nly he would hear her saying, "What are you thinking of,
Quinny?" and he would come out of his silence with a start, and say,
"Oh, my book, Mary!" and find that he had been walking by her side,
unaware of her, unaware of anything but these abominable paper people
who deluged his mind with their being ... and when they got to
Hangman's Stone, he thought always, "What a good title for a story!"

"But I can't leave it alone," he would say to himself, and then he would
compare himself to a drunkard, eager to be quit of his drink, but unable
to conquer his craving. And he had pride in it, too. That was what
distinguished him from the drunkard and the drug-taker. They had no
pride in their drunkenness or their drugged senses, but he had pride in
his books, and constantly in his mind was the desire that before he
joined the Army, he should leave another book behind him, that his life
should be expressed substantially in a number of novels, so that if he
should die in battle, he would have left something by which men might
remember him.

He had talked to Mary about his position, but she had insisted that this
was a decision he must make for himself. Her view, and the view of her
mother, was that a woman ought not to take the responsibility of urging
a man to endure the horror and danger of such a war as this. "Women
can't go into the trenches themselves," Mrs. Graham said, "and they've
no right to ask any one else to go!" That was what his father had said.

"But somebody must go, and there are people who have to be told about
things," he objected.

"I think," Mrs. Graham answered, "I'd rather be killed than be defended
by a man who was white-feathered into doing it, and I know I should
never be happy again if I'd nagged at a man until he joined the Army,
and he was killed.... I think that some women will have haunted minds
after this War!"

"It's the Government's job to say who shall go and who shall stay," Mary
added. "That's what they're there for, and it's mean of them to shuffle
out of their responsibility and let a lot of flappers and old maids do
their work for them!"

Then their talk had taken a new turn, and in the end it was settled that
Mary and he were to be married when the new book was finished, and then
he would join the Army. There had been a difficulty with Mrs. Graham,
but Mary over-ruled her.

"I won't let him go until he marries me," she said, shutting her lips
firmly and looking very resolutely at he