Only Michael remained.

He told them they were mistaken if they thought their going would inspire him to follow them.  It, and Stephen’s death, merely intensified the bitterness he felt towards the War.  He was more than ever determined to keep himself pure from it, consecrated to his Forlorn Hope.  If they fell back, all the more reason why be should go on.

And, while he waited for the moment of vision, he continued Stephen’s work on the Green Review.  Stephen had left it to him when he went out.  Michael tried to be faithful to the tradition he thus inherited; but gradually Stephen’s spirit disappeared from the Review and its place was taken by the clear, hard, unbreakable thing that was Michael’s mind.

And Michael knew that he was beginning to make himself felt.

But Stephen’s staff, such as it was, and nearly all his contributors had gone to the War, one after another, and Michael found himself taking all their places.  He began to feel a strain, which he took to be the strain of overwork, and he went down to Renton to recover.

That was on the Tuesday that followed Veronica’s Sunday.

He thought that down there he would get away from everything that did him harm:  from his father’s and mother’s eyes; from his sister’s proud, cold face; and from his young brother’s smile; and from Veronica’s beauty that saddened him; and from the sense of Nicky’s danger that brooded as a secret obsession over the house.  He would fill up the awful empty space.  He thought:  “For a whole fortnight I shall get away from this infernal War.”

But he did not get away from it.  On every stage of the journey down he encountered soldiers going to the Front.  He walked in the Park at Darlington between his trains, and wounded soldiers waited for him on every seat, shuffled towards him round every turning, hobbled after him on their crutches down every path.  Their eyes looked at him with a shrewd hostility.  He saw the young Yorkshire recruits drinking in the open spaces.  Sergeants’ eyes caught and measured him, appraising his physique.  Behind and among them he saw Drayton’s, and Reveillaud’s, and Stephen’s eyes; and young Wadham’s eyes, strange and secretive and hard.

* * * * *

At Reyburn Michael’s train was switched off to a side platform in the open.  Before he left Darlington, a thin, light rain had begun to fall from a shred of blown cloud; and at Reyburn the burst mass was coming down.  The place was full of the noise of rain.  The drops tapped on the open platform and hissed as the wind drove them in a running stream.  They drummed loudly on the station roof.  But these sounds went out suddenly, covered by the trampling of feet.

A band of Highlanders with their bagpipes marched into the station.  They lined up solemnly along the open platform with their backs to Michael’s train and their faces to the naked rails on the other side.  Higher up Michael could see the breast of an engine; it was backing, backing, towards the troop-train that waited under the cover of the roof.  He could hear the clank of the coupling and the recoil.  At that sound the band had their mouths to their bagpipes and their fingers ready on the stops.  Two or three officers hurried down from the station doors and stood ready.