“Agoing to do your job.” The words acted like a spur on Peter’s dazed mind. “Do _my_ job”—he echoed—“I’ll see the fellow damned first. Give me a hand, will you?” Wonderingly, the coal-miner obeyed; and Peter staggered somehow to his feet. The dug-out spun round him; his arm hurt abominably; but he was going to do his job—oh, undoubtedly, he was going to do his job. It lay, the job he was going to do, somewhere up above—up those damned steps—blast the steps—there must be millions of them—and the light atop of them had gone out. . . . “Better lay him down again,” said the infantry subaltern calmly. “I expect it’s only a faint.” He lit a cigarette, looked down at his own legs, both broken by machine-gun bullets, thought: “They can’t get us away before dark”; and went to sleep. Mucksweat, left alone with two unconscious officers, picked up the smouldering cigarette, put it in his mouth, scratched head meditatively—and returned to his watch at the stair-head. § 7 A torch, flashing in Peter’s face, recalled him to a moment’s consciousness. A voice asked: “How are we going to get him up those steps, sir?” Answered another voice: “Tote him on a blanket if we can find one, Bombardier.” Said Peter Jameson: “That’s you, isn’t it, Henry?” “Yes.” “Well—all I can say is”—the words were hardly audible—“that—it’s—damn—sporting—of—you—to—have—come. . . .” Then he fainted again: leaving Charles Henry, American Citizen, to puzzle out the exact meaning of the sentence as he had puzzled his way through the barrages on Trônes Wood. PART TWENTY-SIX BROKEN MEN § 1 Charlie Tebbits, faithless to all traditions of the building trade, kept his promised date; and Patricia moved into Sunflowers by the end of June. She “moved in” without servants or children; assisted only by a great grenadier of a woman who came from Arlsfield Village just too late to prepare breakfast and left just too early to prepare dinner. But Patricia had been homeless eighteen months, long enough to revel even in the discomforts of home-making—scamped meals, chairs without loose-covers, curtainless windows, floor-boards minus carpets, workmen all day and solitude all night. The more she grew to know this house she had fallen in love with, the more she fell in love with it. Compared to Lowndes Square, Sunflowers was tiny—she loved it for its tininess. Sunflowers possessed no second staircase—she found she had never really approved of second staircases. Sunflowers had no wine-cellar—she decided wine-cellars inevitably harboured black-beetles. All through ten unhampered days, she delivered herself up, hand and brain, to this new infatuation.