earnestness. Suddenly he flashed into indignant vehemence. "What
Maisie's told me! It's false of the man as he was out there. He wants
you to believe that. Out there he was different. He may have been paltry
and base once; but he was reborn into a new nobility. He was white all
through. He was overpoweringly heroic. From the humblest Tommy we all
adored him--adored him for the example he set us. He was only cheerful
when there was dying to be done--out at rest and in quiet sectors he was
gloomy. The men loved him for that; it struck them as humorous. And yet
he was utterly indifferent to their love. He'd got beyond caring for
what anybody thought of him. He was too absorbed in establishing reasons
for thinking well of himself. I learnt things about him--one does in the
presence of physical torture. I learnt secrets about the fineness of his
spirit which, I believe, he never allowed you to suspect. Probably he
never suspected them himself until the ordeal of terror had sifted the
gold from the dross. It was the dross that Maisie remembered. But we,
who were his comrades in khaki, saw nothing but the gold--his untiring
ability to share. You weren't there; nevertheless, that's what I've got
to help you to understand. I've got to make you see the new Lord Dawn
who was born out there. It was last night, after Pollock returned, that
I saw my duty clearly. It came on me in a flash that, if a man who had
been counted dead could come back, it was not impossible that this
pleading from beyond the grave, which I'd tried to thwart and
ridicule----"

He broke off abruptly. It was the wideness of her eyes that warned him.
He was conscious that she, too, was feeling that invisible pressure. She
was expecting to see something. He followed the direction of her eyes,
glancing behind him into the hollow dimness of the room, where the
solitary lamp was burning and the vanished lords of Dawn gazed stonily
down from their canvases. In that moment he was aware that he had been
stating facts as he had never owned them to himself. It was as though
his lips had been used----

"Things that he didn't allow me to suspect!" She sighed shudderingly.
"He allowed me to suspect so much. But tell me. What were these things?
Since they're the reasons for your visit, they must be important."

"They're only part of the reasons."

"There are others?"

"The chief reason is yourself." He spoke cautiously, fearful lest he
might lose her attention by rousin