and a straight fighting front to his brown face.  His was the type which becomes, in a generation or so, typically Colonial or American; but no one could possibly have taken Jimmy Fort for anything but an Englishman.  Though he was nearly forty, there was still something of the boy in his face, something frank and curly-headed, gallant and full of steam, and his small steady grey eyes looked out on life with a sort of combative humour.  He was still in uniform, though they had given him up as a bad job after keeping him nine months trying to mend a wounded leg which would never be sound again; and he was now in the War Office in connection with horses, about which he knew.  He did not like it, having lived too long with all sorts and conditions of men who were neither English nor official, a combination which he found trying.  His life indeed, just now, bored him to distraction, and he would ten times rather have been back in France.  This was why he found the word “Peace” so exceptionally tantalising.

Reaching his rooms, he threw off his tunic, to whose stiff regularity he still had a rooted aversion; and, pulling out a pipe, filled it and sat down at his window.

Moonshine could not cool the hot town, and it seemed sleeping badly—­the seven million sleepers in their million homes.  Sound lingered on, never quite ceased; the stale odours clung in the narrow street below, though a little wind was creeping about to sweeten the air.  ‘Curse the war!’ he thought.  ’What wouldn’t I give to be sleeping out, instead of in this damned city!’ They who slept in the open, neglecting morality, would certainly have the best of it tonight, for no more dew was falling than fell into Jimmy Fort’s heart to cool the fret of that ceaseless thought:  ‘The war!  The cursed war!’ In the unending rows of little grey houses, in huge caravanserais, and the mansions of the great, in villas, and high slum tenements; in the government offices, and factories, and railway stations where they worked all night; in the long hospitals where they lay in rows; in the camp prisons of the interned; in bar racks, work-houses, palaces—­no head, sleeping or waking, would be free of that thought:  ‘The, cursed war!’ A spire caught his eye, rising ghostly over the roofs.  Ah! churches alone, void of the human soul, would be unconscious!  But for the rest, even sleep would not free them!  Here a mother would be whispering the name of her boy; there a merchant would snore and dream he was drowning, weighted with gold; and a wife would be turning to stretch out her arms to-no one; and a wounded soldier wake out of a dream trench with sweat on his brow; and a newsvendor in his garret mutter hoarsely.  By thousands the bereaved would be tossing, stifling their moans; by thousands the ruined would be gazing into the dark future; and housewives struggling with sums; and soldiers sleeping like logs—­for to morrow they died; and children dreaming of them; and prostitutes lying in stale wonder at the busyness