me his first visit. I was convalescent and had made myself
fairly comfortable in a cottage near Guildford. I had got rid of the
last of a long series of nurses. My leg had ceased to cause me any
active annoyance, but I was beginning to find myself a good deal bored
and not a little depressed. When Gorman walked in I was not, just at
first, particularly glad to see him.

"Let me congratulate you," he said.

"On being alive? Is that a blessing?"

I had been brooding over the fact that I was lame for life. Gorman's
breezy cheerfulness rather jarred me.

"Of course it's a blessing to be alive," said Gorman, "but I wasn't
thinking of that. What I was congratulating you on was being a hero.
D.S.O., isn't it? Tell me all about it, won't you?"

I have been given the right of appending those three letters to my
name, so I suppose I must have avoided the worst kinds of blundering and
incompetence. But I have no recollection of doing anything to deserve
the honour. I fear I answered Gorman rather ill-temperedly.

"There's nothing whatever to tell," I said. "I just crawled about in a
trench, generally muddy. Everybody else did exactly the same."

Gorman is still the same man he always was, amazingly tactful and
sympathetic. He realised at once that I hated talking about the war and
was in no mood for recounting my own experiences. Instead of pressing me
with silly questions until he drove me mad, he dropped the subject of my
D.S.O. and began to babble agreeably about other things.

"Politics," he said, "have got into a frightful state. In fact there are
hardly any politics at all. We haven't had a decent rag since the war
began. We all sit round cooing at each other like beastly little green
lovebirds in a cage. It can't last long, of course. Sooner or later
somebody's bound to break out and try to bite; but for the present
Parliament's the dullest place in Europe."

I began to feel slightly interested.

"I remember hearing," I said, "that you Nationalists promised not to
cheer for the Germans."

"We did more than that," said Gorman. "We rallied to the Empire at the
very start and have kept on rallying ever since. It felt odd at first,
but you get used to anything in time, even to being loyal. You'd have
been surprised if you'd heard me singing, 'God Save the King' in Dublin
last week."

"Did you really?"

"Twice," said Gorman, "on two consecutive days."

A world in which such things could happen might, I began to