r explorers must
experience when they return to their first full meal. For he was of the
New Army, and before the war had actually believed in music, art, and
all that sort of thing. With a month's leave before him, he could afford
to feel that life was extraordinarily joyful, his own experiences
particularly wonderful; and, coming out into the moonlight, he had taken
what can only be described as a great gulp of it, for he was a young man
with a sense of beauty. When one has been long in the trenches, lain out
wounded in a shell-hole twenty-four hours, and spent three months in
hospital, beauty has such an edge of novelty, such a sharp sweetness,
that it almost gives pain. And London at night is very beautiful. He
strolled slowly towards the Circus, still drawing the moonlight deep
into his lungs, his cap tilted up a little on his forehead in that
moment of unmilitary abandonment; and whether he stopped before the
book-shop window because the girl's figure was in some sort a part of
beauty, or because he saw that she was crying, he could not have made
clear to any one.

Then something--perhaps the scent of powder, perhaps the yellow glove,
or the oblique flutter of the eyelids--told him that he was making what
he would have called "a blooming error," unless he wished for company,
which had not been in his thoughts. But her sob affected him, and he
said:

"What's the matter?"

Again her eyelids fluttered sideways, and she stammered:

"Not'ing. The beautiful evening--that's why!"

That a woman of what he now clearly saw to be "a certain type" should
perceive what he himself had just been perceiving, struck him forcibly,
and he said:

"Cheer up."

She looked up again swiftly: "Cheer up! You are not lonelee like me."

For one of that sort, she looked somehow honest; her tear-streaked face
was rather pretty, and he murmured:

"Well, let's walk a bit, and talk it over."

They turned the corner, and walked east, along streets empty, and
beautiful, with their dulled orange-glowing lamps, and here and there
the glint of some blue or violet light. He found it queer and rather
exciting--for an adventure of just this kind he had never had. And he
said doubtfully:

"How did you get into this? Isn't it an awfully hopeless sort of life?"

"Ye-es, it ees--" her voice had a queer soft emphasis. "You are
limping--haf you been wounded?"

"Just out of hospital to-day."

"The horrible war--all the misery is because of th