ffed sacks,
representing German defenders, were hung for bayonet practice. It was
a noon of grey mist through which the alignments of huts and tents
were barely visible. Instinctively avoiding the wet earth of the
parados, he went round, and, tired after the recent spell of physical
drill, sat down on the equally wet sandbags of the model parapet, a
pathetic, lonely little khaki figure isolated for the moment by the
kindly mist from an uncomprehending world.

He read Peggy's letter several times. He recognized her goodness, her
loyalty. The grateful tears even came to his eyes and he brushed them
away hurriedly with a swift look round. But his heart beat none the
faster. A long-faded memory of childhood came back to him in regained
colour. Some quarrel with Peggy. What it was all about he had entirely
forgotten; but he remembered her little flushed face and her angry
words: "Well, I'm a sport and you ain't!" He remembered also rebuking
her priggishly for unintelligible language and mincing away. He read
the letter again in the light of this flash of memory. The only
difference between it and the childish speech lay in the fact that
instead of a declaration of contrasts, she now uttered a declaration
of similitudes. They were both "sports." There she was wrong. Doggie
shook his head. In her sense of the word he was not a "sport." A sport
takes chances, plays the game with a smile on his lips. There was no
smile on his. He loathed the game with a sickening, shivering
loathing. He was engaged in it because a conglomeration of
irresistible forces had driven him into the _melee_. It never
occurred to Doggie that he was under orders of his own soul. This
simple yet stupendous fact never occurred to Peggy.

He sat on the wet sandbags and thought and thought. Though he
reproached himself for base ingratitude, the letter did not satisfy
him. It left his heart cold. What he sought in it he did not know. It
was something he could not find, something that was not there. The
sea-mist thickened around him. Peggy seemed very far away.... He was
still engaged to her--for it would be monstrous to persist in his
withdrawal. He must accept the situation which she decreed. He owed
that to her loyalty. But how to continue the correspondence? It was
hard enough to write from Salisbury Plain; from here it was well-nigh
impossible.

Thus was Doggie brought up against a New Problem. He struggled
desperately to defer its solution.

C