Sabre said, “I do.  I’ve never been able but to admire him.”  She said, “Every one did Poor Tony.  Brave Tony!”]

XI

On the following morning he crossed to France, there to take up again that strange identity in whose occupancy his own self was held in abeyance, waiting his return.  Seven months passed before he returned to that waiting identity and he resumed it then permanently,—­done with the war.  The tremendous fighting of 1917—­his participation in the war—­his tenancy of the strange personality caught up in the enormous machinery of it all—­ended for him in the great break through of the Hindenburg Line in November.  On top of a recollection of sudden shock, then of whirling giddiness in which he was conscious of some enormous violence going on but could not feel it—­like (as he afterwards thought) beginning to come to in the middle of a tooth extraction under gas—­on the top of these and of extraordinary things and scenes and people he could not at all understand came some one saying: 

“Well, it’s good-by to the war for you, old man.”

He knew that he was aware—­and somehow for some time had been aware—­that he was in a cot in a ship.  He said, “I got knocked out, didn’t I?”

...  Some one was telling him some interminable story about some one being wounded in the shoulder and in the knee.  He said, and his voice appeared to him to be all jumbled up and thick, “Well, I don’t care a damn.”

...  Some one laughed.

Years—­or minutes—­after this he was talking to a nurse.  He said, “What did some one say to me about it being good-by to the war for me?”

The nurse smiled.  “Well, poor thing, you’ve got it rather badly in the knee, you know.”

He puzzled over this.  Presently he said, “Where are we?”

The nurse bent across the cot and peered through the port; then beamed down on him: 

“England!”

She said, “Aren’t you glad? What’s the matter?”

His face was contracted in intensity of thought, extraordinary thought:  he felt the most extraordinary premonition of something disastrous awaiting him:  there was in his mind, meaninglessly, menacingly, over and over again, “Good luck have thee with thine honour ... and thy right hand shall show thee terrible things....”

“Terrible things!”

PART FOUR

MABEL—­EFFIE—­NONA

CHAPTER I

I

Said Hapgood—­that garrulous Hapgood, solicitor, who first in this book spoke of Sabre to a mutual friend—­said Hapgood, seated in the comfortable study of his fiat, to that same friend, staying the night: