The train came on slowly, packed with men; men who thrust their heads and shoulders through the carriage windows, and knelt on the seats, and stood straining over each other’s backs to look out; men whose faces were scarlet with excitement; men with open mouths shouting for joy.

The officers saluted as it passed.  It halted at the open platform, and suddenly the pipers began to play.

Michael got out of his train and watched.

Solemnly, in the grey evening of the rain, with their faces set in a sort of stern esctasy, the Highlanders played to their comrades.  Michael did not know whether their tune was sad or gay.  It poured itself into one mournful, savage, sacred cry of salutation and valediction.  When it stopped the men shouted; there were voices that barked hoarsely and broke; voices that roared; young voices that screamed, strung up by the skirling of the bagpipes.  The pipers played to them again.

And suddenly Michael was overcome.  Pity shook him and grief and an intolerable yearning, and shame.  For one instant his soul rose up above the music, and was made splendid and holy, the next he cowered under it, stripped and beaten.  He clenched his fists, hating this emotion that stung him to tears and tore at his heart and at the hardness of his mind.

As the troop-train moved slowly out of the station the pipers, piping more and more shrilly, swung round and marched beside it to the end of the platform.  The band ceased abruptly, and the men answered with shout after shout of violent joy; they reared up through the windows, straining for the last look—­and were gone.

Michael turned to the porter who lifted his luggage from the rack.  “What regiment are they?” he said.

“Camerons, sir.  Going to the Front.”

The clear, uncanny eyes of Veronica’s father pursued him now.

* * * * *

At last he had got away from it.

In Rathdale, at any rate, there was peace.  The hills and their pastures, and the flat river fields were at peace.  And in the villages of Morfe and Renton there was peace; for as yet only a few men had gone from them.  The rest were tied to the land, and they were more absorbed in the hay-harvest than in the War.  Even the old Belgians in Veronica’s cottage were at peace.  They had forgotten.

For three days Michael himself had peace.

He went up to Veronica’s hill and sat on it; and thought how for hundreds of miles, north, south, east and west of him, there was not a soul whom he knew.  In all his life he had never been more by himself.

This solitude of his had a singular effect on Michael’s mind.  So far from having got away from the War he had never been more conscious of it than he was now.  What he had got away from was other people’s consciousness.  From the beginning the thing that threatened him had been, not the War but this collective war-spirit, clamouring for his private soul.