"Let's talk, Scissors, till it's time. We've such a lot to say and you never know, we may--" "Oh, rubbish, Teddie." So they talked, and the old days with their golden careless hours all came back again. Remorselessly the clock crept on. At three, Marsh said he would have to go. He had his kit to get at the luggage office. John went with him. They walked along the silent unlit streets. At Victoria there were signs of life. Figures in khaki loomed out of the darkness; for a moment they halted, the sound of marching feet came down the Buckingham Palace Road. Ghostly they sounded in the night hush; a little group under the flare of the coffee stall watched them pass a thousand strong, burdened with kit, obscurely leaving the homeland many would never see again. Marsh and John watched them pass, grim faces, pallid in the dim light, a few whistling out of bravado, but apathetically silent, most of them. They followed the detachment into the lighted station, passed the barrier at the departure bay. Marsh found a carriage full of other officers, some half-sleepy after long night journeys, two saying farewells to their lovers, one very drunk, alternately blasphemous and maudlin, kept in control by a friend. The doors slammed, a shrill whistle cut off the useless scrappy conversation. Their hands met in a firm farewell clasp. They could not trust themselves to speak. The train moved. Marsh with a final forced smile looked at Scissors, equally mechanical in response. A yard now apart--two yards--the train diminished, the carriage faded--then two red lights receded in the girdered darkness; after that a mist and the heart's desolation. III The next morning, the _Daily Post_ rang up, asking him to call at once, and the same voice told him that news had just come of the death of Ronald Stream. It was difficult for John to realise that the death of one so exuberantly young was possible. He had a vision of a night in a room at Cambridge when he had talked there, so radiant and intensely interested in anything, and so much the young god in his beauty and zest, that John had felt shy of approaching him. And now he was dead, in the far away Dardanelles. Fame too had touched him by his legacy of a few immortal sonnets, in which beat the heart of young England. Death seemed impossible to that pard-like spirit, swift and beautiful. For a space, John thought of his friend Freddie Pond. He had encountered him only two nights ago as he leaned against the box office in the vestibule of the Court Theatre, during an interval. John thought he had aged and looked sad and tired, perhaps the act of watching the swift passing of so many of the brilliant spirits he had herded, was wearing him. In some respects, waiting at home was worse than the struggle at the front. He saw Merritt at the _Daily Post_, busy and tireless as ever.