So, now, remembering that I had heard Gervase Elwes sing a love song as if the man really cared and not as if he were a florid windbag who would throw the woman off at the first convenient opportunity, I sat down patiently to listen to the "Morning Hymn." But after the first few moments I started up, amazed and thrilled. It was not the singer that mattered. It was the music. I did not know what the words were. I do not know now what they are. But the music was the music of this war. The room in which I stood faded from before my eyes and in its place I saw a battlefield in the grey dawn light, with the dead lying in hundreds upon it, most of them with their clear-featured, boyish faces upturned to that pitiless daybreak. And among those upturned faces was the face of Little Yeogh Wough--very white, very set, very calm. And over in the east, where the sun would rise, there was a radiance that was not yet of the sun and yet was warmer than the chill grim greyness of the dawn. It was a light shed by the presence of a great Archangel, whose arms, outspread, as it were, upon the clouds, enfolded and blessed the dead as they lay beneath, while his face, uplifted to a higher heaven, besought the pity of the great God of the Universe for the agonies of the nations passing through the awful purgative ordeal of War. And over all there brooded such an adoration as forced one to one's knees with one's forehead bowed to the ground. And I knew as I looked--I knew even in my own agony--that the things which those boys had suffered and the other things which they had given up had not been suffered and given up in vain. Oh, what is the use of trying to put the thought of him out of my mind? It is impossible. Everything I do--everything I touch or look at--reminds me of him. I took up a casual book of poems and the first lines that I saw brought fresh tears to my heart, if not to my eyes: "Four ducks on a pond, A grass-bank beyond, A blue sky of spring, White clouds on the wing: What a little thing To remember for years ... To remember with tears!" "It's no use," I said to myself. "The fear meets me everywhere. It's no good my trying to shirk it. I'll go in and see Mrs. Orme." Mrs. Orme was an unhappy mother of an only son, who had heard on the night of last Christmas Day the news that her treasure had been taken from her. She had been expecting him home, just as we are expecting Little Yeogh Wough now, and had kept the Christmas dinner waiting until ten o'clock. Then they had gone on with the feast--a veritable feast, prepared for the hero who was expected--and, simply by way of a pretty thought, had lifted their champagne glasses and drunk to the soldiers who had fallen in the war. Little had they thought that they were drinking to their own idol!