d," Henry thought as he walked
home. "A man can't give more than he's got, and Jimphy's given
everything!"

7

He started up, and looked about the room, and while he listened, he
could hear the big clock in the hall sounding three times. He was
shivering, though he was not cold. In his dream, he had seen Jimphy, all
bloody and broken....

"Oh, my God, how horrible!" he groaned.

He got up and went to the window, but he could not see beyond the high
trees, which swayed and moaned and took strange shapes in the wind. His
dream still held his mind, and as he looked into the darkness and saw
the bending branches yielding and rebounding, it seemed to him that he
saw the soldiers rushing forward and heard their cries, hoarse with war
lust or stifled by the blood that gushed from their mouths as they
staggered and fell ... and as he had seen him in his dream, so he saw
Jimphy again, running forward and shouting as he ran, until suddenly
with a queer wrinkled look of amazement on his face, he stopped, and
then, clasping his hands to his head, tumbled in a shapeless heap on the
ground ... but now it seemed to him that as Jimphy fell, his face
changed: it was no longer Jimphy's face, but his own.

"My God, it's me!" he cried, shrinking away from the window, and
clutching at the curtains as if he would cover himself with them. "My
God, it's _me_!"

He shut his eyes tightly and stumbled back to bed. He bruised himself
against a chair, but he was afraid to open his eyes, and he rolled into
bed, covering himself completely with the clothes, and buried his face
in his folded arms. In his mind, one thought hammered insistently: _I
must live! I must live! I must live!_

8

"I'm run down," he said to himself in the morning. "That's what's the
matter with me. I'm run down!"

His father's death had affected him, he thought, far more than he had
imagined. He would be all right again after a rest in Devonshire. It was
natural that he should be in a nervous state ... quite natural. He would
go straight to Boveyhayne from Liverpool. He could catch the Bournemouth
Express, and change at Templecombe. ... "That's what I'll do," he said,
and he hurried downstairs to prepare for his journey.

THE SEVENTH CHAPTER

1

He changed his mind at Liverpool. "I'll go to London first," he said,
"and see Roger and Rachel. I might as well hear anything there is to
hear!" And so he had telegraphed to Roger who met him at Euston.