had occasionally taken the Communion, largely to please an elder school-friend, who was ardently devout, and was now a Chaplain on the Western front.  But what did it really mean to him?—­what would it mean to her—­if she were left alone?  Images passed through his mind—­the sights of the trenches—­shattered and dying bodies.  What was the soul?—­had it really an independent life? Something there was in men—­quite rough and common men—­something revealed by war and the sufferings of war—­so splendid, so infinitely beyond anything he had ever dreamed of in ordinary life, that to think of it roused in him a passion of hidden feeling—­perhaps adoration—­but vague and speechless—­adoration of he knew not what.  He did not speak easily of his feeling, even to his young wife, to whom marriage had so closely, so ineffably bound him.  But as he lay on the grass looking up at her—­smiling—­obeying her command of silence, his thoughts ranged irrepressibly.  Supposing he fell, and she lived on—­years and years—­to be an old woman?  Old!  Nelly?  Impossible!  He put his hand gently on the slender foot, and felt the pulsing life in it.  ‘Dearest!’ she murmured at his touch, and their eyes met tenderly.

‘I should be content—­’ he thought—­’if we could just live this life out!  I don’t believe I should want another life.  But to go—­and leave her; to go—­just at the beginning—­before one knows anything—­before one has finished anything—­’

And again his eyes wandered from her to the suffusion of light and colour on the lake.  ’How could anyone ever want anything better than this earth—­this life—­at its best—­if only one were allowed a full and normal share of it!’ And he thought again, almost with a leap of exasperation, of those dead and mangled men—­out there—­in France.  Who was responsible—­God?—­or man?  But man’s will is—­must be—­something dependent—­something included in God’s will.  If God really existed, and if He willed war, and sudden death—­then there must be another life.  Or else the power that devised the world was not a good, but an evil—­at best, a blind one.

But while his young brain was racing through the old puzzles in the old ways, Nelly was thinking of something quite different.  Her delicate small face kept breaking into little smiles with pensive intervals—­till at last she broke out—­

’Do you remember how I caught you—­turning back to look after us—­just here—­just about here?  You had passed that thorn tree—­’

He came back to love-making with delight.

’"Caught me!” I like that!  As if you weren’t looking back too!  How else did you know anything about me?’

He had taken his seat beside her on the rock, and her curly black head was nestling against his shoulder.  There was no one on the mountain path, no one on the lake.  Occasionally from the main road on the opposite shore there was a passing sound of wheels.  Otherwise the world was theirs—­its abysses of shadow, its ‘majesties of light.’