Marjorie also lay awake. She too felt herself distorted with misery. How odiously cruel he had been, and how much she longed to forgive him! Perhaps he would come in the dark, when all the house was asleep, tiptoeing into the room very quietly to kneel by her bed and ask to be forgiven. Would he come, she wondered? She stared into the blackness above her and about her, willing him to come, commanding him--angry and wretched because he was so slow in coming, because he didn't come at all. They were both of them asleep before two. Seven hours of sleep make a surprising difference to the state of mind. Guy, who thought he was distorted for life, woke to find himself healthily normal. Marjorie's angers and despairs had subsided. The hour they had together between breakfast and Guy's departure was filled with almost trivial conversation. Guy was determined to say something about last's night incident. But it was only at the very last moment, when the dog-cart was actually at the door, that he managed to bring out some stammered repentance for what had happened last night. "Don't think about it," Marjorie had told him. So they had kissed and parted, and their relations were precisely the same as they had been before Guy came on leave. * * * * * George was sent out a week or two later, and a month after that they heard at Blaybury that he had lost a leg--fortunately below the knee. "Poor boy!" said Mr. Petherton. "I must really write a line to his mother at once." Jacobsen made no comment, but it was a surprise to him to find how much he had been moved by the news. George White had lost a leg; he couldn't get the thought out of his head. But only below the knee; he might be called lucky. Lucky--things are deplorably relative, he reflected. One thanks God because He has thought fit to deprive one of His creatures of a limb. "Neither delighteth He in any man's legs," eh? Nous avons changé tout cela. George had lost a leg. There would be no more of that Olympian speed and strength and beauty. Jacobsen conjured up before his memory a vision of the boy running with his great fawn-coloured dog across green expanses of grass. How glorious he had looked, his fine brown hair blowing like fire in the wind of his own speed, his cheeks flushed, his eyes very bright. And how easily he ran, with long, bounding strides, looking down at the dog that jumped and barked at his side! He had had a perfection, and now it was spoilt. Instead of a leg he had a stump. _Moignon_, the French called it; there was the right repulsive sound about _moignon_ which was lacking in "stump." Soignons le moignon en l'oignant d'oignons. Often, at night before he went to sleep, he couldn't help thinking of George and the war and all the millions of _moignons_ there must be in the world. He had a dream one night of slimy red knobbles, large polyp-like things, growing as he looked at them, swelling between his hands--_moignons_, in fact.