as not to enter into unproductive argument, as yours. And I am a
Master of Arts of the two Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge. Yet I
fail to find anything dishonourable in my present estate as 33702
Private Phineas McPhail in the British Army."

Doggie seemed not to hear him. He stared at him wildly.

"Enlist?" he repeated. "As a Tommy?"

"Even as a Tommy," said Phineas. He glanced at the ormolu clock. "It
is past one. The respectable widow woman near the Elephant and Castle
who has let me a bedroom will be worn by anxiety as to my non-return.
Marmaduke, my dear, dear laddie, I must leave you. If you will be
lunching here twelve hours hence, nothing will give me greater
pleasure than to join you. Laddie, do you think you could manage a
fried sole and a sweetbread?"

"Enlist?" said Doggie, following him out to the front door in a dream.

He opened the door. Phineas shook hands.

"Fried sole and a sweetbread at one-thirty?"

"Of course, with pleasure," said Doggie.

Phineas fumbled in his pockets.

"It's a long cry at this time of night from Bloomsbury to the Elephant
and Castle. You haven't the price of a taxi fare about you,
laddie--two or three pounds----?"

Doggie drew from his patent note-case a sheaf of one-pound and
ten-shilling treasury notes and handed them over to McPhail's vulture
clutch.

"Good night, laddie!"

"Good night!"

Phineas strode away into the blackness. Doggie shut the front door and
put up the chain and went back into his sitting-room. He wound his
fingers in his hair.

"Enlist? My God!"

He lit a cigarette and after a few puffs flung it into the grate. He
stared at the alternatives.

Flight, which was craven--a lifetime of self-contempt. Durdlebury,
which was impossible. Enlistment----?

Yet what was a man incapable yet able-bodied, honourable though
disgraced, to do?

His landlord found him at seven o'clock in the morning asleep in an
arm-chair.

CHAPTER IX

After a bath and a change and breakfast, Doggie went out for one of
his solitary walks. At Durdlebury such a night as the last would have
kept him in bed in a darkened room for most of the following day. But
he had spent many far, far worse on Salisbury Plain, and the
inexorable reveille had dragged him out into the raw dreadful morning,
heedless of his headache and yearning for slumber, until at last the
process of hardening had begun. To-day Doggie was as unfatigued a
young man as walked the streets