uck by his companion's silence, turned a sudden look
upon him. Mannering's eyes were absently and yet intently fixed on
the small squads of drilling men. And it was sharply borne in on
Chicksands that he was walking beside the mere image or phantom of a
man, a man whose mind was far away--'voyaging through strange seas
of thought alone.' Mannering's eyes were wide open; but they made
the weird impression on the spectator of a double seeing--of some
object of vision beyond and behind the actual scene of the barracks
and the recruits, and that an object producing terror or pain.
Chicksands made a remark and it was not answered.

It was not the first time that Arthur had observed this trance-like
state in the man who was to be his brother-in-law, and had been his
'chum' from childhood. Others had noticed it, and he had reason to
think that Beryl was often distressed by it. He had never himself
seen any signs of strangeness or depression in Aubrey before the
Easter of 1915, when they met in Paris, for the first time after the
battle of Neuve Chapelle, in which Mannering had lost his dearest
friend, one Freddy Vivian, of the Worcesters. During the winter they
had met fairly often in the neighbourhood of Ypres, and Aubrey was
then the same eager, impulsive fellow that Chicksands had known at
Eton and Cambridge, bubbling over with the exploits of his
battalion, and adored by his own men. In April, in a raid near
Festubert, Mannering was badly wounded. But the change in him was
already evident when they were in Paris together. Chicksands could
only suppose it represented the mental and nervous depression caused
by Vivian's death, and would pass away. On the contrary, it had
proved to be something permanent.

Yet it had never interfered with his efficiency as a soldier, nor
his record for a dare-devil courage. There were many tales current
of his exploits on the Somme, in which again and again he had singed
the beard of Death, with an absolute recklessness of his own
personal life, combined with the most anxious care for that of his
men. Since the battle of Messines he had been the head of a
remarkable Officers' School at Aldershot, mainly organized by
himself. But now, it seemed, he was moving heaven and earth to get
back to France and the front. Chicksands did not think he would
achieve it. He was invaluable where he was, and his superiors, to
Mannering's indignation, were inclined to regard him as a man who
was physically