Miss N. had a little room of her own in the club. She furnished it very prettily, and we used to pretend to admire the view from the windows. Once we tried to persuade an artist who happened to be in camp to make a sketch from that window. The artist shrank from the task. The far background was well enough, trees on the side of a hill; but the objects in the middle distance were a railway line and a ditch full of muddy water. In the foreground there were two incinerators, a dump of old tins, and a Salvation Army hut. I dare say the artist was right in shrinking from the subject. In that little room of hers, Miss N. had tea parties every day before the afternoon lecture. I was often there. Sometimes I brought M. with me. Always there were boys, as many as the room would hold, often more than it held comfortably. _Pain d'epice_ is not my favourite food in ordinary life, but I ate it with delight in that company. No one, on this side of the grave, will ever know how much Miss N. did for those boys in a hundred ways. I feebly guess, because I know what her friendship meant to me. I was, I know, a trial to her. My lax churchmanship must have shocked her. My want of energy must have annoyed her. But she remained the most loyal of fellow-workers. There were breakfast-parties, as well as tea-parties, in Miss N.'s room on Sunday mornings. We had a celebration of the Holy Communion at 6 o'clock and afterwards we breakfasted with Miss N. The memory of one Sunday in particular remains with me. On Easter Sunday in 1915 I celebrated on board the _Lusitania_, a little way outside the harbour of New York, the congregation kneeling among the arm-chairs and card-tables of the great smoke-room on the upper deck. In 1916 I read the same office in the class-room of the Y.S.C., with a rough wooden table for an altar, a cross made by the camp carpenter and two candles for furniture, and boys, confirmed ten days before, they and Miss N., for congregation. Afterwards, in her little room, we had the happiest of all our parties. Surely our Easter eggs were good to eat. I have written of the members of the Y.S.C. as boys. They were boys, but every now and then one or another turned out to be very much a man in experience. There was one whom I came to know particularly well. He had been "up the line" and fought. He had been sent down because at the age of eighteen he could not stand the strain. I was present in our little military church when he was baptized, and on the same afternoon confirmed by Bishop Bury. I gave him his confirmation card and advised him to send it home to his mother for safety. "I think, sir," he said, "that I would rather send it to my wife." He was a fellow-citizen of mine, born and bred in Belfast. We Ulstermen are a forward and progressive people. CHAPTER X THE DAILY ROUND