“I wish I could get an audience like that in my church.”

A smile crept out at the corner of Leila’s lips.  She was thinking:  ’Ah!  Your Church is out of date, my dear, and so are you!  Your Church, with its smell of mould and incense, its stained-glass, and narrowed length and droning organ.  Poor Edward, so out of the world!’ But she only pressed his arm, and whispered: 

“Look at Noel!”

The girl was talking to Jimmy Fort.  Her cheeks were gushed, and she looked prettier than Pierson had seen her look for a long time now, ever since Kestrel, indeed.  He heard Leila sigh.

“Does she get news of her boy?  Do you remember that May Week, Edward?  We were very young then; even you were young.  That was such a pretty little letter you wrote me.  I can see you still-wandering in your dress clothes along the river, among the ‘holy’ cows.”

But her eyes slid round again, watching her other neighbour and the girl.  A violinist had begun to play the Cesar Franck Sonata.  It was Pierson’s favourite piece of music, bringing him, as it were, a view of heaven, of devotional blue air where devout stars were shining in a sunlit noon, above ecstatic trees and waters where ecstatic swans were swimming.

“Queer world, Mr. Pierson!  Fancy those boys having to go back to barrack life after listening to that!  What’s your feeling?  Are we moving back to the apes?  Did we touch top note with that Sonata?”

Pierson turned and contemplated his questioner shrewdly.

“No, Captain Fort, I do not think we are moving back to the apes; if we ever came from them.  Those boys have the souls of heroes!”

“I know that, sir, perhaps better than you do.”

“Ah! yes,” said Pierson humbly, “I forgot, of course.”  But he still looked at his neighbour doubtfully.  This Captain Fort, who was a friend of Leila’s, and who had twice been to see them, puzzled him.  He had a frank face, a frank voice, but queer opinions, or so it seemed to, Pierson—­little bits of Moslemism, little bits of the backwoods, and the veldt; queer unexpected cynicisms, all sorts of side views on England had lodged in him, and he did not hide them.  They came from him like bullets, in that frank voice, and drilled little holes in the listener.  Those critical sayings flew so much more poignantly from one who had been through the same educational mill as himself, than if they had merely come from some rough diamond, some artist, some foreigner, even from a doctor like George.  And they always made him uncomfortable, like the touch of a prickly leaf; they did not amuse him.  Certainly Edward Pierson shrank from the rough touches of a knock-about philosophy.  After all, it was but natural that he should.

He and Noel left after the first part of the concert, parting from the other two at the door.  He slipped his hand through her arm; and, following out those thoughts of his in the concert-hall, asked: