It was during two nights in the forest of S----, about which I must afterwards write, that I had those long conversations with Trenchard, upon whose evidence now I must very largely depend. Before me as I write is his Diary, left to me by him. In this whole business of the war there is nothing more difficult than the varied and confused succession with which moods, impressions, fancies, succeed one upon another, but Trenchard told me so simply and yet so graphically of the events of these weeks that followed the battle of S---- that I believe I am departing in no way from the truth in my present account, the truth, at any rate as he himself believed it to be.... The only impression that he brought away with him from the battle of S---- was that picture, lighted by the horizon fires, of Marie Ivanovna kneeling with her hand on Semyonov's shoulder. That, every detail and colour of it, bit into his brain. In understanding him it is of the first importance to remember that this was the one and only love business of his life. The effect of those days in Petrograd when Marie Ivanovna had shown him that she liked him, the thundering stupefying effect of that night when she had accepted his love, must have caught his soul and changed it as glass is caught by the worker and blown into shape and colour. There he was, fashioned and purified, ready for her use. What would she make of him? That she should make nothing of him at all was as incredible to him as that there should not be, somewhere in the world, Polchester town in Glebeshire county. There had been with him, I think, from the first a fear that "it was all too good to be true"--_Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes_. It is not easy for any man, after thirty years' shy shrinking from the world, to shake himself free of superstitions, and such terrors the quiet and retired Polchester had bred in Trenchard's heart as though it had been the very epitome of life at its lowest and vilest. It simply came to this, that he refused to believe that Marie Ivanovna had been given to him only to be taken away again. About women he knew simply nothing and Russian women are not the least complicated of their sex. About Marie Ivanovna he of course knew nothing at all. His first weeks in our Otriad had been like the painful return to drab reality after a splendid dream. "After all I am the hopeless creature I thought I was. What was there, in those days in Petrograd, that could blind me?" His shyness returned, his awkwardness, his mistakes in tact and resource were upon him again like a suit of badly made clothes. He knew this but he believed that it could make no difference to his lady. So sure was he of himself in regard to her--she might be transformed into anything hideous or vile and still now he would love her--that he could not believe that she would change. The love that had come to them was surely eternal--it must be, it must be, it must be....