in the enormous machinery of the war,
he never could accept it, as other men seemed to accept it, as normal
and natural occupation that might be expected to go on for ever and
outside of which was nothing at all. His life was not here; it was at
home. He got the feeling that this business in which he was caught up
was a business apart altogether from his own individual life,--a kind of
trance in which his own life was held temporarily in abeyance, a kind of
transmigration in which he occupied another and a very strange identity:
from whose most strange personality, often so amazingly occupied, he
looked wonderingly upon the identity that was his own, waiting his
return.

And it was when, in thought or fleeting action, he came in touch with
that old, waiting identity, that there happened the things that seemed
transient as falling stars but moved into his horoscope as planets,--and
remained.

II

He first went to France, in one of the long string of Service battalions
that had sprung out of the Pinks, in the June following his enlistment.
Mabel had not wished to make any change in her manner of life while he
was still in England in training and she did not wish to when, at home
three days on his draft leave, he discussed it with her. She much
preferred, she said, to go on living in her own home. She was altogether
against any idea of going to be with her father at Tidborough, and there
was no cousin "or anybody like that" (her two sisters were married and
had homes of their own) that she would care to have in the house with
her. Relations were all very well in their right place but sharing the
house with you was not their right place. She had plenty to do with her
war work and one thing and another; if, in the matter of obviating
loneliness, she did make any change at all, it might be to get some sort
of paid companion: if you had any one permanently in the house it was
much better to have some one in a dependent position, not as your equal,
upsetting things.

The whole of these considerations were advanced again in a letter which
Sabre received in July and which gave him great pleasure. Mabel had
decided to get a paid companion--it was rather lonely in some ways--and
she had arranged to have "that girl, Miss Bright." Sabre, reading,
exclaimed aloud, "By Jove, that's good. I am glad." And he thought,
"Jolly little Effie! That's splendid." He somehow liked immensely the
idea of imagining Bright Effie about the hous