‘There’s another chink in his armour,’ I went on.  ’There’s one person in the world he can never practise his transformations on, and that’s me.  I shall always know him again, though he appeared as Sir Douglas Haig.  I can’t explain why, but I’ve got a feel in my bones about it.  I didn’t recognize him before, for I thought he was dead, and the nerve in my brain which should have been looking for him wasn’t working.  But I’m on my guard now, and that nerve’s functioning at full power.  Whenever and wherever and howsoever we meet again on the face of the earth, it will be “Dr Livingstone, I presume” between him and me.’

‘That is better,’ said Macgillivray.  ’If we have any luck, Hannay, it won’t be long till we pull you out of His Majesty’s Forces.’

Mary got up from the piano and resumed her old perch on the arm of Sir Walter’s chair.

‘There’s another blind spot which you haven’t mentioned.’  It was a cool evening, but I noticed that her cheeks had suddenly flushed.

‘Last week Mr Ivery asked me to marry him,’ she said.

PART II

CHAPTER TWELVE

I Become a Combatant Once More

I returned to France on 13 September, and took over my old brigade on the 19th of the same month.  We were shoved in at the Polygon Wood on the 26th, and after four days got so badly mauled that we were brought out to refit.  On 7 October, very much to my surprise, I was given command of a division and was on the fringes of the Ypres fighting during the first days of November.  From that front we were hurried down to Cambrai in support, but came in only for the last backwash of that singular battle.  We held a bit of the St Quentin sector till just before Christmas, when we had a spell of rest in billets, which endured, so far as I was concerned, till the beginning of January, when I was sent off on the errand which I shall presently relate.

That is a brief summary of my military record in the latter part of 1917.  I am not going to enlarge on the fighting.  Except for the days of the Polygon Wood it was neither very severe nor very distinguished, and you will find it in the history books.  What I have to tell of here is my own personal quest, for all the time I was living with my mind turned two ways.  In the morasses of the Haanebeek flats, in the slimy support lines at Zonnebeke, in the tortured uplands about Flesquieres, and in many other odd places I kept worrying at my private conundrum.  At night I would lie awake thinking of it, and many a toss I took into shell-holes and many a time I stepped off the duckboards, because my eyes were on a different landscape.  Nobody ever chewed a few wretched clues into such a pulp as I did during those bleak months in Flanders and Picardy.