gth of the battle-front in France, charging in short drives, which
carried the line a little forward, with just a tiny pause and suck-back;
then on again irresistibly, on and on; and at each rush, every voice, his
own among them, shouted "Hooray! the English! Hooray! the English!" The
sensation of that advancing tide of dim figures in grey light, the throb
and roar, the wonderful, rhythmic steady drive of it, no more to be
stopped than the waves of an incoming tide, was gloriously fascinating;
life was nothing, death nothing. "Hooray, the English!" In that dream,
he was his country, he was every one of that long charging line, driving
forward in. those great heaving pulsations, irresistible, on and on. Out
of the very centre of this intoxicating dream he had been dragged by some
street noise, and had closed his eyes again, in the vain hope that he
might dream it on to its end. But it came no more; and lighting his
pipe, he lay there wondering at its fervid, fantastic realism. Death was
nothing, if his country lived and won. In waking hours he never had
quite that single-hearted knowledge of himself. And what marvellously
real touches got mixed into the fantastic stuff of dreams, as if
something were at work to convince the dreamer in spite of
himself--"Hooray!" not "Hurrah!" Just common "Hooray!" And "the
English," not the literary "British." And then the soft flower had
struck his forehead, and Leila's voice cried: "Jimmy!"

When she left him, his thought was just a tired: 'Well, so it's begun
again!' What did it matter, since common loyalty and compassion cut him
off from what his heart desired; and that desire was absurd, as little
likely of attainment as the moon. What did it matter? If it gave her
any pleasure to love him, let it go on! Yet, all the time that he was
walking across under the plane trees, Noel seemed to walk in front of
him, just out of reach, so that he ached with the thought that he would
never catch her up, and walk beside her.

Two days later, on reaching his rooms in the evening, he found this
letter on ship's note-paper, with the Plymouth postmark--

"Fare thee well, and if for ever,
Then for ever fare thee well"
"Leila"

He read it with a really horrible feeling, for all the world as if he had
been accused of a crime and did not know whether he had committed it or
not. And, trying to collect his thoughts, he took a cab and drove to her
fiat