with the Fleet. Small quick-firers, Sir? Company guns? Any sort of light machinery?"

"Come away," said a voice behind. "They've chucked the best farrier between Hull and Dewsbury. Think they'll take you an' your potty quick- firers?"

The speaker turned on his heel and swore.

"Oh, damn the Guard, by all means!" said Sergeant Purvis, collecting his papers. "D'you suppose it's any pleasure to me to reject chaps of your build and make? Vote us a second Guard battalion and we'll accommodate you. Now, you can come into Schools and watch Trials if you like."

Most of the men accepted his invitation, but a few walked away angrily. I followed from the smoking-room across a wide corridor into a riding- school, under whose roof the voices of the few hundred assembled wandered in lost echoes.

"I'll leave you, if you don't mind," said Burgard. "Company officers aren't supposed to assist at these games. Here, Matthews!" He called to a private and put me in his charge.

In the centre of the vast floor my astonished eyes beheld a group of stripped men; the pink of their bodies startling the tan.

"These are our crowd," said Matthews. "They've been vetted, an' we're putting 'em through their paces."

"They don't look a bit like raw material," I said.

"No, we don't use either raw men or raw meat for that matter in the Guard," Matthews replied. "Life's too short."

Purvis stepped forward and barked in the professional manner. It was physical drill of the most searching, checked only when he laid his hand over some man's heart.

Six or seven, I noticed, were sent back at this stage of the game. Then a cry went up from a group of privates standing near the line of contorted figures. "White, Purvis, white! Number Nine is spitting white!"

"I know it," said Purvis. "Don't you worry."

"Unfair!" murmured the man who understood quick-firers. "If I couldn't shape better than that I'd hire myself out to wheel a perambulator. He's cooked."

"Nah," said the intent Matthews. "He'll answer to a month's training like a horse. It's only suet. You've been training for this, haven't you?"

"Look at me," said the man simply.

"Yes. You're overtrained," was Matthews' comment. "The Guard isn't a circus."

"Guns!" roared Purvis, as the men broke off and panted. "Number off from the right. Fourteen is one, three is two, eleven's three, twenty and thirty-nine are four and five, and five is six." He was giving them their numbers at the guns as they struggled into their uniforms. In like manner he told off three other guncrews, and the remainder left at the double, to return through the further doors with four light quick-firers jerking at the end of man-ropes.

"Knock down and assemble against time!" Purvis called.

The audience closed in a little as the crews flung themselves on the guns, which melted, wheel by wheel, beneath their touch.

"I've never seen anything like this," I whispered.

"Huh!" said Matthews scornfully. "They're always doin' it in the Line and Militia drill-halls. It's only circus-work."

The guns were assembled again and some one called the time. Then followed ten minutes of the quickest firing and feeding with dummy cartridges that was ever given man to behold.

"They look as if they might amount to something—this draft," said Matthews softly.

"What might you teach 'em after this, then?" I asked.

"To be Guard," said Matthews.

"Spurs," cried Purvis, as the guns disappeared through the doors into the stables. Each man plucked at his sleeve, and drew up first one heel and then the other.

"What the deuce are they doing?" I asked.

"This," said Matthews. He put his hand to a ticket-pocket inside his regulation cuff, showed me two very small black box-spurs: drawing up a gaitered foot, he snapped them into the box in the heel, and when I had inspected snapped them out again.

"That's all the spur you really need," he said.

Then horses were trotted out into the school barebacked, and the neophytes were told to ride.

Evidently the beasts knew the game and enjoyed it, for they would not make it easy for the men.

A heap of saddlery was thrown in a corner, and from this each man, as he captured his mount, made shift to draw proper equipment, while the audience laughed, derided, or called the horses towards them.

It was, most literally, wild horseplay, and by the time it was finished the recruits and the company were weak with fatigue and laughter.

"That'll do," said Purvis, while the men rocked in their saddles. "I don't see any particular odds between any of you. C Company! Does anybody here know anything against any of these men?"

"That's a bit of the Regulations," Matthews whispered. "Just like forbiddin' the banns in church. Really, it was all settled long ago when the names first came up."

There was no answer.

"You'll take 'em as they stand?"

There was a grunt of assent.

"Very good. There's forty men for twenty-three billets." He turned to the sweating horsemen. "I must put you into the Hat."

With great ceremony and a shower of company jokes that I did not follow, an enormous Ally Sloper top-hat was produced, into which numbers and blanks were dropped, and the whole was handed round to the riders by a private, evidently the joker of C Company.

Matthews gave me to understand that each company owned a cherished receptacle (sometimes not a respectable one) for the papers of the final drawing. He was telling me how his company had once stolen the Sacred Article used by D Company for this purpose and of the riot that followed, when through the west door of the schools entered a fresh detachment of stripped men, and the arena was flooded with another company.

Said Matthews as we withdrew, "Each company does Trials their own way. B Company is all for teaching men how to cook and camp. D Company keeps 'em to horse-work mostly. We call D the circus-riders and B the cooks. They call us the Gunners."

"An' you've rejected me," said the man who had done sea-time, pushing out before us. "The Army's goin' to the dogs."

I stood in the corridor looking for Burgard.

"Come up to my room and have a smoke," said Matthews, private of the Imperial Guard.

We climbed two flights of stone stairs ere we reached an immense landing flanked with numbered doors.

Matthews pressed a spring-latch and led me into a little cabin-like room. The cot was a standing bunk, with drawers beneath. On the bed lay a brilliant blanket; by the bed head was an electric light and a shelf of books: a writing table stood in the window, and I dropped into a low wicker chair.

"This is a cut above subaltern's quarters," I said, surveying the photos, the dhurri on the floor, the rifle in its rack, the field-kit hung up behind the door, and the knicknacks on the walls.

"The Line bachelors use 'em while we're away; but they're nice to come back to after 'heef.'" Matthews passed me his cigarette-case.

"Where have you 'heefed'?" I said.

"In Scotland, Central Australia, and North-Eastern Rhodesia and the North- West Indian front."

"What's your service?"

"Four years. I'll have to go in a year. I got in when I was twenty-two—by a fluke—from the Militia direct—on Trials."

"Trials like those we just saw?"

"Not so severe. There was less competition then. I hoped to get my stripes, but there's no chance."

"Why?"

"I haven't the knack of handling men. Purvis let me have a half-company for a month in Rhodesia—over towards Lake N'Garni. I couldn't work 'em properly. It's a gift."

"Do colour-sergeants handle half-companies with you?"

"They can command 'em on the 'heef.' We've only four company officers— Burgard, Luttrell, Kyd, and Harrison. Pigeon's our swop, and he's in charge of the ponies. Burgard got his company on the 'heef,' You see Burgard had been a lieutenant in the Line, but he came into the Guards on Trials like the men. He could command. They tried him in India with a wing of the battalion for three months. He did well so he got his company. That's what made me hopeful. But it's a gift, you see—managing men—and so I'm only a senior private. They let ten per cent of us stay on for two years extra after our three are finished—to polish the others."

"Aren't you even a corporal?"

"We haven't corporals, or lances for that matter, in the Guard. As a senior private I'd take twenty men into action; but one Guard don't tell another how to clean himself. You've learned that before you apply. ... Come in!"

There was a knock at the door, and Burgard entered, removing his cap.

"I thought you'd be here," he said, as Matthews vacated the other chair and sat on the bed. "Well, has Matthews told you all about it? How did our Trials go, Matthews?"

"Forty names in the Hat, Sir, at the finish. They'll make a fairish lot. Their gun-tricks weren't bad; but D company has taken the best horsemen— as usual."

"Oh, I'll attend to that on 'heef.' Give me a man who can handle company- guns and I'll engage to make him a horse-master. D company will end by thinkin' 'emselves Captain Pigeon's private cavalry some day."

I had never heard a private and a captain talking after this fashion, and my face must have betrayed my astonishment, for Burgard said:

"These are not our parade manners. In our rooms, as we say in the Guard, all men are men. Outside we are officers and men."

"I begin to see," I stammered. "Matthews was telling me that sergeants handled half-companies and rose from the ranks—and I don't see that there are any lieutenants—and your companies appear to be two hundred and fifty strong. It's a shade confusing to the layman."

Burgard leaned forward didactically. "The Regulations lay down that every man's capacity for command must be tested to the uttermost. We construe that very literally when we're on the 'heef.' F'r instance, any man can apply to take the command next above him, and if a man's too shy to ask, his company officer must see that he gets his chance. A sergeant is given a wing of the battalion to play with for three weeks—a month, or six weeks—according to his capacity, and turned adrift in an Area to make his own arrangements. That's what Areas are for—and to experiment in. A good gunner—a private very often—has all four company-guns to handle through a week's fight, acting for the time as the major. Majors of Guard battalions (Verschoyle's our major) are supposed to be responsible for the guns, by the way. There's nothing to prevent any man who has the gift working his way up to the experimental command of the battalion on 'heef.' Purvis, my colour-sergeant, commanded the battalion for three months at the back of Coolgardie, an' very well he did it. Bayley 'verted to company officer for the time being an' took Harrison's company, and Harrison came over to me as my colour-sergeant. D'you see? Well, Purvis is down for a commission when there's a vacancy. He's been thoroughly tested, and we all like him. Two other sergeants have passed that three months' trial in the same way (just as second mates go up for extra master's certificate). They have E.C. after their names in the Army List. That shows they're capable of taking command in event of war. The result of our system is that you could knock out every single officer of a Guard battalion early in the day, and the wheels 'ud still go forward, not merely round. We're allowed to fill up half our commissioned list from the ranks direct. Now d'you see why there's such a rush to get into a Guard battalion?"

