and yet forlorn,
Came through the silence of the trees,
The echoes of a golden horn,
Calling to distances.

Somehow Yeovil knew that he would never hear that voice again, and he
knew, too, that he would hear it always, with its message, "Be a
fighter." And he knew now, with a shamefaced consciousness that sprang
suddenly into existence, that the summons would sound for him in vain.

The weary brain-torturing months of fever had left their trail behind, a
lassitude of spirit and a sluggishness of blood, a quenching of the
desire to roam and court adventure and hardship. In the hours of waking
and depression between the raging intervals of delirium he had
speculated, with a sort of detached, listless indifference, on the
chances of his getting back to life and strength and energy. The
prospect of filling a corner of some lonely Siberian graveyard or Finnish
cemetery had seemed near realisation at times, and for a man who was
already half dead the other half didn't particularly matter. But when he
had allowed himself to dwell on the more hopeful side of the case it had
always been a complete recovery that awaited him; the same Yeovil as of
yore, a little thinner and more lined about the eyes perhaps, would go
through life in the same way, alert, resolute, enterprising, ready to
start off at short notice for some desert or upland where the eagles were
circling and the wild-fowl were calling. He had not reckoned that Death,
evaded and held off by the doctors' skill, might exact a compromise, and
that only part of the man would go free to the West.

And now he began to realise how little of mental and physical energy he
could count on. His own country had never seemed in his eyes so comfort-
yielding and to-be-desired as it did now when it had passed into alien
keeping and become a prison land as much as a homeland. London with its
thin mockery of a Season, and its chattering horde of empty-hearted self-
seekers, held no attraction for him, but the spell of English country
life was weaving itself round him, now that the charm of the desert was
receding into a mist of memories. The waning of pleasant autumn days in
an English woodland, the whir of game birds in the clean harvested
fields, the grey moist mornings in the saddle, with the magical cry of
hounds coming up from some misty hollow, and then the delicious abandon
of physical weariness in bathroom and bedroom after a long run, and the
heavenly snatc