She presented it to him with a bright smile and with no appearance of thinking him presumptuous. Then she frankly shook him by the hand, wished him the best of luck and left him beside the gate leading up to Bratton Farm, where their colloquy had been held. At the bend of the road she turned to wave him a last farewell and so disappeared into the misty twilight. Jan raised the precious pencil-case to his lips, pushed it into his waistcoat pocket and was happy. He even told himself in so many words that he was happy; which is an experience of such rarity that those to whom it has once come never quite forget it. Jan thought that if he were to be shot the next week, he would still have had as good a moment as three score years and ten of life could bring him. But of course there was no question of his being shot the next week or for a great many weeks to come. The training process through which he and other recruits had to go might have been tedious if he had not accepted it as an indispensable means towards an end, and if he had not, rather unexpectedly, found a certain pleasure in it. The monotony of drill was at least a novel species of monotony; his comrades were for the most part cheery, companionable fellows, many of whom differed sufficiently from the types hitherto known to him to stimulate his ever alert curiosity; the sergeant who instructed them in the use of the bayonet had semi-jocular anecdotes of his own experiences to relate which exhibited the grim visage of war as wreathed in smiles. Even the very real hardships and discomforts of camp life under persistent, pitiless rain were made light of by Jan, who felt himself developing into an efficient soldier day by day and who indeed was often singled out for commendation. He wrote regularly, if briefly, to the old people at the farm, regretting that there was so little to say; yet he found plenty to say to Miss Mildred. Had she not bidden him to write ‘at great length’? Those carefully composed epistles of his, which were couched in a queer mixture of dialect and high-flown language and in which words (culled from the works of some more competent manipulator of them) were occasionally used in a sense unrecognised by the dictionary, were not without pathos, as showing forth a poor mortal brimming over with ideas and impressions and struggling hard to be articulate. Let us hope that their recipient so interpreted them. Her replies, at any rate, laconic though they were, gave the utmost satisfaction to a worshipper who was duly sensible of her graciousness in deigning to reply at all.