cordially by the hand--

"There's no way I would rather you spent your furlough. But come back,
Geoff," said he. He was not an observant man except in the matter of
military detail; and of Geoffrey's object he had never the slightest
suspicion. Had it been told him, however, he would only have
considered it one of those queer, inexplicable vagaries, like the
history of his coward in the Crimea.

Geoffrey's action, however, was of a piece with the rest of his life:
it was due to no sudden, desperate resolve. He went out to the war as
deliberately as he had ridden out to the hunting-field. The realities
of battle might prove his anticipations mere unnecessary torments of
the mind.

"If only I can serve,--as a volunteer, as a private, in any capacity,"
he thought, "I shall at all events know. And if I fail, I fail not in
the company of my fellows. I disgrace only myself, not my name. But if
I do not fail--" He drew a great breath, he saw himself waking up one
morning without oppression, without the haunting dread that he
was destined one day to slink in forgotten corners of the world a
forgotten pariah, destitute even of the courage to end his misery. He
went out to the war because he was afraid of fear.


II.

On the evening of the capitulation of Paris, two subalterns of
German Artillery were seated before a camp fire on a slope of hill
overlooking the town. To both of them the cessation of alarm was as