* * * * *

A light rain was falling when I reached Midhurst.  A hired dog-cart met me at the station, so I gathered that Jimmy’s mad passion for his motor-car had survived the war.

And at Amershott everything seemed to have survived.  If it had not been for troops on the high road, and for the stillness of the coverts, and for the recruiting posters stuck everywhere on the barn-doors, and for the strange figure of old Perrott driving the mail-cart from Midhurst to Amershott instead of his son, you wouldn’t have known that the war had anything to do with England.  And I expected to find Jimmy in his old Norfolk suit standing in the garage and looking with adoration at his motor-car.

As I thought all this I smiled when Parker told me that Mr. Jevons was in the garage.  Parker, I noticed, didn’t smile.

And in another minute it was Jevons who did all the smiling.

I found him in the garage—­no, I can’t say I found him, for I didn’t recognize him, but I heard his voice assuring me that it was he.  He was in khaki; from head to foot, from his peaked military cap to his puttees he was in faultless, well-fitting khaki; even his shirt and his neck-tie were khaki.  Jimmy’s colours showed up wonderfully out of all that brownish, greyish, yellowish green.  His flush fairly flamed, and his eyes, his eyes looked enormous and very bright—­great chunks of dark sapphire his eyes were.  They were twinkling at me.

“It’s me all right, old man,” he said, and turned from me in his deep preoccupation.  And as he turned I saw that he wore round his right arm a white brassard with a red cross on it.

At the far end of the coach-house where the great black and white idol used to stand there was a khaki car with a huge red cross on a white square on its flank and on its khaki canvas hood.  This was what his eyes turned to.

“But—­where’s the black-and-white god?” I asked.

“There she is,” he said, “you’re looking at her.”

“You haven’t—­”

“Yes, I have.  She’s had her new coat on for the last three weeks.  You couldn’t take her out as she was, all black and white.  She’d have been knocked to bits before we’d begun our job.  So I had her painted.  She’s a good enough target for shell-fire as she is.”

“You don’t mean,” I said, “that you’re going out?”

“What else have I been meaning ever since there was a war?”

“But—­where are you going to?”

“Belgium,” he said.  He added that it was the only blessed place he could get to.

“And what are you going to do when you get there?”

He said he was going to scout for wounded, of course.