ht do something ... something distinguished!"

There were times when he gave himself up to dreams of glory, saw himself
decorated with high awards for bravery. He would imagine himself
performing some impossible act of courage ... saving an Army Corps from
destruction ... showing resource in a period of crisis, and so bringing
salvation where utter loss had seemed inevitable. But these times of
glory were few and brief: he saw himself most often, killed
ingloriously, inconspicuously, one of a crowd, blown, perhaps, to pieces
or buried in bombarded earthworks; and through his dreams of glory and
his plans for work in Ireland, there stubbornly thrust itself this
accusation: I'm a coward! I'm a coward! I'm a coward!

In England, men were charging the queer people who called themselves
Conscientious Objectors with cowardice, but the charge seemed a baseless
one to Henry. He did not believe that he could endure the odium and
obloquy which some of the Conscientious Objectors had borne. There was
courage in the man who said, "I will fight for my country!" but that
courage might be less than that of the man who said, "I will not fight
for my country!" Henry was not a Conscientious Objector, nor could he
understand the state of mind of the man who was. He was a coward.
Inside him, he knew that he was a coward. Inside him, he accused himself
of cowardice. Everything in his life showed that he was a coward, that
he shrank from physical combats, from tests of courage, that sometimes
he shrank from spiritual contests....

"I ought to tell Mary," he said to himself. "I can't marry her without
telling her that I'm ... a funk!"

But he temporised even in this. "I'll wait a little while longer," he
said. "Perhaps later on!..."

Always he wanted to thrust the unpleasant thing a little further off; It
was as if he had said to himself, "I won't deal with it just yet ... and
perhaps it won't need to be dealt with!"

"I'll finish my book first," he said, "and then I'll tell Mary. Perhaps
the war will be over!..."

4

Mary wrote to him twice every week. Rachel Carey and her baby were
staying at Boveyhayne Manor now, and Mary was glad of their company in
the house, for the child gave Mrs. Graham pleasure. She enquired
continually about his book. "_What a pity_," she wrote once, "_that it
was not finished before Roger went into the Army. Then you could both
have gone in together._" And he had written, "_Yes, it is a pity the
book wa