Val could not remember the time when his ambition had not been set on soldiering:  regiments of Hussars and Dragoons had deployed on his earliest Land of Counterpane:  he had never cared for any other toys.  But as soon as war was over he had resigned his commission, a high sense of duty driving him from a field in which he felt unfit to serve.  He had pitilessly executed his own judgment:  no man can do more.  But what if in judgement itself had been unhinged—­warped—­deflected by the interaction of splintered bone and cut sinew and dazed, ghost-ridden mind?  Have not psychologists said that few fighting men were strictly normal in or for some time after the war?

If that were true, Val had wasted the best years of his life on a delusion.  It was a disturbing thought, but it brought a sparkle to his eyes and an electric force to his fingertips:  he raised his head and looked out into the September night as if there was stirring in him the restless sap of spring.  After all he was still a young man.  Forty years more!  If these grey ten years since the war could be taken as finite, not endless:  if after them one were to break the chain, tear off the hair shirt, come out of one’s cell into the warm sun—­then, oh then—­Val’s shoulders remembered their military set—­life might be life again and not life in death.

“What the devil are you strumming now?”

“Tipperary.”

“That’s not much in your line.”

“Oh!  I was in the Army once,” said Val.  “You go to sleep.”

He had his wish.  The heavy eyelids closed, the great chest rose and fell evenly, and some—­not all—­of the deep lines of pain were smoothed away from Bernard’s lips.  Even in sleep it was a restless, suffering head, but it was no longer so devil-ridden as when he was talking of his wife.  Val played on softly:  once when he desisted Bernard stirred and muttered something which sounded like “Go on, damn you,” a proof that his mind was not far from his body, only the thinnest of veils lying over its terrible activity.  David would have played the clock round, if Saul would have slept on.

Saul did not.  He woke—­with a tremendous start, sure sign of broken nerves:  a start that shook him like a fall and shook the couch too.  “Hallo!” he came instantly into full possession of his faculties:  “you still here?  What’s the time?  I feel as if I’d been asleep for years.  Why, it’s daylight!” He dragged out his watch.  “What the devil is the time?”

Val rose and pulled back a curtain.  The morning sky was full of grey light, and long pale shadows fell over frost-silvered turf:  mists were steaming up like pale smoke from the river, over whose surface they swept in fantastic shapes like ghosts taking hands in an evanescent arabesque:  the clouds, the birds, the flowers were all awake.  The house was awake too, and in fact it was the clatter of a housemaid’s brush on the staircase that had roused Bernard.  “It’s nearly six o’clock,” said Val.  “You’ve had a long sleep, Berns.  I’m afraid the others have missed their train.”