"Indeed I do. Have you commanded the regiment experimentally?"

"Oh, time and again," Burgard laughed. "We've all had our E.C. turn."

"Doesn't the chopping and changing upset the men?"

"It takes something to upset the Guard. Besides, they're all in the game together. They give each other a fair show you may be sure."

"That's true," said Matthews. "When I went to N'Gami with my—with the half-company," he sighed, "they helped me all they knew. But it's a gift— handling men. I found that out,"

"I know you did," said Burgard softly. "But you found it out in time, which is the great thing. You see," he turned to me, "with our limited strength we can't afford to have a single man who isn't more than up to any duty—in reason. Don't you be led away by what you saw at Trials just now. The Volunteers and the Militia have all the monkey-tricks of the trade—such as mounting and dismounting guns, and making fancy scores and doing record marches; but they need a lot of working up before they can pull their weight in the boat."

There was a knock at the door. A note was handed in. Burgard read it and smiled.

"Bayley wants to know if you'd care to come with us to the Park and see the kids. It's only a Saturday afternoon walk-round before the taxpayer.... Very good. If you'll press the button we'll try to do the rest."

He led me by two flights of stairs up an iron stairway that gave on a platform, not unlike a ship's bridge, immediately above the barrelled glass roof of the riding-school. Through a ribbed ventilator I could see B Company far below watching some men who chased sheep. Burgard unlocked a glass-fronted fire-alarm arrangement flanked with dials and speaking- tubes, and bade me press the centre button.

Next moment I should have fallen through the riding-school roof if he had not caught me; for the huge building below my feet thrilled to the multiplied purring of electric bells. The men in the school vanished like minnows before a shadow, and above the stamp of booted feet on staircases I heard the neighing of many horses.

"What in the world have I done?" I gasped.

"Turned out the Guard—horse, foot, and guns!"

A telephone bell rang imperiously. Burgard snatched up the receiver:

"Yes, Sir.... What, Sir?... I never heard they said that," he laughed, "but it would be just like 'em. In an hour and a half? Yes, Sir. Opposite the Statue? Yes, Sir."

He turned to me with a wink as he hung up.

"Bayley's playing up for you. Now you'll see some fun."

"Who's going to catch it?" I demanded.

"Only our local Foreign Service Corps. Its C.O. has been boasting that it's en tat de partir, and Bayley's going to take him at his word and have a kit-inspection this afternoon in the Park. I must tell their drill-hall. Look over yonder between that brewery chimney and the mansard roof!"

He readdressed himself to the telephone, and I kept my eye on the building to the southward. A Blue Peter climbed up to the top of the flagstaff that crowned it and blew out in the summer breeze. A black storm-cone followed.

"Inspection for F.S. corps acknowledged, Sir," said Burgard down the telephone. "Now we'd better go to the riding-school. The battalion falls in there. I have to change, but you're free of the corps. Go anywhere. Ask anything. In another ten minutes we're off."

I lingered for a little looking over the great city, its huddle of houses and the great fringe of the Park, all framed between the open windows of this dial-dotted eyrie.

When I descended the halls and corridors were as hushed as they had been noisy, and my feet echoed down the broad tiled staircases. On the third floor, Matthews, gaitered and armed, overtook me smiling.

"I thought you might want a guide," said he. "We've five minutes yet," and piloted me to the sunsplashed gloom of the riding-school. Three companies were in close order on the tan. They moved out at a whistle, and as I followed in their rear I was overtaken by Pigeon on a rough black mare.

"Wait a bit," he said, "till the horses are all out of stables, and come with us. D Company is the only one mounted just now. We do it to amuse the taxpayer," he explained, above the noise of horses on the tan.

"Where are the guns?" I asked, as the mare lipped my coat-collar.

"Gone ahead long ago. They come out of their own door at the back of barracks. We don't haul guns through traffic more than we can help.... If Belinda breathes down your neck smack her. She'll be quiet in the streets. She loves lookin' into the shop-windows."

The mounted company clattered through vaulted concrete corridors in the wake of the main body, and filed out into the crowded streets.

When I looked at the townsfolk on the pavement, or in the double-decked trams, I saw that the bulk of them saluted, not grudgingly or of necessity, but in a light-hearted, even flippant fashion.

"Those are Line and Militia men," said Pigeon. "That old chap in the top-hat by the lamp-post is an ex-Guardee. That's why he's saluting in slow-time. No, there's no regulation governing these things, but we've all fallen into the way of it somehow. Steady, mare!"

"I don't know whether I care about this aggressive militarism," I began, when the company halted, and Belinda almost knocked me down. Looking forward I saw the badged cuff of a policeman upraised at a crossing, his back towards us.

"Horrid aggressive, ain't we?" said Pigeon with a chuckle when we moved on again and overtook the main body. Here I caught the strains of the band, which Pigeon told me did not accompany the battalion on 'heef,' but lived in barracks and made much money by playing at parties in town.

"If we want anything more than drums and fifes on 'heef' we sing," said Pigeon. "Singin' helps the wind."

I rejoiced to the marrow of my bones thus to be borne along on billows of surging music among magnificent men, in sunlight, through a crowded town whose people, I could feel, regarded us with comradeship, affection—and more.

"By Jove," I said at last, watching the eyes about us, "these people are looking us over as if we were horses."

"Why not? They know the game."

The eyes on the pavement, in the trams, the cabs, at the upper windows, swept our lines back and forth with a weighed intensity of regard which at first seemed altogether new to me, till I recalled just such eyes, a thousand of them, at manoeuvres in the Channel when one crowded battleship drew past its sister at biscuit-toss range. Then I stared at the ground, overborne by those considering eyes.

Suddenly the music changed to the wail of the Dead March in "Saul," and once more—we were crossing a large square—the regiment halted.

"Damn!" said Pigeon, glancing behind him at the mounted company. "I believe they save up their Saturday corpses on purpose."

"What is it?" I asked.

"A dead Volunteer. We must play him through." Again I looked forward and saw the top of a hearse, followed by two mourning-coaches, boring directly up the halted regiment, which opened out company by company to let it through.

"But they've got the whole blessed square to funeralise in!" I exclaimed. "Why don't they go round?"

"Not so!" Pigeon replied. "In this city it's the Volunteer's perquisite to be played through by any corps he happens to meet on his way to the cemetery. And they make the most of it. You'll see."

I heard the order, "Rest on your arms," run before the poor little procession as the men opened out. The driver pulled the black Flanders beasts into a more than funeral crawl, and in the first mourning-coach I saw the tearful face of a fat woman (his mother, doubtless), a handkerchief pressed to one eye, but the other rolling vigilantly, alight with proper pride. Last came a knot of uniformed men—privates, I took it —of the dead one's corps.

Said a man in the crowd beside us to the girl on his arm, "There, Jenny! That's what I'll get if I 'ave the luck to meet 'em when my time comes."

"You an' your luck," she snapped. "'Ow can you talk such silly nonsense?"

"Played through by the Guard," he repeated slowly. "The undertaker 'oo could guarantee that, mark you, for all his customers—well, 'e'd monopolise the trade, is all I can say. See the horses passagin' sideways!"

"She done it a purpose," said the woman with a sniff.

"An' I only hope you'll follow her example. Just as long as you think I'll keep, too."

We reclosed when the funeral had left us twenty paces behind. A small boy stuck his head out of a carriage and watched us jealously.

"Amazing! Amazing!" I murmured. "Is it regulation?"

"No. Town-custom. It varies a little in different cities, but the people value being played through more than most things, I imagine. Duddell, the big Ipswich manufacturer—he's a Quaker—tried to bring in a bill to suppress it as unchristian." Pigeon laughed.

"And?"

"It cost him his seat next election. You see, we're all in the game."

We reached the Park without further adventure, and found the four company- guns with their spike teams and single drivers waiting for us. Many people were gathered here, and we were halted, so far as I could see, that they might talk with the men in the ranks. The officers broke into groups.

"Why on earth didn't you come along with me?" said Boy Bayley at my side. "I was expecting you."

"Well, I had a delicacy about brigading myself with a colonel at the head of his regiment, so I stayed with the rear company and the horses. It's all too wonderful for any words. What's going to happen next?"

"I've handed over to Verschoyle, who will amuse and edify the school children while I take you round our kindergarten. Don't kill any one, Vee. Are you goin' to charge 'em?"

Old Verschoyle hitched his big shoulder and nodded precisely as he used to do at school. He was a boy of few words grown into a kindly taciturn man.

"Now!" Bayley slid his arm through mine and led me across a riding road towards a stretch of rough common (singularly out of place in a park) perhaps three-quarters of a mile long and half as wide. On the encircling rails leaned an almost unbroken line of men and women—the women outnumbering the men. I saw the Guard battalion move up the road flanking the common and disappear behind the trees.

As far as the eye could range through the mellow English haze the ground inside the railings was dotted with boys in and out of uniform, armed and unarmed. I saw squads here, half-companies there; then three companies in an open space, wheeling with stately steps; a knot of drums and fifes near the railings unconcernedly slashing their way across popular airs; and a batch of gamins labouring through some extended attack destined to be swept aside by a corps crossing the ground at the double. They broke out of furze bushes, ducked over hollows and bunkers, held or fell away from hillocks and rough sandbanks till the eye wearied of their busy legs.

