life’s worth?  I shrug my shoulders at my own unanswerable questions—­all I know is that I move daily with men who have everything to live for who, nevertheless, are urged by an unconscious magnanimity to die.  I don’t think any of our dead pity themselves—­but they would have done so if they had faltered in their choice.  One lives only from sunrise to sunrise, but there’s a more real happiness in this brief living than I ever knew before, because it is so exactingly worth while.

Thank you again for your kindness. 
          Very sincerely yours,
                                  C.D.

The suggestion that we might all meet in London in January, 1917, was a hope rather than an expectation.  We received a cable from France on Sunday, December 17th, 1916, and left New York on December 30th.  We were met in London by the two sailor-sons, who were expecting appointments at any moment, and Coningsby arrived late in the evening of January 13th.  He was unwell when he arrived, having had a near touch of pneumonia.  The day before he left the front he had been in action, with a temperature of 104.  There were difficulties about getting his leave at the exact time appointed, but these he overcame by exchanging leave with a brother-officer.  He travelled from the Front all night in a windowless train, and at Calais was delayed by a draft of infantry which he had to take over to England.  The consequence of this delay was that the meeting at the railway station, of which he had so long dreamed, did not come off.  We spent a long day, going from station to station, misled by imperfect information as to the arrival of troop trains.  At Victoria Station we saw two thousand troops arrive on leave, men caked with trench-mud, but he was not among them.  We reluctantly returned to our hotel in the late afternoon and gave up expecting him.  There was all the time a telegram at the hotel from him, giving the exact place and time of his arrival, but it was not delivered until it was too late to meet him.  He arrived at ten o’clock, and at the same time his two brothers, who had been summoned in the morning to Southampton, entered the hotel, having been granted special leave to return to London.  A night’s rest did wonders for Coningsby, and the next day his spirits were as high as in the old days of joyous holiday.  During the next eight days we lived at a tense pitch of excitement.  We went to theatres, dined in restaurants, met friends, and heard from his lips a hundred details of his life which could not be communicated in letters.  We were all thrilled by the darkened heroic London through which we moved, the London which bore its sorrows so proudly, and went about its daily life with such silent courage.  We visited old friends to whom the war had brought irreparable bereavements, but never once heard the voice of self-pity, of murmur or complaint.  To me it was an incredible England; an England purged of all weakness, stripped of flabbiness, regenerated by sacrifice.  I had dreamed of no such transformation by anything I had read in American newspapers and magazines.  I think no one can imagine the completeness of this rebirth of the soul of England who has not dwelt, if only for a few days, among its people.