"H'm! My own feeling would be that it is more for the aggrandisement of Louis Napoleon than for the checking of Russia that we are going to fight." "Who's going to fight?" asked Lieutenant George, catching the word. And then of course it was out. For, once more, whatever of misery and loss war entails upon others, to the fighting man in embryo it means only glory and the chances of promotion. It was the following day that the disturbances nearer home began. Jack lay awake most of the morning after he got to bed, thinking soberly, with rapturous intervals when Gracie's laughing face floated in the smaller darkness of his tired eyes, and envying Jim, who slept at intervals like a sheep-dog after a day on the hills. But at times even Jim's heavy breathing stopped and he lay quite still, and then he too was thinking--which was an unusual thing for him to do in the night--though not perhaps so deeply as Jack. They both felt like boiled owls in the morning, and lay late. It was close on midday when Jack, after several pipes and a splitting yawn, said, "Let's go up along,"--which always meant north along the flats--"my blood's thickening." And they went off together along the hard-ribbed sand, with the sea and the sky like bars of lead on one side and the stark corpses of the sand-hills, with the wire-grass sticking up out of them like the quills of porcupines, on the other. They walked a good two miles without a word, both thinking the same things and both fearing to start the ball rolling. "We've got to talk it out, Jim," said Jack at last. Jim grunted gloomily. "What are you thinking of it?" "Same as you, I s'pose." "It mustn't part us, old Jim." Jim snorted. Under extreme urgency he was at times slow of expression in words. "Gracie has become a woman, the most beautiful woman in all the world"--with rapture, as though the mere proclamation of the fact afforded him mighty joy, which it did. "And we are men . . . and--and we've got to face it like men." And Jim grunted again. He was surging with emotions, but he couldn't put them into words like Jack. "I would give my life for her," said Jack. "I'd give ten lives if I had 'em." "She can only have one of us, and only one of us can have her." Which was obvious enough. "And it all lies with her. We only want what she wants." "I only want her," groaned Jim. "Of course. So do I. But we neither of us want her unless she wants us," reasoned Jack. "I do. She's made me feel sillier than ever I felt in all my life before. All I know is that I want her." Jack nodded. "I know. I've been thinking of it all night." "So've I," growled Jim. And Jack refrained from telling him how he had envied him his powers of sleep. "It seems to me the best thing we can do is to write and tell her what we're feeling." Jim snorted dissentingly. Letter-writing was not his strong point, and Jack understood.