Another minute I try to recapture that moment of ideal patriotism which I touched on the deck of the _Rangoon_. I see a death in No Man's Land to-morrow as a wonderful thing. There you stand exactly between two nations. All Britain with her might is behind your back, reaching down to her frontier, which is the trench whence you have just leapt. All Germany with her might is before your face. Perhaps it is not ill to die standing like that in front of your nation. I cannot bear to think of my mother's pain, if to-morrow claims me. But I leave her this book, into which I seem to have poured my life. It is part of myself. No, it _is_ myself--and I shall only return her what is her own. Oh, but if I go down, I want to ask you not to think it anything but a happy ending. It will be happy, because victory came to the nation, and that is more important than the life of any individual. Listen to that bombardment outside, which is increasing, if possible, as the darkness gathers--well, it is one of the last before the extraordinary Sabbath-silence, which will be the Allies' Peace. And, if these pages can be regarded as my spiritual history, they will have a happy ending, too. This is why. In the Mediterranean on a summer day, I learned that I was to pursue beauty like the Holy Grail. And I see it now in everything. I know that, just as there is far more beauty in nature than ugliness, so there is more goodness in humanity than evil. There is more happiness in life than pain. Yes, there is. As Monty used to say, we are given now and then moments of surpassing joy which outweigh decades of grief, I think I knew such a moment when I won the swimming cup for Bramhall. And I remember my mother whispering one night: "If all the rest of my life, Rupert, were to be sorrow, the last nineteen years of you have made it so well worth living." Happiness wins hands down. Take any hundred of us out here, and for ten who are miserable you will find ninety who are lively and laughing. Life is good--else why should we cling to it as we do?--oh, yes, we surely do, especially when the chances are all against us. Life is good, and youth is good. I have had twenty glorious years. I may be whimsical to-night, but I feel that the old Colonel was right when he saw nothing unlovely in Penny's death; and that Monty was right when he said that Doe had done a perfect thing at the last, and so grasped the Grail. And I have the strange idea that very likely I, too, shall find beauty in the morning. THE END