Bayley took me through the railings, and gravely returned the salute of a freckled twelve-year-old near by.

"What's your corps?" said the Colonel of that Imperial Guard battalion to that child.

"Eighth District Board School, fourth standard, Sir. We aren't out to-day." Then, with a twinkle, "I go to First Camp next year."

"What are those boys yonder—that squad at the double?"

"Jewboys, Sir. Jewish Voluntary Schools, Sir."

"And that full company extending behind the three elms to the south-west?"

"Private day-schools, Sir, I think. Judging distance, Sir."

"Can you come with us?"

"Certainly, Sir."

"Here's the raw material at the beginning of the process," said Bayley to me.

We strolled on towards the strains of "A Bicycle Built for Two," breathed jerkily into a mouth-organ by a slim maid of fourteen. Some dozen infants with clenched fists and earnest legs were swinging through the extension movements which that tune calls for. A stunted hawthorn overhung the little group, and from a branch a dirty white handkerchief flapped in the breeze. The girl blushed, scowled, and wiped the mouth-organ on her sleeve as we came up.

"We're all waiting for our big bruvvers," piped up one bold person in blue breeches—seven if he was a day.

"It keeps 'em quieter, Sir," the maiden lisped. "The others are with the regiments."

"Yeth, and they've all lots of blank for you," said the gentleman in blue breeches ferociously.

"Oh, Artie! 'Ush!" the girl cried.

"But why have they lots of blank for us?" Bayley asked. Blue Breeches stood firm.

"'Cause—'cause the Guard's goin' to fight the Schools this afternoon; but my big bruvver says they'll be dam-well surprised."

"Artie!" The girl leaped towards him. "You know your ma said I was to smack——"

"Don't. Please don't," said Bayley, pink with suppressed mirth. "It was all my fault. I must tell old Verschoyle this. I've surprised his plan out of the mouths of babes and sucklings."

"What plan?"

"Old Vee has taken the battalion up to the top of the common, and he told me he meant to charge down through the kids, but they're on to him already. He'll be scuppered. The Guard will be scuppered!"

Here Blue Breeches, overcome by the reproof of his fellows, began to weep.

"I didn't tell," he roared. "My big bruvver he knew when he saw them go up the road..."

"Never mind! Never mind, old man," said Bayley soothingly. "I'm not fighting to-day. It's all right."

He rightened it yet further with sixpence, and left that band loudly at feud over the spoil.

"Oh, Vee! Vee the strategist," he chuckled. "We'll pull Vee's leg to-night."

Our freckled friend of the barriers doubled up behind us.

"So you know that my battalion is charging down the ground," Bayley demanded.

"Not for certain, Sir, but we're preparin' for the worst," he answered with a cheerful grin. "They allow the Schools a little blank ammunition after we've passed the third standard; and we nearly always bring it on to the ground of Saturdays."

"The deuce you do! Why?"

"On account of these amateur Volunteer corps, Sir. They're always experimentin' upon us, Sir, comin' over from their ground an' developin' attacks on our flanks. Oh, it's chronic 'ere of a Saturday sometimes, unless you flag yourself."

I followed his eye and saw white flags fluttering before a drum and fife band and a knot of youths in sweaters gathered round the dummy breech of a four-inch gun which they were feeding at express rates.

"The attacks don't interfere with you if you flag yourself, Sir," the boy explained. "That's a Second Camp team from the Technical Schools loading against time for a bet."

We picked our way deviously through the busy groups. Apparently it was not etiquette to notice a Guard officer, and the youths at the twenty-five pounder were far too busy to look up. I watched the cleanly finished hoist and shove-home of the full-weight shell from a safe distance, when I became aware of a change among the scattered boys on the common, who disappeared among the hillocks to an accompaniment of querulous whistles. A boy or two on bicycles dashed from corps to corps, and on their arrival each corps seemed to fade away.

The youths at loading practice did not pause for the growing hush round them, nor did the drum and fife band drop a single note. Bayley exploded afresh. "The Schools are preparing for our attack, by Jove! I wonder who's directin' 'em. Do you know?"

The warrior of the Eighth District looked up shrewdly.

"I saw Mr. Cameron speaking to Mr. Levitt just as the Guard went up the road. 'E's our 'ead-master, Mr. Cameron, but Mr. Levitt, of the Sixth District, is actin' as senior officer on the ground this Saturday. Most likely Mr. Levitt is commandin'."

"How many corps are there here?" I asked.

"Oh, bits of lots of 'em—thirty or forty, p'r'aps, Sir. But the whistles says they've all got to rally on the Board Schools. 'Ark! There's the whistle for the Private Schools! They've been called up the ground at the double."

"Stop!" cried a bearded man with a watch, and the crews dropped beside the breech wiping their brows and panting.

"Hullo! there's some attack on the Schools," said one. "Well, Marden, you owe me three half-crowns. I've beaten your record. Pay up."

The boy beside us tapped his foot fretfully as he eyed his companions melting among the hillocks, but the gun-team adjusted their bets without once looking up.

The ground rose a little to a furze-crowned ridge in the centre so that I could not see the full length of it, but I heard a faint bubble of blank in the distance.

"The Saturday allowance," murmured Bayley. "War's begun, but it wouldn't be etiquette for us to interfere. What are you saying, my child?"

"Nothin', Sir, only—only I don't think the Guard will be able to come through on so narrer a front, Sir. They'll all be jammed up be'ind the ridge if we've got there in time. It's awful sticky for guns at the end of our ground, Sir."

"I'm inclined to think you're right, Moltke. The Guard is hung up: distinctly so. Old Vee will have to cut his way through. What a pernicious amount of blank the kids seem to have!"

It was quite a respectable roar of battle that rolled among the hillocks for ten minutes, always out of our sight. Then we heard the "Cease Fire" over the ridge.

"They've sent for the Umpires," the Board School boy squeaked, dancing on one foot. "You've been hung up, Sir. I—I thought the sand-pits 'ud stop you."

Said one of the jerseyed hobbledehoys at the gun, slipping on his coat: "Well, that's enough for this afternoon. I'm off," and moved to the railings without even glancing towards the fray.

"I anticipate the worst," said Bayley with gravity after a few minutes. "Hullo! Here comes my disgraced corps!"

The Guard was pouring over the ridge—a disorderly mob—horse, foot, and guns mixed, while from every hollow of the ground about rose small boys cheering shrilly. The outcry was taken up by the parents at the railings, and spread to a complete circle of cheers, handclappings, and waved handkerchiefs.

Our Eighth District private cast away restraint and openly capered. "We got 'em! We got 'em!" he squealed.

The grey-green flood paused a fraction of a minute and drew itself into shape, coming to rest before Bayley. Verschoyle saluted.

"Vee, Vee," said Bayley. "Give me back my legions. Well, I hope you're proud of yourself?"

"The little beasts were ready for us. Deuced well posted too," Verschoyle replied. "I wish you'd seen that first attack on our flank. Rather impressive. Who warned 'em?"

"I don't know. I got my information from a baby in blue plush breeches. Did they do well?"

"Very decently indeed. I've complimented their C.O. and buttered the whole boiling." He lowered his voice. "As a matter o' fact, I halted five good minutes to give 'em time to get into position."

"Well, now we can inspect our Foreign Service corps. We sha'n't need the men for an hour, Vee."

"Very good, Sir. Colour-sergeants!" cried Verschoyle, raising his voice, and the cry ran from company to company. Whereupon the officers left their men, people began to climb over the railings, and the regiment dissolved among the spectators and the school corps of the city.

"No sense keeping men standing when you don't need 'em," said Bayley. "Besides, the Schools learn more from our chaps in an afternoon than they can pick up in a month's drill. Look at those Board-schoolmaster captains buttonholing old Purvis on the art of war!"

"Wonder what the evening papers'll say about this," said Pigeon.

"You'll know in half an hour," Burgard laughed. "What possessed you to take your ponies across the sand-pits, Pij?"

"Pride. Silly pride," said the Canadian.

We crossed the common to a very regulation paradeground overlooked by a statue of our Queen. Here were carriages, many and elegant, filled with pretty women, and the railings were lined with frockcoats and top hats. "This is distinctly social," I suggested to Kyd.

"Ra-ather. Our F.S. corps is nothing if not correct, but Bayley'll sweat 'em all the same."

I saw six companies drawn up for inspection behind lines of long sausage- shaped kit-bags. A band welcomed us with "A Life on the Ocean Wave."

"What cheek!" muttered Verschoyle. "Give 'em beans, Bayley."

"I intend to," said the Colonel, grimly. "Will each of you fellows take a company, please, and inspect 'em faithfully. 'En etat de partir' is their little boast, remember. When you've finished you can give 'em a little pillow-fighting."

"What does the single cannon on those men's sleeves mean?" I asked.

"That they're big gun-men, who've done time with the Fleet," Bayley returned. "Any F.S. corps that has over twenty per cent big-gun men thinks itself entitled to play 'A Life on the Ocean Wave'—when it's out of hearing of the Navy."

"What beautiful stuff they are! What's their regimental average?"

