There was a scurry of fast-cantering feet.  Around the angle of the trench dashed Bruce.  Head erect, soft dark eyes shining with a light of gay mischief, he galloped up to the grinning Sergeant Vivier and stood.  The dog’s great plume of a tail was wagging violently.  His tulip ears were cocked.  His whole interest in life was fixed on the precious lump of sugar which Vivier held out to him.

From puppyhood, Bruce had adored lump sugar.  Even at The Place, sugar had been a rarity for him, for the Mistress and the Master had known the damage it can wreak upon a dog’s teeth and digestion.  Yet, once in a while, as a special luxury, the Mistress had been wont to give him a solitary lump of sugar.

Since his arrival in France, the dog had never seen nor scented such a thing until now.  Yet he did not jump for the gift.  He did not try to snatch it from Vivier.  Instead, he waited until the old Frenchman held it closer toward him, with the invitation: 

“Take it, mon vieux!  It is for you.”

Then and then only did Bruce reach daintily forward and grip the grimy bit of sugar between his mighty jaws.  Vivier stroked the collie’s head while Bruce wagged his tail and munched the sugar and blinked gratefully up at the donor.  Mahan looked on, enviously.  “A dog’s got forty-two teeth, instead of the thirty-two that us humans have to chew on,” observed the Sergeant.  “A vet’ told me that once.  And sugar is bad for all forty-two of ’em.  Maybe you didn’t know that, Monsoo Vivier?  Likely, at this rate, we’ll have to chip in before long and buy poor Brucie a double set of false teeth.  Just because you’ve put his real ones out of business with lumps of sugar!”

Vivier looked genuinely concerned at this grim forecast.  Bruce wandered across to the place where the donor of the soup-bone brandished his offering.  Other men, too, were crowding around with gifts.

Between petting and feeding, the collie spent a busy hour among his comrades-at-arms.  He was to stay with the “Here-We-Comes” until the following day, and then carry back to headquarters a reconnaissance report.

At four o’clock that afternoon the sky was softly blue and the air was unwontedly clear.  By five o’clock a gentle India-summer haze blurred the world’s sharper outlines.  By six a blanket-fog rolled in, and the air was wetly unbreatheable.  The fog lay so thick over the soggy earth that objects ten feet away were invisible.

“This,” commented Sergeant Mahan, “is one of the times I was talking about this morning—­when eyes are no use.  This is sure the country for fogs, in war-time.  The cockneys tell me the London fogs aren’t a patch on ’em.”

The “Here-We-Comes” were encamped, for the while, at the edge of a sector from whence all military importance had recently been removed by a convulsive twist of a hundred-mile battle-front.  In this dull hole-in-a-corner the new-arrived rivets were in process of welding into the more veteran structure of the mixed regiment.