“Oh, give the devil his due, you fellows,” he said. “War isn’t a pretty game, but it does make for courage. We all know that. And things even finer than mere fighting pluck. There was a man in my company, a Jacques Decrusy. He was just a stupid peasant lad. We were crowded into one end of the trench, about a score of us. The rest of it had fallen in, and we couldn’t move. And a bomb dropped into the middle of us; and the same instant that it touched the ground Decrusy threw himself flat down upon it and took the whole of it into his body. There was nothing left of him but scraps. But the rest of us got off. Nobody had drugged him to do that. There isn’t one of us who was in that trench that will not be a better man to the end of his days, remembering how Jacques Decrusy gave his life for ours.” Mrs. Phillips stooped and kissed her. “Of course, dear,” she said. “Perhaps I shall, now that my mind is easier.”!

The girl turned and went. Joan watched her as she descended the great staircase. She moved with a curious, gliding motion, pausing at times for the people to make way for her. “Couldn’t you have saved a bit, Daddy?” she asked, “of all that wealth of youth—just enough to live on?”

They grew less and less afraid of looking at one another as they felt that darkened room further and further behind them. After the coffee, Mrs. Phillips proposed their adjourning to the “drawing-room” the other side of the folding doors, which had been left open. Phillips asked her to leave Joan and himself where they were. He wanted to talk to her. He promised not to bore her for more than ten minutes. “Your friends, that you never had any. And your enemies, that they are always the latest,” she informed him.