"It ought to be five eight, height, thirty-eight, chest, and twenty-four years, age. What is it?" Bayley asked of a Private.

"Five nine and half, Sir, thirty-nine, twenty-four and a half," was the reply, and he added insolently, "En tat de partir." Evidently that F.S. corps was on its mettle ready for the worst.

"What about their musketry average?" I went on.

"Not my pidgin," said Bayley. "But they wouldn't be in the corps a day if they couldn't shoot; I know that much. Now I'm going to go through 'em for socks and slippers."

The kit-inspection exceeded anything I had ever dreamed. I drifted from company to company while the Guard officers oppressed them. Twenty per cent, at least, of the kits were shovelled out on the grass and gone through in detail.

"What have they got jumpers and ducks for?" I asked of Harrison.

"For Fleet work, of course. En tat de partir with an F. S. corps means they are amphibious."

"Who gives 'em their kit—Government?"

"There is a Government allowance, but no C. O. sticks to it. It's the same as paint and gold-leaf in the Navy. It comes out of some one's pockets. How much does your kit cost you?"—this to the private in front of us.

"About ten or fifteen quid every other year, I suppose," was the answer.

"Very good. Pack your bag—quick."

The man knelt, and with supremely deft hands returned all to the bag, lashed and tied it, and fell back.

"Arms," said Harrison. "Strip and show ammunition."

The man divested himself of his rolled greatcoat and haversack with one wriggle, as it seemed to me; a twist of a screw removed the side plate of the rifle breech (it was not a bolt action). He handed it to Harrison with one hand, and with the other loosed his clip-studded belt.

"What baby cartridges!" I exclaimed. "No bigger than bulletted breech- caps."

"They're the regulation .256," said Harrison. "No one has complained of 'em yet. They expand a bit when they arrive.... Empty your bottle, please, and show your rations."

The man poured out his water-bottle and showed the two-inch emergency tin.

Harrison passed on to the next, but I was fascinated by the way in which the man re-established himself amid his straps and buckles, asking no help from either side.

"How long does it take you to prepare for inspection?" I asked him.

"Well, I got ready this afternoon in twelve minutes," he smiled. "I didn't see the storm-cone till half-past three. I was at the Club."

"Weren't a good many of you out of town?"

"Not this Saturday. We knew what was coming. You see, if we pull through the inspection we may move up one place on the roster for foreign service.... You'd better stand back. We're going to pillow-fight."

The companies stooped to the stuffed kit-bags, doubled with them variously, piled them in squares and mounds, passed them from shoulder to shoulder like buckets at a fire, and repeated the evolution.

"What's the idea?" I asked of Verschoyle, who, arms folded behind him, was controlling the display. Many women had descended from the carriages, and were pressing in about us admiringly.

"For one thing, it's a fair test of wind and muscle, and for another it saves time at the docks. We'll suppose this first company to be drawn up on the dock-head and those five others still in the troop-train. How would you get their kit into the ship?"

"Fall 'em all in on the platform, march'em to the gangways," I answered, "and trust to Heaven and a fatigue party to gather the baggage and drunks in later."

"Ye-es, and have half of it sent by the wrong trooper. I know that game," Verschoyle drawled. "We don't play it any more. Look!"

He raised his voice, and five companies, glistening a little and breathing hard, formed at right angles to the sixth, each man embracing his sixty- pound bag.

"Pack away," cried Verschoyle, and the great bean-bag game (I can compare it to nothing else) began. In five minutes every bag was passed along either arm of the T and forward down the sixth company, who passed, stacked, and piled them in a great heap. These were followed by the rifles, belts, greatcoats, and knapsacks, so that in another five minutes the regiment stood, as it were, stripped clean.

"Of course on a trooper there'd be a company below stacking the kit away," said Verschoyle, "but that wasn't so bad."

"Bad!" I cried. "It was miraculous!"

"Circus-work—all circus-work!" said Pigeon. "It won't prevent 'em bein' sick as dogs when the ship rolls." The crowd round us applauded, while the men looked meekly down their self-conscious noses.

A little grey-whiskered man trotted up to the Boy.

"Have we made good, Bayley?" he said. "Are we en tat de partir?"

"That's what I shall report," said Bayley, smiling.

"I thought my bit o' French 'ud draw you," said the little man, rubbing his hands.

"Who is he?" I whispered to Pigeon.

"Ramsay—their C.O. An old Guard captain. A keen little devil. They say he spends six hundred a year on the show. He used to be in the Lincolns till he came into his property."

"Take 'em home an' make 'em drunk," I heard Bayley say. "I suppose you'll have a dinner to celebrate. But you may as well tell the officers of E company that I don't think much of them. I sha'n't report it, but their men were all over the shop."

"Well, they're young, you see," Colonel Ramsay began.

"You're quite right. Send 'em to me and I'll talk to 'em. Youth is the time to learn."

"Six hundred a year," I repeated to Pigeon. "That must be an awful tax on a man. Worse than in the old volunteering days."

"That's where you make your mistake," said Verschoyle. "In the old days a man had to spend his money to coax his men to drill because they weren't the genuine article. You know what I mean. They made a favour of putting in drills, didn't they? And they were, most of 'em, the children we have to take over at Second Camp, weren't they? Well, now that a C. O. is sure of his men, now that he hasn't to waste himself in conciliating an' bribin', an' beerin' kids, he doesn't care what he spends on his corps, because every pound tells. Do you understand?"

"I see what you mean, Vee. Having the male material guaranteed——"

"And trained material at that," Pigeon put in. "Eight years in the schools, remember, as well as——"

"Precisely. A man rejoices in working them up. That's as it should be," I said.

"Bayly's saying the very same to those F. S. pups," said Verschoyle.

The Boy was behind us, between two young F. S. officers, a hand on the shoulder of each.

"Yes, that's all doocid interesting," he growled paternally. "But you forget, my sons, now that your men are bound to serve, you're trebly bound to put a polish on 'em. You've let your company simply go to seed. Don't try and explain. I've told all those lies myself in my time. It's only idleness. I know. Come and lunch with me to-morrow and I'll give you a wrinkle or two in barracks." He turned to me.

"Suppose we pick up Vee's defeated legion and go home. You'll dine with us to-night. Good-bye, Ramsay. Yes, you're en etat de partir, right enough. You'd better get Lady Gertrude to talk to the Armity if you want the corps sent foreign. I'm no politician."

We strolled away from the great white statue of the Widow, with sceptre, orb, and crown, that looked toward the city, and regained the common, where the Guard battalion walked with the female of its species and the children of all its relatives. At sight of the officers the uniforms began to detach themselves and gather in companies. A Board School corps was moving off the ground, headed by its drums and fifes, which it assisted with song. As we drew nearer we caught the words, for they were launched with intention:—

'Oo is it mashes the country nurse? The Guardsman! 'Oo is it takes the lydy's purse? The Guardsman! Calls for a drink, and a mild cigar, Batters a sovereign down on the bar, Collars the change and says "Ta-ta!" The Guardsman!

"Why, that's one of old Jemmy Fawne's songs. I haven't heard it in ages," I began.

"Little devils!" said Pigeon. "Speshul! Extra speshul! Sports Edition!" a newsboy cried. "'Ere y'are, Captain. Defeat o' the Guard!"

"I'll buy a copy," said the Boy, as Pigeon blushed wrathfully. "I must, to see how the Dove lost his mounted company." He unfolded the flapping sheet and we crowded round it.

"'Complete Rout of the Guard,'" he read. "'Too Narrow a Front.' That's one for you, Vee! 'Attack Anticipated by Mr. Levitt, B. A.' Aha! 'The Schools Stand Fast.'"

"Here's another version," said Kyd, waving a tinted sheet. "'To your tents, O Israel! The Hebrew Schools stop the Mounted Troops.' Pij, were you scuppered by Jewboys?"

"'Umpires Decide all Four Guns Lost,'" Bayley went on. "By Jove, there'll have to be an inquiry into this regrettable incident, Vee!"

"I'll never try to amuse the kids again," said the baited Verschoyle. "Children and newspapers are low things.... And I was hit on the nose by a wad, too! They oughtn't to be allowed blank ammunition!"

So we leaned against the railings in the warm twilight haze while the battalion, silently as a shadow, formed up behind us ready to be taken over. The heat, the hum of the great city, as it might have been the hum of a camped army, the creaking of the belts, and the well-known faces bent above them, brought back to me the memory of another evening, years ago, when Verschoyle and I waited for news of guns missing in no sham fight.

"A regular Sanna's Post, isn't it?" I said at last. "D'you remember, Vee— by the market-square—that night when the wagons went out?"

Then it came upon me, with no horror, but a certain mild wonder, that we had waited, Vee and I, that night for the body of Boy Bayley; and that Vee himself had died of typhoid in the spring of 1902. The rustling of the papers continued, but Bayley, shifting slightly, revealed to me the three- day old wound on his left side that had soaked the ground about him. I saw Pigeon fling up a helpless arm as to guard himself against a spatter of shrapnel, and Luttrell with a foolish tight-lipped smile lurched over all in one jointless piece. Only old Vee's honest face held steady for awhile against the darkness that had swallowed up the battalion behind us. Then his jaw dropped and the face stiffened, so that a fly made bold to explore the puffed and scornful nostril.

* * * * *

I waked brushing a fly from my nose, and saw the Club waiter set out the evening papers on the table.



