il don't the feller stand up to it like a
man?"--made him now conscious that he was himself at last faced with a
similar test to which he himself must stand up.

But, beyond question, he could not have held the position as he did had
it not been for Rachel; he seemed to see that here was a chance of
seizing her and making her really his own, a chance that would never be
his again. He was making an appeal to her--she was closer to him, he
thought, with every day.

So his natural humour and spirits returned--At present life was
tolerable; he suffered very little pain and he was aware that a number
of people to whom he had never meant anything whatever now cared for him
very much indeed.

He was ashamed when he heard of the men who were dying and suffering for
their country--"He would have had to have gone to Africa," he told
himself, "if he'd not had his accident. Then enteric or a bullet and
good-bye to Rachel altogether!"

III

He had often, during those long hours, thought of the Duchess. He had,
always, in his heart, considered her affection for him strange; he knew
that it was difficult for her to be patient with fools and he knew that
his own intellectual gifts were on no very high level. He based her
friendship for him on the naive transparency with which he displayed his
frankly pagan indulgences. His love for Rachel and this accident had
changed all that. He was still pagan enough at heart, but there were
other things in his world. Principally it occurred to him now that one
couldn't judge about the way things looked to other people, and the
Duchess, of course, always _did_ judge; if they didn't look her way, why
then wipe them out!

He had, in fact, much less now to say to the Duchess; he was afraid that
he would no longer agree with her about things--"Of course she knows the
world and is a damn clever woman, but she's jolly well too hard on
people who aren't quite her style--She'd put my back up, I believe, if
she talked." He had, indeed, always been uncomfortable at the old lady's
approaches to sentiment. She was never sentimental with other people--He
_hated_ sentiment in anyone except, of course, Rachel and she never
_was_ sentimental.

He looked out now upon the road that ran through the park beyond his
window, watched the nursemaids and the children, the old gentlemen, the
girls, the smart women and the pale young men with books and the smart
young men with shiny hats, and he wondered about them