te."

A few have already settled themselves for correspondence. Barque is
standing up. He stoops over a sheet of paper flattened on a note-book
upon a jutting crag in the trench wall. Apparently in the grip of an
inspiration, he writes on and on, with his eyes in bondage and the
concentrated expression of a horseman at full gallop.

When once Lamuse--who lacks imagination--has sat down, placed his
little writing-block on the padded summit of his knees, and moistened
his copying-ink pencil, he passes the time in reading again the last
letters received, in wondering what he can say that he has not already
said, and in fostering a grim determination to say something else.

A sentimental gentleness seems to have overspread little Eudore, who is
curled up in a sort of niche in the ground. He is lost in meditation,
pencil in hand, eyes on paper. Dreaming, he looks and stares and sees.
It is another sky that lends him light, another to which his vision
reaches. He has gone home.

In this time of letter-writing, the men reveal the most and the best
that they ever were. Several others surrender to the past, and its
first expression is to talk once more of fleshly comforts.

Through their outer crust of coarseness and concealment, other hearts
venture upon murmured memories, and the rekindling of bygone
brightness: the summer morning, when the green freshness of the garden
steals in upon the purity of the country bedroom; or when the wind in
the wheat of the level lands sets it slowly stirring or deeply waving,
and shakes the square of oats hard by into quick little feminine
tremors; or the winter evening, with women and their gentleness around
the shaded luster of the lamp.

But Papa Blaire resumes work upon the ring he has begun. He has
threaded the still formless disc of aluminium over a bit of rounded
wood, and rubs it with the file. As he applies himself to the job, two
wrinkles of mighty meditation deepen upon his forehead. Anon he stops,
straightens himself, and looks tenderly at the trifle, as though she
also were looking at it.

"You know," he said to me once, speaking of another ring, "it's not a
question of doing it well or not well. The point is that I've done it
for my wife, d'you see? When I had nothing to do but scratch myself, I
used to have a look at this photo"--he showed me a photograph of a big,
chubby-faced woman--"and then it was quite easy to set about this
damned ring. You might say that we've made