He turned to me. “If one had decided all this muddle shall end! If one had taken it, as an artist takes his clay, as a man who builds takes site and stone, and made———” He flung out his big broad hand at the glories of sky and sea, and drew a deep breath, “something to fit that setting.” He added in explanation, “Then there wouldn’t have been such stories as yours at all, you know. . . .” “Tell me more about it,” he said, “tell me all about yourself. I feel all these things have passed away, all these things are to be changed for ever. . . . You won’t be what you have been from this time forth. All the things you have done—don’t matter now. To us, at any rate, they don’t matter at all. We have met, who were separated in that darkness behind us. Tell me. “Yes,” he said; and I told my story straight and as frankly as I have told it to you. “And there, where those little skerries of weed rock run out to the ebb, beyond the headland, is Bungalow village. What did you do with your pistol?” “I left it lying there—among the barley.” He glanced at me from under his light eyelashes. “If others feel like you and I,” he said, “there’ll be a lot of pistols left among the barley to-day. . . .” So we talked, I and that great, strong man, with the love of brothers so plain between us it needed not a word. Our souls went out to one another in stark good faith; never before had I had anything but a guarded watchfulness for any fellow-man. Still I see him, upon that wild desolate beach of the ebb tide, I see him leaning against the shelly buttress of a groin, looking down at the poor drowned sailor whose body we presently found. For we found a newly drowned man who had just chanced to miss this great dawn in which we rejoiced. We found him lying in a pool of water, among brown weeds in the dark shadow of the timberings. You must not overrate the horrors of the former days; in those days it was scarcely more common to see death in England than it would be to-day. This dead man was a sailor from the _Rother Adler_, the great German battleship that—had we but known it—lay not four miles away along the coast amidst ploughed-up mountains of chalk ooze, a torn and battered mass of machinery, wholly submerged at high water, and holding in its interstices nine hundred drowned brave men, all strong and skilful, all once capable of doing fine things. . . .