She threw her arms round his neck in a sudden passion. "You _can't_ leave me, John, you _can't_! I couldn't bear it. Why, we've only been married eighteen months. How can you want to go away and leave me and baby and---- Why, you might get killed!" Her voice went up to a shriek. "I don't _want_ to leave you," said John, a strange, terrifying, rapid-speaking John; "I hate it. I hate war, I hate fighting, I hate leaving you--oh, my God, how I hate leaving you, my darling! I've prayed to God all day to stop the war before I have to go, but of course He won't. Oh, Mary, _help_ me to go; don't make it harder for me." She got off his knee; she brought a chair up opposite to him; she sat down in it and rested her chin on her hands and looked straight at him. "Tell me all about it," she said. "I'm quite all right." So he told her all about it, and she never took her eyes off his face. "A man came into the office to-day to talk to us about the war. The Governor introduced him--Denham, his name was ... I knew he was all right at once. You know how you feel that about some people ... He said he thought perhaps some of us didn't quite know what to do, and he wondered if he could help any of us ... Said of course he knew that, if we thought England was in danger, we'd all rush to enlist, but perhaps we didn't quite know how much England _was_ in danger, and all that England stood for--liberty, peace, nationality, honour and so on. In fact he'd come down to see if any of us would like to fight for England ... Said he was afraid it was rather cheek of him to ask us to defend him, because that was what it came to, he being too old to fight. Said he knew some of us would have to make terrible sacrifices, sacrifices which he wasn't in the least making himself. Hoped we'd forgive him. He couldn't say that if he were as young as us he'd enlist like a shot, any more than he could say that if a woman jumped off Waterloo Bridge on a dark night he'd jump in after her. On the whole he thought it would be much easier to pretend he hadn't noticed. In fact that's very likely what he _would_ do. But if someone, say the mother of the girl, pointed out the body to him, then he'd have to come to a decision. Well, he was in the position of that mother, he had come down to point out the body. He confessed it wasn't the job he liked best, pointing out bodies for other people to save, but he was doing it because he thought it might be of some service. That was what we all had to realize, that it was a time when we had to do things we didn't like. 'Business as usual' might be a good motto, but 'Happiness as usual' was a thing we mustn't expect ..." John fell into silence again. "What else did he say?" asked Mary, still with her eyes fastened on his face, as though she were looking at him for the last time. "That was how he began. I can't tell you all he said afterwards, but I felt as if I'd just fight for _him_, even if there was nobody else in England ..."