s still the
Armistice week. The London streets were crowded with soldiers and young
women of every sort and kind. He bought a newspaper and read it in the
train. It gave him a queer satisfaction--for one half of him was still
always watching the other--to discover that he could feel patriotic
emotion like anybody else and could be thrilled by the elation of
Britain's victory--_his_ victory. He read the telegrams, the positions on
the Rhine assigned to the Second Army, and the Fourth,--General Plumer
General Rawlinson--General F.--Gad! he used to know the son of that last
old fellow at King's.

Then he fell to his old furtive watching of the people on the platform,
the men getting in and out of the train. At any moment he might fall in
with one of his old Cambridge acquaintances, in one of these smart
officers, with their decorations and their red tabs. But in the first
place they wouldn't travel in this third class where he was sitting--not
till the war was over. And in the next, he was so changed--had taken
indeed such pains to be--that it was long odds against his being
recognized. Eleven years, was it, since he left Cambridge? About.

At X. he got out. The ticket collector noticed him for that faint touch
of a past magnificence that still lingered in his carriage and gait; but
there were so many strangers about that he was soon forgotten.

He passed under a railway arch and climbed a hill, the hill on which he
had met Dempsey. At the top of the hill he left the high-road for a grass
track across the common. There was just enough light from a declining
moon to show him where he was. The common was full of dark shapes--old
twisted thorns, and junipers, and masses of tall grass--shapes which
often seemed to him to be strargely alive, the silent but conscious
witnesses of his passage.

The wood was very dark. He groped his way through it with difficulty
and found the hut. Once inside it, he fastened the door with a wooden
bar he had himself made, and turned on his electric torch. Bit by bit
in the course of his night visits he had accumulated a few necessary
stores--some firewood, a few groceries hidden in a corner, a couple
of brown blankets, and a small box of tools. A heap of dried bracken in a
corner, raised on a substratum of old sacks, had often served him for a
bed; and when he had kindled a wood fire in the rough grate of loose
bricks where Colonel Shepherd's keepers had been accustomed to warm the
hot meat s