churches scattered throughout the land, of all the worshippers assembling. The birds were singing. A field mouse rustled in a bunch of dead grass and peeped out. A wood-pigeon clattered out of a fir tree behind the church. A blackbird escaped with his noisy startled laugh. Two rooks flew high on some distant business.

"I'll wait inside," I thought, and hobbled up to the church door, which was shut and also, I discovered, locked. Even then I only thought that my watch was very much faster than usual; but the notice-board caught my eye, and the notice told me what I had forgotten, namely, that service was held every other Sunday in the morning and every other Sunday in the evening, and that this was a Sunday for evensong.

I cannot possibly describe my discomfiture or my subsequent sense of relief. It was as though a sponge had been applied to the writings on my troubled mind and all superstitious dread wiped out. "It's all a hoax," I cried out to myself, "a silly hoax played upon me by my nerves. There's nothing in it." And I stretched myself luxuriously in the sunshine, like a man freed from a weight he has been carrying.

You see, the impulse drawing me to the church for that morning service was so strong and so authentic that as that had proved a delusion, I was certain that the whole experience the attacks and the memory of them and so forth -was a delusion also; that it was accidental, due, as I had thought originally, merely to a passing weakness of the nervous

system; that there had been and would be no serious tampering with my personality. I was so certain of this that I actually felt conscious of a twinge of disappointment, though I assure you I was honestly and deeply relieved.

I did not see then, as I see now, that just the intensity of this relief and the swiftness of its coming proved perhaps more surely than anything else could have done the reality of my past experience. Even then I knew, without definitely stating it to myself, that I should not give any living being the least hint of what I had experienced, or of what I imagined that I had escaped.

Anyhow, for the time being my misgivings ceased, or if any came were instantly quieted by the thought that a man, after having lived through things such as I had lived through, could not expect to resume his previous state of being immediately or without perhaps a conscious struggle.

II

DURING the next few days my feelings resembled those of a small boy who fully expects to be caned or kept in, and who is let off with a reprimand. The affair was not forgotten, but it had lost its poignancy of importance. Moreover an incident took place on my normal plane which was so unusual that it wholly occupied my attention.

For a long time the bosom friend of my sister Doris had been a girl named Amy Stone. They had been friends at school, and Amy used to spend half her holidays with us. Her coming was so recognised as a rule that our plans were made to facilitate her visit. She was an institution. The girls in the first flush of their friendship had decided that their dearest wish was that each should marry the other's brother. This was broken to me in a moment of confidence by Doris on a moonlight evening one summer holiday, after I had been at Charterhouse three years that is to say, about eight years before the war, when I was sixteen in fact. I took the proposal very seriously at the time, but on the whole it had a pleasant effect on my relations with Amy; I remember begging Doris to be careful not to let her love of Amy lead her into an engagement which she might afterwards regret. I was not more solemn than boys are wont to be about their sisters' affairs, and

I was pleased with some points on which I insisted: that a girl might be good and delightful, but it did not follow that her brother must necessarily be equally good and delightful; that marriage was a very serious affair, and so on. I worked in a little Mendel, too, I forget quite how. Doris was duly impressed, and we both felt very queer and friendly and grown up to be discussing together a matter of such stirring importance.

In spite of its importance, however, which we at that moment deliciously tasted, the matter did not unduly weigh upon our spirits. It made me a little self-conscious at my next meeting with Amy. That was all. We had many matters to which to attend of less weight but of more immediate urgency, and so though it lent, for a year or two, a spice to our doings, it dropped little by little from our consciousness, and was never mentioned by any of us again. So much so that when Doris became engaged it was so remote that I never thought even to tease her about her early plan.

I was still very fond of Doris, but we had few interests in common as we grew up, and with Amy I had none at all. Since my disablement I realised what an "awfully good little sort " Doris was, and realised it not without a qualm of conscience. Everything she did for me she did without any fuss. Her kindness was never heavy, never insistent. And when I tried to express gratitude she seemed almost hurt.

I said once: afraid."

"I'm a most infernal nuisance, I'm

She said, frowning angrily, "It's mean of you to say that." I looked at her in surprise, not following her line of thought. She threw back her head to ask, "Have I ever made you feel a nuisance?" "Oh, I see," I grunted.

At which she, sharing my dislike of emotion, snapped her fingers and exclaimed:

"O Woman, in our hours of ease
Uncertain coy, and hard to please,'
When tears of anguish wring the brow
A ministering angel thou,"

and, laughing, left the room.

The lines are true enough to be trite. My sister is a nice ordinary girl; her compassion was sublime. Never again, I decided, would I blame a woman for being slightly stupid. What was a mere lack of intelligence placed against this rarer, richer quality? Of course if a man were always fit and strong. . . . I suppressed the conclusion as unworthy, the trend of thought as graceless.

I do not think that I slipped into complacency on the tack of woman's sublime compassion because I remained sensitive to it; but when Amy came I was not wholly unprepared to witness another demonstration of this fine quality in action.

At first, however, she seemed hardly friendly. Not knowing what trouble might not be at her heart - her brother, I knew, was somewhere at the front in the Army Service Corps; not dangerous his position, but not safe; and Heaven only knew for whom she might not be caring dumbly, patiently- I wondered which was worse for a girl - for the man to