“Stop!  Do not persecute that young man.  You are four and he is one.  Drop it, I tell you—­Huns that you are!”

The commercial fellows, however, laughed; and this infuriating Mr. Lavender, he dealt one of them a blow with the ham-bone, which, lighting on the funny point of his elbow, caused him to howl and spin round the room.  One of the others promptly avenged him with a squirt of syphon in Mr. Lavender’s left eye; whereon he incontinently attacked them all, whirling the ham-bone round his head like a shillelagh.  And had it not been that Blink and the maid seized his coat-tails he would have done them severe injury.  It was at this moment that Joe Petty, attracted by the hullabaloo, arrived in the doorway, and running up to his master, lifted him from behind and carried him from the room, still brandishing the ham-bone and kicking out with his legs.  Dumping him into the car, Joe mounted hastily and drove off.  Mr. Lavender sat for two or three minutes coming to his senses before full realization of what he had done dawned on him.  Then, flinging the ham-bone from him, he sank back among the cushions, with his chin buried on his chest.  “What have I done?” he thought over and over again.  “What have I done?  Taken up the bone for a Conscientious Objector—­defended a renegade against great odds!  My God!  I am indeed less than a public man!”

And in this state of utter dejection, inanition, and collapse, with Blink asleep on his feet, he was driven back to Hampstead.

X

DREAMS A DREAM AND SEES A VISION

Though habitually abstemious, Mr. Lavender was so very hungry that evening when he sat down to supper that he was unable to leave the lobster which Mrs. Petty had provided until it was reduced to mere integument.  Since his principles prevented his lightening it with anything but ginger-beer he went to bed in some discomfort, and, tired out with the emotions of the day, soon fell into a heavy slumber, which at dawn became troubled by a dream of an extremely vivid character.  He fancied himself, indeed, dressed in khaki, with a breastplate composed of newspapers containing reports of speeches which he had been charged to deliver to soldiers at the front.  He was passing in a winged tank along those scenes of desolation of which he had so often read in his daily papers, and which his swollen fancy now coloured even more vividly than had those striking phrases of the past, when presently the tank turned a somersault, and shot him out into a morass lighted up by countless star-shells whizzing round and above.  In this morass were hundreds and thousands of figures sunk like himself up to the waist, and waving their arms above their heads.  “These,” thought Mr. Lavender, “must be the soldiers I have come to speak to,” and he tore a sheet off his breastplate; but before he could speak from its columns it became thin air in his hand; and he went on tearing off sheet after sheet, hoping to find a speech which would stay solid long enough for him to deliver it.  At last a little corner stayed substantial in his hand, and he called out in a loud voice:  “Heroes!”