l right at the hospital," he said. "It was good of
you to think of coming home. Don't go away, for a bit." It was the
first time he had asked anything of her.

Another fortnight passed before they heard from Arthur, and then he wrote
them both from Hull. He would be somewhere in the North Sea, mine
sweeping, when they read his letters. He had hoped to get a day or two
to run across and say good-bye; but the need for men was pressing and he
had not liked to plead excuses. The boat by which he had managed to
leave Bergen had gone down. He and a few others had been picked up, but
the sights that he had seen were haunting him. He felt sure his uncle
would agree that he ought to be helping, and this was work for England he
could do with all his heart. He hoped he was not leaving his uncle in
the lurch; but he did not think the war would last long, and he would
soon be back.

"Dear lad," said her father, "he would take the most dangerous work that
he could find. But I wish he hadn't been quite so impulsive. He could
have been of more use helping me with this War Office contract. I
suppose he never got my letter, telling him about it."

In his letter to Joan he went further. He had received his uncle's
letter, so he confided to her. Perhaps she would think him a crank, but
he couldn't help it. He hated this killing business, this making of
machinery for slaughtering men in bulk, like they killed pigs in Chicago.
Out on the free, sweet sea, helping to keep it clean from man's
abominations, he would be away from it all.

She saw the vision of him that night, as, leaning from her window, she
looked out beyond the pines: the little lonely ship amid the waste of
waters; his beautiful, almost womanish, face, and the gentle dreamy eyes
with their haunting suggestion of a shadow.

Her little drummer played less and less frequently to her as the months
passed by. It didn't seem to be the war he had looked forward to. The
illustrated papers continued to picture it as a sort of glorified picnic
where smiling young men lolled luxuriously in cosy dug-outs, reading
their favourite paper. By curious coincidence, it generally happened to
be the journal publishing the photograph. Occasionally, it appeared,
they came across the enemy, who then put up both hands and shouted
"Kamerad." But the weary, wounded men she talked to told another story.

She grew impatient of the fighters with their mouths; the savage old
baldhe