"THEY"

THE RETURN OF THE CHILDREN

Neither the harps nor the crowns amused, nor the cherubs' dove-winged races— Holding hands forlornly the Children wandered beneath the Dome; Plucking the radiant robes of the passers by, and with pitiful faces Begging what Princes and Powers refused:—"Ah, please will you let us go home?"

Over the jewelled floor, nigh weeping, ran to them Mary the Mother, Kneeled and caressed and made promise with kisses, and drew them along to the gateway— Yea, the all-iron unbribable Door which Peter must guard and none other. Straightway She took the Keys from his keeping, and opened and freed them straightway.

Then to Her Son, Who had seen and smiled, She said: "On the night that I bore Thee What didst Thou care for a love beyond mine or a heaven that was not my arm? Didst Thou push from the nipple O Child, to hear the angels adore Thee? When we two lay in the breath of the kine?" And He said:—"Thou hast done no harm."

So through the Void the Children ran homeward merrily hand in hand, Looking neither to left nor right where the breathless Heavens stood still; And the Guards of the Void resheathed their swords, for they heard the Command. "Shall I that have suffered the children to come to me hold them against their will?"

"THEY" One view called me to another; one hill top to its fellow, half across the county, and since I could answer at no more trouble than the snapping forward of a lever, I let the country flow under my wheels. The orchid- studded flats of the East gave way to the thyme, ilex, and grey grass of the Downs; these again to the rich cornland and fig-trees of the lower coast, where you carry the beat of the tide on your left hand for fifteen level miles; and when at last I turned inland through a huddle of rounded hills and woods I had run myself clean out of my known marks. Beyond that precise hamlet which stands godmother to the capital of the United States, I found hidden villages where bees, the only things awake, boomed in eighty-foot lindens that overhung grey Norman churches; miraculous brooks diving under stone bridges built for heavier traffic than would ever vex them again; tithe-barns larger than their churches, and an old smithy that cried out aloud how it had once been a hall of the Knights of the Temple. Gipsies I found on a common where the gorse, bracken, and heath fought it out together up a mile of Roman road; and a little farther on I disturbed a red fox rolling dog-fashion in the naked sunlight.

As the wooded hills closed about me I stood up in the car to take the bearings of that great Down whose ringed head is a landmark for fifty miles across the low countries. I judged that the lie of the country would bring me across some westward running road that went to his feet, but I did not allow for the confusing veils of the woods. A quick turn plunged me first into a green cutting brimful of liquid sunshine, next into a gloomy tunnel where last year's dead leaves whispered and scuffled about my tyres. The strong hazel stuff meeting overhead had not been cut for a couple of generations at least, nor had any axe helped the moss-cankered oak and beech to spring above them. Here the road changed frankly into a carpetted ride on whose brown velvet spent primrose-clumps showed like jade, and a few sickly, white-stalked bluebells nodded together. As the slope favoured I shut off the power and slid over the whirled leaves, expecting every moment to meet a keeper; but I only heard a jay, far off, arguing against the silence under the twilight of the trees.

Still the track descended. I was on the point of reversing and working my way back on the second speed ere I ended in some swamp, when I saw sunshine through the tangle ahead and lifted the brake.

It was down again at once. As the light beat across my face my fore-wheels took the turf of a great still lawn from which sprang horsemen ten feet high with levelled lances, monstrous peacocks, and sleek round-headed maids of honour—blue, black, and glistening—all of clipped yew. Across the lawn—the marshalled woods besieged it on three sides—stood an ancient house of lichened and weather-worn stone, with mullioned windows and roofs of rose-red tile. It was flanked by semi-circular walls, also rose-red, that closed the lawn on the fourth side, and at their feet a box hedge grew man-high. There were doves on the roof about the slim brick chimneys, and I caught a glimpse of an octagonal dove-house behind the screening wall.

Here, then, I stayed; a horseman's green spear laid at my breast; held by the exceeding beauty of that jewel in that setting.

"If I am not packed off for a trespasser, or if this knight does not ride a wallop at me," thought I, "Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth at least must come out of that half-open garden door and ask me to tea."

A child appeared at an upper window, and I thought the little thing waved a friendly hand. But it was to call a companion, for presently another bright head showed. Then I heard a laugh among the yew-peacocks, and turning to make sure (till then I had been watching the house only) I saw the silver of a fountain behind a hedge thrown up against the sun. The doves on the roof cooed to the cooing water; but between the two notes I caught the utterly happy chuckle of a child absorbed in some light mischief.

The garden door—heavy oak sunk deep in the thickness of the wall—opened further: a woman in a big garden hat set her foot slowly on the time- hollowed stone step and as slowly walked across the turf. I was forming some apology when she lifted up her head and I saw that she was blind.

"I heard you," she said. "Isn't that a motor car?"

"I'm afraid I've made a mistake in my road. I should have turned off up above—I never dreamed"—I began.

"But I'm very glad. Fancy a motor car coming into the garden! It will be such a treat——" She turned and made as though looking about her. "You— you haven't seen any one have you—perhaps?"

"No one to speak to, but the children seemed interested at a distance."

"Which?"

"I saw a couple up at the window just now, and I think I heard a little chap in the grounds."

"Oh, lucky you!" she cried, and her face brightened. "I hear them, of course, but that's all. You've seen them and heard them?"

"Yes," I answered. "And if I know anything of children one of them's having a beautiful time by the fountain yonder. Escaped, I should imagine."

"You're fond of children?"

I gave her one or two reasons why I did not altogether hate them.

"Of course, of course," she said. "Then you understand. Then you won't think it foolish if I ask you to take your car through the gardens, once or twice—quite slowly. I'm sure they'd like to see it. They see so little, poor things. One tries to make their life pleasant, but——" she threw out her hands towards the woods. "We're so out of the world here."

"That will be splendid," I said. "But I can't cut up your grass."

She faced to the right. "Wait a minute," she said. "We're at the South gate, aren't we? Behind those peacocks there's a flagged path. We call it the Peacock's Walk. You can't see it from here, they tell me, but if you squeeze along by the edge of the wood you can turn at the first peacock and get on to the flags."

It was sacrilege to wake that dreaming house-front with the clatter of machinery, but I swung the car to clear the turf, brushed along the edge of the wood and turned in on the broad stone path where the fountain-basin lay like one star-sapphire.

"May I come too?" she cried. "No, please don't help me. They'll like it better if they see me."

She felt her way lightly to the front of the car, and with one foot on the step she called: "Children, oh, children! Look and see what's going to happen!"

The voice would have drawn lost souls from the Pit, for the yearning that underlay its sweetness, and I was not surprised to hear an answering shout behind the yews. It must have been the child by the fountain, but he fled at our approach, leaving a little toy boat in the water. I saw the glint of his blue blouse among the still horsemen.

Very disposedly we paraded the length of the walk and at her request backed again. This time the child had got the better of his panic, but stood far off and doubting.

"The little fellow's watching us," I said. "I wonder if he'd like a ride."

"They're very shy still. Very shy. But, oh, lucky you to be able to see them! Let's listen."

I stopped the machine at once, and the humid stillness, heavy with the scent of box, cloaked us deep. Shears I could hear where some gardener was clipping; a mumble of bees and broken voices that might have been the doves.

"Oh, unkind!" she said weariedly.

"Perhaps they're only shy of the motor. The little maid at the window looks tremendously interested."

"Yes?" She raised her head. "It was wrong of me to say that. They are really fond of me. It's the only thing that makes life worth living—when they're fond of you, isn't it? I daren't think what the place would be without them. By the way, is it beautiful?"

"I think it is the most beautiful place I have ever seen."

"So they all tell me. I can feel it, of course, but that isn't quite the same thing."

"Then have you never—-?" I began, but stopped abashed.

"Not since I can remember. It happened when I was only a few months old, they tell me. And yet I must remember something, else how could I dream about colours. I see light in my dreams, and colours, but I never see them. I only hear them just as I do when I'm awake."

"It's difficult to see faces in dreams. Some people can, but most of us haven't the gift," I went on, looking up at the window where the child stood all but hidden.

"I've heard that too," she said. "And they tell me that one never sees a dead person's face in a dream. Is that true?"

"I believe it is—now I come to think of it."

"But how is it with yourself—yourself?" The blind eyes turned towards me.

"I have never seen the faces of my dead in any dream," I answered.

"Then it must be as bad as being blind."

The sun had dipped behind the woods and the long shades were possessing the insolent horsemen one by one. I saw the light die from off the top of a glossy-leaved lance and all the brave hard green turn to soft black. The house, accepting another day at end, as it had accepted an hundred thousand gone, seemed to settle deeper into its rest among the shadows.

"Have you ever wanted to?" she said after the silence.

"Very much sometimes," I replied. The child had left the window as the shadows closed upon it.

"Ah! So've I, but I don't suppose it's allowed. ... Where d'you live?"

"Quite the other side of the county—sixty miles and more, and I must be going back. I've come without my big lamp."

"But it's not dark yet. I can feel it."

"I'm afraid it will be by the time I get home. Could you lend me someone to set me on my road at first? I've utterly lost myself."

"I'll send Madden with you to the cross-roads. We are so out of the world, I don't wonder you were lost! I'll guide you round to the front of the house; but you will go slowly, won't you, till you're out of the grounds? It isn't foolish, do you think?"

"I promise you I'll go like this," I said, and let the car start herself down the flagged path.

