to cars."

I said they were. I'd motored on them. Kendal looked at me as he might
have looked at the survivor of a shattering experience. Then he looked at
his car. He seemed to be seeing all the roads in Belgium in a hideous
vision.

Then he spoke. "Well, they may be bad roads, but Mr. Jevons isn't going
to be done. He'll take out ten cars before 'e turns back. Ten cars, he
will."

Yes, yes, I might have known it. Was there ever anything Jevons had made
up his mind to do and didn't? Had I ever known him turn back from any
adventure that he had set out on? If he said he was going to the war,
why couldn't I have known that he would go? The more incredible the thing
was, the more likely he was to do it.

When I said so he shook his head and said it wasn't really as likely as
it looked.

We were sitting together after dinner in his garden. Though it was the
third week in September the nights were still warm. Without Viola, the
stillness of the place was strange to me, almost uncanny, as if Viola
were dead and had come back and was listening to us somewhere. I had just
told him it was splendid of him going out like this, and he had smiled
back at me and asked, "Like what?" And then I had said I might have known
it; it was the sort of thing he would do.

No, he went on, it wasn't likely. It had been touch and go, he had only
just pulled it off by the skin of his teeth. It had given him more
trouble than anything he'd ever tried for. It had bothered him more. It
had bothered him most damnably.

I thought he was referring to his struggles with the recruiting depots
and the War Office and the Home Office and the Embassies and all the rest
of it. And I said it _was_ pretty hard luck his own Ambulance Corps being
sent out without him. But he said, No; it wasn't. He hadn't been very
keen on the Ambulance Corps. He hadn't really wanted to go out with all
that beastly crowd. This quick scouting game--by himself--was more in his
line. All he regretted was the time he'd lost.

Well, I said, anyhow he was a lucky beggar to have got what he wanted
after six weeks.

At that he looked at me suddenly and his face went all sharp and thin. Or
else I hadn't noticed till then how sharp and thin it was. His flush had
seemed to flood it and fill it out somehow, and his eyes struck your
attention like two great flashes of energy. The flash had gone out now as
he looked at me.

I reminded him: "Haven't you always said you could get w