For these were volunteers, still eager for adventure: and though, in after days, there came the time when realization turned that eagerness to misery unutterable, to horror and the fear of maimings—nevertheless the spirit lived on, dour, untameable, ultimate arbiter of the World’s destinies. . . . Those three days, even unemotional Peter felt the uplift of the game. “Little Willie” danced and pranced, tossing his white silk head-rope, shaking at bit-chain; the Doctor, riding stiffly on a broad roan mare, cracked time-worn jokes, pulled steadily at his whiskey-filled water-bottle; Purves, trotting up and down the column, knees still a little uncertain against the saddle-wallets, made the passing of Stark’s simplest order into a full-dress parade. Something in the continuous movement of it all, in their aloofness from everyday life, jolted Peter’s mind—for the first time since he had set forth, subaltern of an hour, from Lowndes Square—clean out of the commercial groove in which it had so long been running. He forgot the old things, remembered only the new. His chagrin at the loss of Nirvana found healing. Behind, rolled this new entity which he was helping to create—an entity of flesh and steel and the open air. Ahead, lay adventure. . . . § 2 And on the third evening, the Brigade wound slowly across the bridge, past the lake and under the fir trees, till their wheels raised the soft dust along the path road to Deepcut Barracks. Alice and Patricia and Peter’s children watched them as they came. To the children, it was all excitement; they waved to the horsemen, to the dusty limber-gunners trudging the little slope. Better than lead soldiers, those real playthings! But to the two women, the end seemed very near. Each in her own way; grave, the one—with her white frocked daughters beside her; moist-eyed the other—thinking of her child to be—they resented this new world, that would so soon tear their men-folk from them, leaving nothing to hope for save the comfort of pencilled letters, the joy of snatched “leaves,” and always, defying comfort, lurking behind joy, fear—the fear of the telegram! § 3 Very often, through that June and July and August of 1915, Patricia regretted her decision to share house with Alice. Their red-brick villa among the dusty pine-trees held no chance of privacy; always, it seemed to Patricia, horses and grooms waited by the laurels before its door; always came visitors—of a morning, of an afternoon, of an evening—to the communal lunch-table, to tea, and drinks after tea, to dinner and drinks after dinner: always they were playing bridge, or preparing sandwiches for field-days among the heather, or listening to long talks between man and man. . . . No privacy! It seemed to her as though they lived at a boarding-house of which she were proprietress; Peter only an occasional guest.