Langton leaned over and touched the other’s tunic pocket in which lay Julie’s note.  Then he leaned back and went on with his cigarette.

Peter flushed.  “It’s too late,” he said judicially, flicking off his ash.

“So?  Well, I’m sorry, frankly—­sorry for her and sorry for you.  But if it is, I’ll remember my own wisdom:  it’s no use meddling with such things.  For all that, you’re a fool, Peter, as I told you last night.”

“Just so.  And I asked what was a fool.”

“And I didn’t answer.  I reckon fools can be of many sorts.  Your sort of fool chucks the world over for the quest of an ideal.”

“Thank you,” said Peter quietly.

“You needn’t.  That fool is a real fool, and bigger than most.  Ideals are ideals, and one can’t realise them.  It’s waste of time to try.”

“Is it?” said Peter.  “Well, at any rate, I don’t know that I’m out after them much.  I don’t see any.  All I know is that I’ve looked in the likely places, and now I’ll look in the unlikely.”

Langton ground his cigarette-end in his coffee-cup.  “You will,” he said, “whatever I say....  Have another drink?  After all, there’s no need to ‘turn down the empty glass’ yet.”

They did not see each other in the morning, and Peter made his way early to the hospital as arranged.  The P.M.O. met him, and he was put in nominal charge of the three Red-Cross ambulance-cars.  While he was talking to the doctor the three nurses came out and got in, Julie not looking in his direction; then he climbed up next the driver of the first car.  “Cheerio,” said the P.M.O., and they were off.

It was a dull day, and mists hung over the water-meadows by the Somme.  For all that Peter enjoyed himself immensely.  They ran swiftly through the little villages, under the sweeping trees all new-budded into green, and soon had vistas of the distant sea.  The driver of Peter’s car was an observant fellow, and he knew something of gardening.  It was he who pointed out that the fruit-trees had been indifferently pruned or not pruned at all, and that there were fields no longer under the plough that had been plainly so not long before.  In a word, the country bore its war scars, although it needed a clever eye to see them.

But Peter had little thought for this.  Now and again, at a corner, he would glance back, his mind on Julie in the following car, while every church tower gave him pause for thought.  He tried to draw the man beside him on religion, but without any success, though he talked freely enough of other things.  He was for the Colonies after the war, he said.  He’d knocked about a good deal in France, and the taste for travel had come to him.  Canada appeared a land of promise; one could get a farm easily, and his motor knowledge would be useful on a farm these days.  Yes, he had a pal out there, a Canadian who had done his bit and been invalided out of it.  They corresponded, and he expected to get in with him,