r Anthony. "Ambulance or train?"

"Donkey carriage," said I. "This very moment minute."

I left them and trotted away homewards.

Just as I had turned a bend of the chestnut avenue near the Park gates,
I came upon a couple of familiar figures--familiar, that is to say,
individually, but startlingly unfamiliar in conjunction. They were a
young man and girl, Randall Holmes and Phyllis Gedge. Randall had
concluded a distinguished undergraduate career at Oxford last summer.
He was a man of birth, position, and, to a certain extent, of fortune.
Phyllis Gedge was the daughter, the pretty and attractive daughter, of
Daniel Gedge, the socialistic builder who did not hold with war. What
did young Randall mean by walking in the dark with his arm round
Phyllis's waist? Of course as soon as he heard the click-clack of
Hosea's hoofs he whipped his arm away; but I had already caught him.
They tried to look mighty unconcerned as I pulled up. I took off my hat
politely to the lady and held out my hand to the young man.

"Good evening, Randall," said I. "I haven't seen you for ages."

He was a tall, clean-limbed, clear-featured boy, with black hair, which
though not long, yet lacked the military trimness befitting the heads
of young men at the present moment. He murmured something about being
busy.

"It will do you good to take a night off," I said; "drop in after
dinner and smoke a pipe with an old friend."

I smiled, bowed again politely, whipped up Hosea and trotted off. I
wondered whether he would come. He had said: "Delighted, I'm sure," but
he had not looked delighted. Very possibly he regarded me as a
meddlesome, gossiping old tom-cat. Perhaps for that reason he would
deem it wise to adopt a propitiatory attitude. Perhaps also he retained
a certain affectionate respect for me, seeing that I had known him as a
tiny boy in a sailor suit, and had fed him at Harrow (as I did poor
Oswald Fenimore at Wellington) with Mrs. Marigold's famous potted
shrimp and other comestibles, and had put him up, during here and there
holidays and later a vacation, when his mother and aunts, with whom he
lived, had gone abroad to take inefficacious cures for the tedium of a
futile life. Oxford, however, had set him a bit off my plane.

As an ordinary soldierman, trained in the elementary virtues of
plain-speaking and direct dealing, love of country and the sacredness
of duty, I have had no use for the metaphysician. I haven't the
remotest notio