Since the letter that greeted her, there had been one barren field post-card. Even that was ten days old. And away there, in the trenches, the struggle seemed to wax fiercer every hour. The blank parallelogram of her window gleamed pale grey before, in spite of herself, she fell asleep. * * * * * The strain of Mark’s sudden silence told upon the others also. It was tacitly assumed that postal arrangements were disorganised. Each hoped that the rest believed in that consoling fiction; but privately, they were sceptics all. Helen continued to post his paper and her own thick envelope every other day in the hope that he was still to be found somewhere in the terrible maze of trenches that drew England’s best and bravest as a magnet draws steel. Meantime they were thankful for unremitting work—for the constant movement and interest of life at the Base. Young officers, eager for action, might be bored to extinction by a few weeks in camp or in one of the crowded hotels; but an observer, blessed with humour and a large love of human nature, could not fail to find at every turn food for thought, for laughter and for tears. War is neither all horror, nor all heroism, or it could not be waged by flesh and blood. Soldiers who can die like gods, or fight as the beasts that perish, are, in the intervals, men of like passions with their kind. And genuine soldiers were scarce among those who now poured into Boulogne, to fill the gaps in that dangerously thin line round Ypres—Territorials and schoolmasters, clergymen and clerks, lords of commerce and lords of the land; dissimilar in almost every essential, yet welded together by one common resolve, one common faith: a crusade indeed, as Mark had said. And the manifold needs of a host undreamed of by the wildest, wickedest ‘militarists,’ demanded the existence of that other army chiefly congregated at the Base: doctors, nurses, chaplains, ambulance folk, owners of private cars, and those sorrowful birds of passage—relations of dying or dangerously wounded men. On the quays, in streets and hotels they thronged, those incongruous fragments of the world’s greatest drama; and Lady Forsyth never tired of watching them or listening to their snatches of talk. Neither weariness, nor nightmare visions, nor anxiety, even, could blunt the edge of her keen interest in the human panorama. ‘Oh, Sheila, my lamb,’ she exclaimed one evening after a day of very varied emotions, ‘aren’t people—all sorts and kinds of them—passionately interesting? Even when I’m laid on the uttermost shelf I shall still be always peeping over the edge!’ ‘And you’ll always find _me_ peeping up at you,’ the girl answered, smiling at the quaint conceit. ‘It’s simply wonderful, being with you—through all this!’