The two men followed them under the gloomy archway into the blue-lit gloom without; climbed stolidly to the rear seat of the open cabriolet. Pat took the wheel; Peter cranked up; and the Crossley crawled out into the dark canyon of Grosvenor Gardens. She was a very different car now from the royal-blue garnished plaything which Peter had hurled along the Bath Road in August 1914: countless muddy boots had left their mark on her varnish; countless accoutrements had torn her gray cord lining: but the engine still purred sweetly as of old, bore them smoothly past the dark bulk of Hyde Park Corner, up Park Lane, homewards. As she drove, Patricia’s momentary spasm of discontent vanished. They were so pathetically grateful, the comments she caught from the passengers behind; and when she stopped the car at a shuttered house in Albany Street; when there came—from the mysterious lower regions—a woman who said, “Why, Alf, is it really you? I’ve been waiting up just on the off chance you might get home tonight”; when—with a grateful “Merry Christmas to you, sir”—the two weary men stumbled down the steps out of sight; it seemed to her as though, by parting with those few moments of her own selfish happiness, she had somehow earned the right to enjoy every moment of the seven days during which Peter would be hers. Peter’s comment, as they sat over the little supper prepared for them in her father’s library, is characteristic. “I hated doing it,” he said, “but somehow one feels one ought to do all one can for them. Compared with us, the men have a pretty thin time.” . . . § 4 In the ordinary workaday life of the peacetime individual, a week seems a distinct interval of time: but to the men and women of the recent War, who snatched their respite from long months of anxiety in a few brief hours of happiness, the allotted seven days used to pass like a quickly-flashing dream. Still, for her one week, Patricia was happy; and much of that happiness came from the knowledge that this man whom War had sent back to her, was no longer the same creature whom she had given to War. He had left her a civilian in khaki; he came back a member of the British Expeditionary Force. She found the change in him difficult of analysis. The old absorbed Peter still lived—a reticent animal; unwilling to tell her of his life “out there”; though eager enough to explain the changes in his Brigade: how Major Lethbridge had been promoted Lieutenant Colonel, and Conway given “C” Battery in his stead: how Torrington’s successor, Captain Sandiland, was inclined to take unto himself too much credit for the work done by his subalterns: how Little Willie still flourished. But of Loos, of trench-warfare, of Reninghelst and Dickebusch, and the three weeks’ rest at Acquin which the Fourth Southdown Brigade had been enjoying when he left—he told her little or nothing. “It was really not so bad,” seemed the limit of his descriptive powers.