"My O.C., who by the way is my uncle too, and a medical man, insisted on my coming here," he remarked. "He says I’m not strong enough for trench life. But the old boy—bless his heart!—loves me like a son, and I’m morally certain he wants to pack me off for fear I’ll get killed. I simply can’t go home, you know, until I’ve done my bit. It would be jolly weak of me, wouldn’t it?" "You might go for a time," I replied guardedly, "and return later on when you get stronger." He started to laugh, but a quick stabbing pain in the chest caught him halfway, and he stopped short with a twisted smile as he exclaimed: "I believe the old chap has been talking to you too! You’re all in league to get me out of France." This was so close to the truth that I could not contradict him, but shook my head in partial negative. His uncle felt, as I too came to feel later, that the loss to the world of such a brilliant mind and one with such potentialities would not be compensated for by the little good its master could accomplish physically in the trenches. "After all," he argued, "how much poorer would Wales be if I were gone? The hole would soon be filled." "I can’t agree with you," I answered slowly; "your life is more important to others than you think, and you would risk it in a field for which you are not physically fitted. You have overdrawn your brain account at the Bank of Nature, and flesh is paying up. You must go home until the note is settled." "Sounds rational but horribly mathematical—and I always hated mathematics. Hope I’ll be able," he continued mischievously, "to repay the ’interest’ you and uncle are taking in me." "We want you to consider the matter philosophically," I said, "not mathematically." "That’s better," he replied, with his usual bright smile; "philosophy comes more natural to me. True, it savours of Euclid, but I can forgive it that offence; it has so many virtues." He remained silent a few moments, thinking, and then asked me suddenly: "If I go home, how soon can I get back to France?" "I hope you won’t return here," I replied gravely; "it would be suicidal, and, flattery aside, your life is too valuable to be sacrificed over here." "Perhaps you are right," he murmured pensively, as though we were discussing a third party whose life interested him only in an impersonal manner, and without exhibiting the slightest self-consciousness or vanity. "It might be better if I stayed at home. I admit," he continued more brightly, "I have a selfish desire to live. I am so young and have seen so little of this great big interesting world and I want so much to know what it all means. Still I would far sooner die than feel myself a slacker or a ’skrimshanker.’" "No one will mistake you for either," I returned warmly. "Your lungs are not strong, and I fear if you remain here in the cold and wet you will not recover."