ng a winding down-hill road held his attention so
that he could not get beyond it. He turned about and ran up over the
hill again and down long slopes inland, running very softly and smoothly
with his lights devouring the road ahead and sweeping the banks and
hedges beside him, and as he came down a little hill through a village
he heard a confused clatter and jingle of traffic ahead, and saw the
danger triangle that warns of cross-roads. He slowed down and then
pulled up abruptly.

Riding across the gap between the cottages was a string of horsemen, and
then a grey cart, and then a team drawing a heavy object--a gun, and
then more horsemen, and then a second gun. It was all a dim brown
procession in the moonlight. A mounted officer came up beside him and
looked at him and then went back to the cross-roads, but as yet England
was not troubling about spies. Four more guns passed, and then a string
of carts and more mounted men, sitting stiffly. Nobody was singing or
shouting; scarcely a word was audible, and through all the column there
was an effect of quiet efficient haste. And so they passed, and rumbled
and jingled and clattered out of the scene, leaving Mr. Britling in his
car in the dreaming village. He restarted his engine once more, and went
his way thoughtfully.

He went so thoughtfully that presently he missed the road to
Pyecrafts--if ever he had been on the road to Pyecrafts at
all--altogether. He found himself upon a highway running across a
flattish plain, and presently discovered by the sight of the Great Bear,
faint but traceable in the blue overhead, that he was going due north.
Well, presently he would turn south and west; that in good time; now he
wanted to feel; he wanted to think. How could he best help England in
the vast struggle for which the empty silence and beauty of this night
seemed to be waiting? But indeed he was not thinking at all, but
feeling, feeling wonder, as he had never felt it since his youth had
passed from him. This war might end nearly everything in the world as he
had known the world; that idea struggled slowly through the moonlight
into consciousness, and won its way to dominance in his mind.

The character of the road changed; the hedges fell away, the pine trees
and pine woods took the place of the black squat shapes of the hawthorn
and oak and apple. The houses grew rarer and the world emptier and
emptier, until he could have believed that he was the only man awake and
o