’Yes.  Can’t fight, I suppose—­poor beggar!  He was very much struck by you, Mrs. George Sarratt!—­that was plain.’

Nelly laughed—­a happy childish laugh.

’Well, if he does get us leave to boat, you needn’t mind, need you?  What else, I wonder, could he do for us?’

‘Nothing!’ The tone was decided.  ’I don’t like being beholden to great folk.  But that, I suppose, is the kind of man whom Bridget would have liked you to marry, darling?’

‘As if he would ever have looked at me!’ said Nelly tranquilly.  ’A man like that may be as rich as rich, but he would never marry a poor wife.’

’Thank God, I don’t believe money will matter nearly as much to people, after the war!’ said Sarratt, with energy.  ’It’s astonishing how now, in the army—­of course it wasn’t the same before the war—­you forget it entirely.  Who cares whether a man’s rich, or who’s son he is?  In my batch when I went up to Aldershot there were men of all sorts, stock-brokers, landowners, city men, manufacturers, solicitors, some of them awfully rich, and then clerks, and schoolmasters, and lots of poor devils, like myself.  We didn’t care a rap, except whether a man took to his drill, or didn’t; whether he was going to keep the Company back or help it on.  And it’s just the same in the field.  Nothing counts but what you are—­it doesn’t matter a brass hap’orth what you have.  And as the new armies come along that’ll be so more and more.  It’s “Duke’s son and Cook’s son,” everywhere, and all the time.  If it was that in the South African war, it’s twenty times that now.  This war is bringing the nation together as nothing ever has done, or could do.  War is hellish!—­but there’s a deal to be said for it!’

He spoke with ardour, as they strolled homeward, along the darkening shore, she hanging on his arm.  Nelly said nothing.  Her little face showed very white in the gathering shadows.  He went on.

’There was a Second Lieutenant in our battalion, an awfully handsome boy—­heir to a peerage I think.  But he couldn’t get a commission quick enough to please him when the war broke out, so he just enlisted—­oh! of course they’ve given him a commission long ago.  But his great friend was a young miner, who spoke broad Northumberland, a jolly chap.  And these two stuck together—­we used to call them the Heavenly Twins.  And in the fighting round Hill 60, the miner got wounded, and lay out between the lines, with the Boche shells making hell round him.  And the other fellow never rested till he’d crawled out to him, and taken him water, and tied him up, and made a kind of shelter for him.  The miner was a big fellow, and the other was just a slip of a boy.  So he couldn’t drag in his friend, but he got another man to go out with him, and between them they did it right enough.  And when I was in the clearing station next day, I saw the two—­the miner in bed, awfully smashed up, and the other sitting by him.  It made one feel choky.  The boy could have put down a cool hundred thousand, I suppose, if it could have done any good.  But it wouldn’t.  I can tell you, darling, this war knocks the nonsense out of a man!’