‘You did really make up your mind—­then?’ she asked him, just for the pleasure of hearing him confess it again.

‘Of course I did!  But what was the good?’

She knew that he meant it had been impossible to speak while his mother was still alive, and he, her only child, was partly dependent upon her.  But his mother had died not long after Nelly’s father, and her little income had come to her son.  So now what with Nelly’s small portion, and his mother’s two hundred and fifty a year in addition to his pay, the young subaltern thought himself almost rich—­in comparison with so many others.  His father, who had died while he was still at school, had been a master at Harrow, and he had been brought up in a refined home, with high standards and ideals.  A scholarship at Oxford at one of the smaller colleges, a creditable degree, then an opening in the office of a well-known firm of solicitors, friends of his father, and a temporary commission, as soon as war broke out, on his record as a keen and diligent member of the Harrow and Oxford O.T.C.’s:—­these had been the chief facts of his life up to August 1914;—­that August which covered the roads leading to the Aldershot headquarters, day by day, with the ever-renewed columns of the army to be, with masses of marching men, whose eager eyes said one thing only—­’Training!—­training!’

The war, and the causes of the war, had moved his nature, which was sincere and upright, profoundly; all the more perhaps because of a certain kindling and awakening of the whole man, which had come from his first sight of Nelly Cookson in the previous June, and from his growing friendship with her—­which he must not yet call love.  He had decided however after three meetings with her that he would never marry anyone else.  Her softness, her yieldingness, her delicate beauty intoxicated him.  He rejoiced that she was no ‘new woman,’ but only a very girlish and undeveloped creature, who would naturally want his protection as well as his love.  For it was his character to protect and serve.  He had protected and served his mother—­faithfully and well.  And as she was dying, he had told her about Nelly—­not before; only to find that she knew it all, and that the only soreness he had ever caused her came from the secrecy which he had tenderly thought her due.

But for all his sanity and sweet temper there was a hard tough strain in him, which had made war so far, even through the horrors of it, a great absorbing game to him, for which he knew himself fitted, in which he meant to excel.  Several times during the fighting that led up to Neuve Chapelle he had drawn the attention of his superiors, both for bravery and judgment; and after Neuve Chapelle, he had been mentioned in despatches.  He had never yet known fear in the field—­never even such a shudder at the unknown—­which was yet the possible!—­as he had just been conscious of.  His nerves had always been strong,