We skirted the left wing of the house, whose elaborately cast lead guttering alone was worth a day's journey; passed under a great rose-grown gate in the red wall, and so round to the high front of the house which in beauty and stateliness as much excelled the back as that all others I had seen.

"Is it so very beautiful?" she said wistfully when she heard my raptures. "And you like the lead-figures too? There's the old azalea garden behind. They say that this place must have been made for children. Will you help me out, please? I should like to come with you as far as the cross-roads, but I mustn't leave them. Is that you, Madden? I want you to show this gentleman the way to the cross-roads. He has lost his way but—he has seen them."

A butler appeared noiselessly at the miracle of old oak that must be called the front door, and slipped aside to put on his hat. She stood looking at me with open blue eyes in which no sight lay, and I saw for the first time that she was beautiful.

"Remember," she said quietly, "if you are fond of them you will come again," and disappeared within the house.

The butler in the car said nothing till we were nearly at the lodge gates, where catching a glimpse of a blue blouse in a shrubbery I swerved amply lest the devil that leads little boys to play should drag me into child- murder.

"Excuse me," he asked of a sudden, "but why did you do that, Sir?"

"The child yonder."

"Our young gentleman in blue?"

"Of course."

"He runs about a good deal. Did you see him by the fountain, Sir?"

"Oh, yes, several times. Do we turn here?"

"Yes, Sir. And did you 'appen to see them upstairs too?"

"At the upper window? Yes."

"Was that before the mistress come out to speak to you, Sir?"

"A little before that. Why d'you want to know?"

He paused a little. "Only to make sure that—that they had seen the car, Sir, because with children running about, though I'm sure you're driving particularly careful, there might be an accident. That was all, Sir. Here are the cross-roads. You can't miss your way from now on. Thank you, Sir, but that isn't our custom, not with——"

"I beg your pardon," I said, and thrust away the British silver.

"Oh, it's quite right with the rest of 'em as a rule. Goodbye, Sir."

He retired into the armour-plated conning tower of his caste and walked away. Evidently a butler solicitous for the honour of his house, and interested, probably through a maid, in the nursery.

Once beyond the signposts at the cross-roads I looked back, but the crumpled hills interlaced so jealously that I could not see where the house had lain. When I asked its name at a cottage along the road, the fat woman who sold sweetmeats there gave me to understand that people with motor cars had small right to live—much less to "go about talking like carriage folk." They were not a pleasant-mannered community.

When I retraced my route on the map that evening I was little wiser. Hawkin's Old Farm appeared to be the survey title of the place, and the old County Gazetteer, generally so ample, did not allude to it. The big house of those parts was Hodnington Hall, Georgian with early Victorian embellishments, as an atrocious steel engraving attested. I carried my difficulty to a neighbour—a deep-rooted tree of that soil—and he gave me a name of a family which conveyed no meaning.

A month or so later—I went again, or it may have been that my car took the road of her own volition. She over-ran the fruitless Downs, threaded every turn of the maze of lanes below the hills, drew through the high- walled woods, impenetrable in their full leaf, came out at the cross roads where the butler had left me, and a little further on developed an internal trouble which forced me to turn her in on a grass way-waste that cut into a summer-silent hazel wood. So far as I could make sure by the sun and a six-inch Ordnance map, this should be the road flank of that wood which I had first explored from the heights above. I made a mighty serious business of my repairs and a glittering shop of my repair kit, spanners, pump, and the like, which I spread out orderly upon a rug. It was a trap to catch all childhood, for on such a day, I argued, the children would not be far off. When I paused in my work I listened, but the wood was so full of the noises of summer (though the birds had mated) that I could not at first distinguish these from the tread of small cautious feet stealing across the dead leaves. I rang my bell in an alluring manner, but the feet fled, and I repented, for to a child a sudden noise is very real terror. I must have been at work half an hour when I heard in the wood the voice of the blind woman crying: "Children, oh children, where are you?" and the stillness made slow to close on the perfection of that cry. She came towards me, half feeling her way between the tree boles, and though a child it seemed clung to her skirt, it swerved into the leafage like a rabbit as she drew nearer.

"Is that you?" she said, "from the other side of the county?"

"Yes, it's me from the other side of the county."

"Then why didn't you come through the upper woods? They were there just now."

"They were here a few minutes ago. I expect they knew my car had broken down, and came to see the fun."

"Nothing serious, I hope? How do cars break down?"

"In fifty different ways. Only mine has chosen the fifty first."

She laughed merrily at the tiny joke, cooed with delicious laughter, and pushed her hat back.

"Let me hear," she said.

"Wait a moment," I cried, "and I'll get you a cushion."

She set her foot on the rug all covered with spare parts, and stooped above it eagerly. "What delightful things!" The hands through which she saw glanced in the chequered sunlight. "A box here—another box! Why you've arranged them like playing shop!"

"I confess now that I put it out to attract them. I don't need half those things really."

"How nice of you! I heard your bell in the upper wood. You say they were here before that?"

"I'm sure of it. Why are they so shy? That little fellow in blue who was with you just now ought to have got over his fright. He's been watching me like a Red Indian."

"It must have been your bell," she said. "I heard one of them go past me in trouble when I was coming down. They're shy—so shy even with me." She turned her face over her shoulder and cried again: "Children! Oh, children! Look and see!"

"They must have gone off together on their own affairs,"

I suggested, for there was a murmur behind us of lowered voices broken by the sudden squeaking giggles of childhood. I returned to my tinkerings and she leaned forward, her chin on her hand, listening interestedly.

"How many are they?" I said at last. The work was finished, but I saw no reason to go.

Her forehead puckered a little in thought. "I don't quite know," she said simply. "Sometimes more—sometimes less. They come and stay with me because I love them, you see."

"That must be very jolly," I said, replacing a drawer, and as I spoke I heard the inanity of my answer.

"You—you aren't laughing at me," she cried. "I—I haven't any of my own. I never married. People laugh at me sometimes about them because— because———"

"Because they're savages," I returned. "It's nothing to fret for. That sort laugh at everything that isn't in their own fat lives."

"I don't know. How should I? I only don't like being laughed at about them. It hurts; and when one can't see.... I don't want to seem silly," her chin quivered like a child's as she spoke, "but we blindies have only one skin, I think. Everything outside hits straight at our souls. It's different with you. You've such good defences in your eyes—looking out— before anyone can really pain you in your soul. People forget that with us."

I was silent reviewing that inexhaustible matter—the more than inherited (since it is also carefully taught) brutality of the Christian peoples, beside which the mere heathendom of the West Coast nigger is clean and restrained. It led me a long distance into myself.

"Don't do that!" she said of a sudden, putting her hands before her eyes.

"What?"

She made a gesture with her hand.

"That! It's—it's all purple and black. Don't! That colour hurts."

"But, how in the world do you know about colours?" I exclaimed, for here was a revelation indeed.

"Colours as colours?" she asked.

"No. Those Colours which you saw just now."

"You know as well as I do," she laughed, "else you wouldn't have asked that question. They aren't in the world at all. They're in you—when you went so angry."

"D'you mean a dull purplish patch, like port-wine mixed with ink?" I said.

"I've never seen ink or port-wine, but the colours aren't mixed. They are separate—all separate."

"Do you mean black streaks and jags across the purple?"

She nodded. "Yes—if they are like this," and zigzagged her finger again, "but it's more red than purple—that bad colour."

"And what are the colours at the top of the—whatever you see?"

Slowly she leaned forward and traced on the rug the figure of the Egg itself.

"I see them so," she said, pointing with a grass stem, "white, green, yellow, red, purple, and when people are angry or bad, black across the red—as you were just now."

"Who told you anything about it—in the beginning?" I demanded.

"About the colours? No one. I used to ask what colours were when I was little—in table-covers and curtains and carpets, you see—because some colours hurt me and some made me happy. People told me; and when I got older that was how I saw people." Again she traced the outline of the Egg which it is given to very few of us to see.

"All by yourself?" I repeated.

"All by myself. There wasn't anyone else. I only found out afterwards that other people did not see the Colours."

She leaned against the tree-hole plaiting and unplaiting chance-plucked grass stems. The children in the wood had drawn nearer. I could see them with the tail of my eye frolicking like squirrels.

"Now I am sure you will never laugh at me," she went on after a long silence. "Nor at them."

"Goodness! No!" I cried, jolted out of my train of thought. "A man who laughs at a child—unless the child is laughing too—is a heathen!"

"I didn't mean that of course. You'd never laugh at children, but I thought—I used to think—that perhaps you might laugh about them. So now I beg your pardon.... What are you going to laugh at?"

I had made no sound, but she knew.

"At the notion of your begging my pardon. If you had done your duty as a pillar of the state and a landed proprietress you ought to have summoned me for trespass when I barged through your woods the other day. It was disgraceful of me—inexcusable."

She looked at me, her head against the tree trunk—long and steadfastly— this woman who could see the naked soul.

"How curious," she half whispered. "How very curious."

"Why, what have I done?"

"You don't understand ... and yet you understood about the Colours. Don't you understand?"

She spoke with a passion that nothing had justified, and I faced her bewilderedly as she rose. The children had gathered themselves in a roundel behind a bramble bush. One sleek head bent over something smaller, and the set of the little shoulders told me that fingers were on lips. They, too, had some child's tremendous secret. I alone was hopelessly astray there in the broad sunlight.

