In that moment I had a kind of revelation.  I had a vision of what I had been fighting for, what we all were fighting for.  It was peace, deep and holy and ancient, peace older than the oldest wars, peace which would endure when all our swords were hammered into ploughshares.  It was more; for in that hour England first took hold of me.  Before my country had been South Africa, and when I thought of home it had been the wide sun-steeped spaces of the veld or some scented glen of the Berg.  But now I realized that I had a new home.  I understood what a precious thing this little England was, how old and kindly and comforting, how wholly worth striving for.  The freedom of an acre of her soil was cheaply bought by the blood of the best of us.  I knew what it meant to be a poet, though for the life of me I could not have made a line of verse.  For in that hour I had a prospect as if from a hilltop which made all the present troubles of the road seem of no account.  I saw not only victory after war, but a new and happier world after victory, when I should inherit something of this English peace and wrap myself in it till the end of my days.

Very humbly and quietly, like a man walking through a cathedral, I went down the hill to the Manor lodge, and came to a door in an old red-brick facade, smothered in magnolias which smelt like hot lemons in the June dusk.  The car from the inn had brought on my baggage, and presently I was dressing in a room which looked out on a water-garden.  For the first time for more than a year I put on a starched shirt and a dinner-jacket, and as I dressed I could have sung from pure lightheartedness.  I was in for some arduous job, and sometime that evening in that place I should get my marching orders.  Someone would arrive—­perhaps Bullivant—­and read me the riddle.  But whatever it was, I was ready for it, for my whole being had found a new purpose.  Living in the trenches, you are apt to get your horizon narrowed down to the front line of enemy barbed wire on one side and the nearest rest billets on the other.  But now I seemed to see beyond the fog to a happy country.

High-pitched voices greeted my ears as I came down the broad staircase, voices which scarcely accorded with the panelled walls and the austere family portraits; and when I found my hostesses in the hall I thought their looks still less in keeping with the house.  Both ladies were on the wrong side of forty, but their dress was that of young girls.  Miss Doria Wymondham was tall and thin with a mass of nondescript pale hair confined by a black velvet fillet.  Miss Claire Wymondham was shorter and plumper and had done her best by ill-applied cosmetics to make herself look like a foreign demi-mondaine.  They greeted me with the friendly casualness which I had long ago discovered was the right English manner towards your guests; as if they had just strolled in and billeted themselves, and you were quite glad to see them but mustn’t be asked to trouble yourself further.  The next second they were cooing like pigeons round a picture which a young man was holding up in the lamplight.