There were other differences of which I can hardly tell you in so many words, but which must transpire as I go on. Briefly, they summed themselves up in the fact that I had gone away one man and I was coming back another. My old self had not only been melted down in the crucible, but it had been stamped with a new image and superscription. It was of a new value and a new currency, and, I think I may venture to add, of that new coinage minted in the civil strife of mankind. The day of my sailing from Liverpool was exactly two years four months and three weeks from that on which I had last seen Regina Barry; and because it was so I must tell you at once of an incident that occurred at the minute when I stepped on board. Having come up the long gangway easily enough, I found that at the top, where passengers and their friends congregate, my difficulties began. When my left eye had been shot out the right had suffered in sympathy, and also from shock to the retina. For a while I had been blind. Rest and care in the hospital my sister, Mabel Rideover, maintained at Taplow had, however, restored the sight of my right eye; and now my trouble was only with perspective. People and things crowded on one another as they do in the vision of a baby. I would dodge that which was far away, and allow myself to bump into objects quite near me. As I stepped on deck I had a minute or two of bewilderment. There were so many men more helpless than I that whatever care there was to give was naturally bestowed on them. Moreover, most of those who thronged the top of the gangway had too many anxieties of their own to notice that a man who at worst was only half blind didn’t know which way to turn. But I did turn—at a venture. The venture took me straight into a woman holding a baby in her arms, whom I crushed against the nearest cabin wall. The woman protested; the baby screamed. I was about, in the rebound, to crash into some other victim when I felt from behind me a hand take me by the arm. An almost invisible guide began to pilot me through the crowd. All I caught sight of was a Canadian nurse’s uniform. It is one of the results of the war that men, who are often reduced to the mere shreds of human nature, grow accustomed to being taken care of by women, who remain the able-bodied ones. “Thanks,” I laughed, as the light touch pushed me along, slightly in advance. “You caught me right in the nick of time. I can see pretty well with my good eye, only I can’t measure distances. They tell me that will come by degrees.”