"No," I said, and shook my head as though the dead eyes could note. "Whatever it is, I don't understand yet. Perhaps I shall later—if you'll let me come again."

"You will come again," she answered. "You will surely come again and walk in the wood."

"Perhaps the children will know me well enough by that time to let me play with them—as a favour. You know what children are like."

"It isn't a matter of favour but of right," she replied, and while I wondered what she meant, a dishevelled woman plunged round the bend of the road, loose-haired, purple, almost lowing with agony as she ran. It was my rude, fat friend of the sweetmeat shop. The blind woman heard and stepped forward. "What is it, Mrs. Madehurst?" she asked.

The woman flung her apron over her head and literally grovelled in the dust, crying that her grandchild was sick to death, that the local doctor was away fishing, that Jenny the mother was at her wits end, and so forth, with repetitions and bellowings.

"Where's the next nearest doctor?" I asked between paroxysms.

"Madden will tell you. Go round to the house and take him with you. I'll attend to this. Be quick!" She half-supported the fat woman into the shade. In two minutes I was blowing all the horns of Jericho under the front of the House Beautiful, and Madden, in the pantry, rose to the crisis like a butler and a man.

A quarter of an hour at illegal speeds caught us a doctor five miles away. Within the half-hour we had decanted him, much interested in motors, at the door of the sweetmeat shop, and drew up the road to await the verdict.

"Useful things cars," said Madden, all man and no butler. "If I'd had one when mine took sick she wouldn't have died."

"How was it?" I asked.

"Croup. Mrs. Madden was away. No one knew what to do. I drove eight miles in a tax cart for the doctor. She was choked when we came back. This car 'd ha' saved her. She'd have been close on ten now."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I thought you were rather fond of children from what you told me going to the cross-roads the other day."

"Have you seen 'em again, Sir—this mornin'?"

"Yes, but they're well broke to cars. I couldn't get any of them within twenty yards of it."

He looked at me carefully as a scout considers a stranger—not as a menial should lift his eyes to his divinely appointed superior.

"I wonder why," he said just above the breath that he drew.

We waited on. A light wind from the sea wandered up and down the long lines of the woods, and the wayside grasses, whitened already with summer dust, rose and bowed in sallow waves.

A woman, wiping the suds off her arms, came out of the cottage next the sweetmeat shop.

"I've be'n listenin' in de back-yard," she said cheerily. "He says Arthur's unaccountable bad. Did ye hear him shruck just now? Unaccountable bad. I reckon t'will come Jenny's turn to walk in de wood nex' week along, Mr. Madden."

"Excuse me, Sir, but your lap-robe is slipping," said Madden deferentially. The woman started, dropped a curtsey, and hurried away.

"What does she mean by 'walking in the wood'?" I asked.

"It must be some saying they use hereabouts. I'm from Norfolk myself," said Madden. "They're an independent lot in this county. She took you for a chauffeur, Sir."

I saw the Doctor come out of the cottage followed by a draggle-tailed wench who clung to his arm as though he could make treaty for her with Death. "Dat sort," she wailed—"dey're just as much to us dat has 'em as if dey was lawful born. Just as much—just as much! An' God he'd be just as pleased if you saved 'un, Doctor. Don't take it from me. Miss Florence will tell ye de very same. Don't leave 'im, Doctor!"

"I know. I know," said the man, "but he'll be quiet for a while now. We'll get the nurse and the medicine as fast as we can." He signalled me to come forward with the car, and I strove not to be privy to what followed; but I saw the girl's face, blotched and frozen with grief, and I felt the hand without a ring clutching at my knees when we moved away.

The Doctor was a man of some humour, for I remember he claimed my car under the Oath of AEsculapius, and used it and me without mercy. First we convoyed Mrs. Madehurst and the blind woman to wait by the sick bed till the nurse should come. Next we invaded a neat county town for prescriptions (the Doctor said the trouble was cerebro-spinal meningitis), and when the County Institute, banked and flanked with scared market cattle, reported itself out of nurses for the moment we literally flung ourselves loose upon the county. We conferred with the owners of great houses—magnates at the ends of overarching avenues whose big-boned womenfolk strode away from their tea-tables to listen to the imperious Doctor. At last a white-haired lady sitting under a cedar of Lebanon and surrounded by a court of magnificent Borzois—all hostile to motors—gave the Doctor, who received them as from a princess, written orders which we bore many miles at top speed, through a park, to a French nunnery, where we took over in exchange a pallid-faced and trembling Sister. She knelt at the bottom of the tonneau telling her beads without pause till, by short cuts of the Doctor's invention, we had her to the sweetmeat shop once more. It was a long afternoon crowded with mad episodes that rose and dissolved like the dust of our wheels; cross-sections of remote and incomprehensible lives through which we raced at right angles; and I went home in the dusk, wearied out, to dream of the clashing horns of cattle; round-eyed nuns walking in a garden of graves; pleasant tea-parties beneath shaded trees; the carbolic-scented, grey-painted corridors of the County Institute; the steps of shy children in the wood, and the hands that clung to my knees as the motor began to move.

* * * * *

I had intended to return in a day or two, but it pleased Fate to hold me from that side of the county, on many pretexts, till the elder and the wild rose had fruited. There came at last a brilliant day, swept clear from the south-west, that brought the hills within hand's reach—a day of unstable airs and high filmy clouds. Through no merit of my own I was free, and set the car for the third time on that known road. As I reached the crest of the Downs I felt the soft air change, saw it glaze under the sun; and, looking down at the sea, in that instant beheld the blue of the Channel turn through polished silver and dulled steel to dingy pewter. A laden collier hugging the coast steered outward for deeper water and, across copper-coloured haze, I saw sails rise one by one on the anchored fishing-fleet. In a deep dene behind me an eddy of sudden wind drummed through sheltered oaks, and spun aloft the first day sample of autumn leaves. When I reached the beach road the sea-fog fumed over the brickfields, and the tide was telling all the groins of the gale beyond Ushant. In less than an hour summer England vanished in chill grey. We were again the shut island of the North, all the ships of the world bellowing at our perilous gates; and between their outcries ran the piping of bewildered gulls. My cap dripped moisture, the folds of the rug held it in pools or sluiced it away in runnels, and the salt-rime stuck to my lips.

Inland the smell of autumn loaded the thickened fog among the trees, and the drip became a continuous shower. Yet the late flowers—mallow of the wayside, scabious of the field, and dahlia of the garden—showed gay in the mist, and beyond the sea's breath there was little sign of decay in the leaf. Yet in the villages the house doors were all open, and bare- legged, bare-headed children sat at ease on the damp doorsteps to shout "pip-pip" at the stranger.

I made bold to call at the sweetmeat shop, where Mrs. Madehurst met me with a fat woman's hospitable tears. Jenny's child, she said, had died two days after the nun had come. It was, she felt, best out of the way, even though insurance offices, for reasons which she did not pretend to follow, would not willingly insure such stray lives. "Not but what Jenny didn't tend to Arthur as though he'd come all proper at de end of de first year— like Jenny herself." Thanks to Miss Florence, the child had been buried with a pomp which, in Mrs. Madehurst's opinion, more than covered the small irregularity of its birth. She described the coffin, within and without, the glass hearse, and the evergreen lining of the grave.

"But how's the mother?" I asked.

"Jenny? Oh, she'll get over it. I've felt dat way with one or two o' my own. She'll get over. She's walkin' in de wood now."

"In this weather?"

Mrs. Madehurst looked at me with narrowed eyes across the counter.

"I dunno but it opens de 'eart like. Yes, it opens de 'eart. Dat's where losin' and bearin' comes so alike in de long run, we do say."

Now the wisdom of the old wives is greater than that of all the Fathers, and this last oracle sent me thinking so extendedly as I went up the road, that I nearly ran over a woman and a child at the wooded corner by the lodge gates of the House Beautiful.

"Awful weather!" I cried, as I slowed dead for the turn.

"Not so bad," she answered placidly out of the fog. "Mine's used to 'un. You'll find yours indoors, I reckon."

Indoors, Madden received me with professional courtesy, and kind inquiries for the health of the motor, which he would put under cover.

I waited in a still, nut-brown hall, pleasant with late flowers and warmed with a delicious wood fire—a place of good influence and great peace. (Men and women may sometimes, after great effort, achieve a creditable lie; but the house, which is their temple, cannot say anything save the truth of those who have lived in it.) A child's cart and a doll lay on the black-and-white floor, where a rug had been kicked back. I felt that the children had only just hurried away—to hide themselves, most like—in the many turns of the great adzed staircase that climbed statelily out of the hall, or to crouch at gaze behind the lions and roses of the carven gallery above. Then I heard her voice above me, singing as the blind sing —from the soul:—

In the pleasant orchard-closes.

And all my early summer came back at the call.

In the pleasant orchard-closes, God bless all our gains say we— But may God bless all our losses, Better suits with our degree,

She dropped the marring fifth line, and repeated—

Better suits with our degree!

I saw her lean over the gallery, her linked hands white as pearl against the oak.

"Is that you—from the other side of the county?" she called.

"Yes, me—from the other side of the county," I answered laughing.

"What a long time before you had to come here again." She ran down the stairs, one hand lightly touching the broad rail. "It's two months and four days. Summer's gone!"

"I meant to come before, but Fate prevented."

"I knew it. Please do something to that fire. They won't let me play with it, but I can feel it's behaving badly. Hit it!"

I looked on either side of the deep fireplace, and found but a half-charred hedge-stake with which I punched a black log into flame.

"It never goes out, day or night," she said, as though explaining. "In case any one conies in with cold toes, you see."

"It's even lovelier inside than it was out," I murmured. The red light poured itself along the age-polished dusky panels till the Tudor roses and lions of the gallery took colour and motion. An old eagle-topped convex mirror gathered the picture into its mysterious heart, distorting afresh the distorted shadows, and curving the gallery lines into the curves of a ship. The day was shutting down in half a gale as the fog turned to stringy scud. Through the uncurtained mullions of the broad window I could see valiant horsemen of the lawn rear and recover against the wind that taunted them with legions of dead leaves. "Yes, it must be beautiful," she said. "Would you like to go over it? There's still light enough upstairs."

I followed her up the unflinching, wagon-wide staircase to the gallery whence opened the thin fluted Elizabethan doors.

"Feel how they put the latch low down for the sake of the children." She swung a light door inward.

"By the way, where are they?" I asked. "I haven't even heard them to-day."

She did not answer at once. Then, "I can only hear them," she replied softly. "This is one of their rooms—everything ready, you see."

She pointed into a heavily-timbered room. There were little low gate tables and children's chairs. A doll's house, its hooked front half open, faced a great dappled rocking-horse, from whose padded saddle it was but a child's scramble to the broad window-seat overlooking the lawn. A toy gun lay in a corner beside a gilt wooden cannon.

"Surely they've only just gone," I whispered. In the failing light a door creaked cautiously. I heard the rustle of a frock and the patter of feet— quick feet through a room beyond.

"I heard that," she cried triumphantly. "Did you? Children, O children, where are you?"

The voice filled the walls that held it lovingly to the last perfect note, but there came no answering shout such as I had heard in the garden. We hurried on from room to oak-floored room; up a step here, down three steps there; among a maze of passages; always mocked by our quarry. One might as well have tried to work an unstopped warren with a single ferret. There were bolt-holes innumerable—recesses in walls, embrasures of deep slitten windows now darkened, whence they could start up behind us; and abandoned fireplaces, six feet deep in the masonry, as well as the tangle of communicating doors. Above all, they had the twilight for their helper in our game. I had caught one or two joyous chuckles of evasion, and once or twice had seen the silhouette of a child's frock against some darkening window at the end of a passage; but we returned empty-handed to the gallery, just as a middle-aged woman was setting a lamp in its niche.

"No, I haven't seen her either this evening, Miss Florence," I heard her say, "but that Turpin he says he wants to see you about his shed."

"Oh, Mr. Turpin must want to see me very badly. Tell him to come to the hall, Mrs. Madden."

I looked down into the hall whose only light was the dulled fire, and deep in the shadow I saw them at last. They must have slipped down while we were in the passages, and now thought themselves perfectly hidden behind an old gilt leather screen. By child's law, my fruitless chase was as good as an introduction, but since I had taken so much trouble I resolved to force them to come forward later by the simple trick, which children detest, of pretending not to notice them. They lay close, in a little huddle, no more than shadows except when a quick flame betrayed an outline.

"And now we'll have some tea," she said. "I believe I ought to have offered it you at first, but one doesn't arrive at manners somehow when one lives alone and is considered—h'm—peculiar." Then with very pretty scorn, "would you like a lamp to see to eat by?" "The firelight's much pleasanter, I think." We descended into that delicious gloom and Madden brought tea.

I took my chair in the direction of the screen ready to surprise or be surprised as the game should go, and at her permission, since a hearth is always sacred, bent forward to play with the fire.

"Where do you get these beautiful short faggots from?" I asked idly. "Why, they are tallies!"

"Of course," she said. "As I can't read or write I'm driven back on the early English tally for my accounts. Give me one and I'll tell you what it meant."

I passed her an unburned hazel-tally, about a foot long, and she ran her thumb down the nicks.

"This is the milk-record for the home farm for the month of April last year, in gallons," said she. "I don't know what I should have done without tallies. An old forester of mine taught me the system. It's out of date now for every one else; but my tenants respect it. One of them's coming now to see me. Oh, it doesn't matter. He has no business here out of office hours. He's a greedy, ignorant man—very greedy or—he wouldn't come here after dark."

"Have you much land then?"

"Only a couple of hundred acres in hand, thank goodness. The other six hundred are nearly all let to folk who knew my folk before me, but this Turpin is quite a new man—and a highway robber."

"But are you sure I sha'n't be——?"

"Certainly not. You have the right. He hasn't any children."

"Ah, the children!" I said, and slid my low chair back till it nearly touched the screen that hid them. "I wonder whether they'll come out for me."

There was a murmur of voices—Madden's and a deeper note—at the low, dark side door, and a ginger-headed, canvas-gaitered giant of the unmistakable tenant farmer type stumbled or was pushed in.

"Come to the fire, Mr. Turpin," she said.

"If—if you please, Miss, I'll—I'll be quite as well by the door." He clung to the latch as he spoke like a frightened child. Of a sudden I realised that he was in the grip of some almost overpowering fear.

"Well?"

"About that new shed for the young stock—that was all. These first autumn storms settin' in ... but I'll come again, Miss." His teeth did not chatter much more than the door latch.

"I think not," she answered levelly. "The new shed—m'm. What did my agent write you on the 15th?"

"I—fancied p'raps that if I came to see you—ma—man to man like, Miss. But——"

His eyes rolled into every corner of the room wide with horror. He half opened the door through which he had entered, but I noticed it shut again —from without and firmly.

"He wrote what I told him," she went on. "You are overstocked already. Dunnett's Farm never carried more than fifty bullocks—even in Mr. Wright's time. And he used cake. You've sixty-seven and you don't cake. You've broken the lease in that respect. You're dragging the heart out of the farm."

"I'm—I'm getting some minerals—superphosphates—next week. I've as good as ordered a truck-load already. I'll go down to the station to-morrow about 'em. Then I can come and see you man to man like, Miss, in the daylight.... That gentleman's not going away, is he?" He almost shrieked.

I had only slid the chair a little further back, reaching behind me to tap on the leather of the screen, but he jumped like a rat.

"No. Please attend to me, Mr. Turpin." She turned in her chair and faced him with his back to the door. It was an old and sordid little piece of scheming that she forced from him—his plea for the new cowshed at his landlady's expense, that he might with the covered manure pay his next year's rent out of the valuation after, as she made clear, he had bled the enriched pastures to the bone. I could not but admire the intensity of his greed, when I saw him out-facing for its sake whatever terror it was that ran wet on his forehead.

I ceased to tap the leather—was, indeed, calculating the cost of the shed—when I felt my relaxed hand taken and turned softly between the soft hands of a child. So at last I had triumphed. In a moment I would turn and acquaint myself with those quick-footed wanderers....

The little brushing kiss fell in the centre of my palm—as a gift on which the fingers were, once, expected to close: as the all faithful half- reproachful signal of a waiting child not used to neglect even when grown-ups were busiest—a fragment of the mute code devised very long ago.

Then I knew. And it was as though I had known from the first day when I looked across the lawn at the high window.

I heard the door shut. The woman turned to me in silence, and I felt that she knew.

What time passed after this I cannot say. I was roused by the fall of a log, and mechanically rose to put it back. Then I returned to my place in the chair very close to the screen.

"Now you understand," she whispered, across the packed shadows.

"Yes, I understand—now. Thank you."

"I—I only hear them." She bowed her head in her hands. "I have no right, you know—no other right. I have neither borne nor lost—neither borne nor lost!"

"Be very glad then," said I, for my soul was torn open within me.

"Forgive me!"

She was still, and I went back to my sorrow and my joy.

"It was because I loved them so," she said at last, brokenly. "That was why it was, even from the first—even before I knew that they—they were all I should ever have. And I loved them so!"

She stretched out her arms to the shadows and the shadows within the shadow.

"They came because I loved them—because I needed them. I—I must have made them come. Was that wrong, think you?"

"No—no."

"I—I grant you that the toys and—and all that sort of thing were nonsense, but—but I used to so hate empty rooms myself when I was little." She pointed to the gallery. "And the passages all empty. ... And how could I ever bear the garden door shut? Suppose——"

"Don't! For pity's sake, don't!" I cried. The twilight had brought a cold rain with gusty squalls that plucked at the leaded windows.

"And the same thing with keeping the fire in all night. I don't think it so foolish—do you?"

I looked at the broad brick hearth, saw, through tears I believe, that there was no unpassable iron on or near it, and bowed my head.

"I did all that and lots of other things—just to make believe. Then they came. I heard them, but I didn't know that they were not mine by right till Mrs. Madden told me——"

"The butler's wife? What?"

"One of them—I heard—she saw. And knew. Hers! Not for me. I didn't know at first. Perhaps I was jealous. Afterwards, I began to understand that it was only because I loved them, not because——... Oh, you must bear or lose," she said piteously. "There is no other way—and yet they love me. They must! Don't they?"

There was no sound in the room except the lapping voices of the fire, but we two listened intently, and she at least took comfort from what she heard. She recovered herself and half rose. I sat still in my chair by the screen.

"Don't think me a wretch to whine about myself like this, but—but I'm all in the dark, you know, and you can see."