“No. To-day I am having a vacation. Boone Cruttenden’s Division are in Corps Reserve near by, so I undertook to bring him up here and give him his first view of the Line.” “How did you get here?” enquired Miss Ryker, who had not initiated the present conversation for nothing. “On a Staff car.” “An automobile?” “Yes.” “Where is it?” “Behind that wood at the top of the hill.” “Then,” announced Miss Ryker, coming to the point, “you will be able to give us two poor girls a ride home.” “It’s—it’s twenty-five miles out of our way,” said Floyd feebly. “Besides, Boone and I have our reputations to consider. He is young, and might live it down, but think of me! People would say I was old enough to know better.” “Think of _us_!” countered Miss Ryker; “if we can’t get back, and the Matron finds that Frances and I have been playing hookey!” She followed up her appeal by a faint sob. Major Floyd dropped the teacups and raised his hands above his head. “Kamerad!” he groaned. _Whoo-oo-oo-oo-UMP!_ A long overdue shell from a German field battery came shrieking over the tree-tops behind them and landed squarely in the road, two hundred yards to their right. “You’re quite safe,” announced the Major, patting four fingers which he had suddenly discovered on the sleeve of his Burberry. “That one is too far away to hurt us. There will probably be more, but Fritz won’t shell away from the road. His imagination is not elastic.” “What about Frances and Captain Cruttenden?” said Helen. “They are nearer the road than we are. Would that shell be able—?” Major Floyd rubbed his misty monocle and examined the two figures to his right. “They don’t appear to have heard it,” he announced, and shook his head mournfully. CHAPTER ELEVEN THE LINE Most of us in our extreme youth, before we leave home and adventure upon the Great Unknown of school life—the most formidable ordeal, by the way, that the majority of us ever have to face—endeavour to prepare ourselves for what we imagine lies before us by a course of study. We devour stories about schools and schoolboys, with an application most unusual in the young. We have all the tenderfoot’s fear of being considered a tenderfoot, so we take pains to acquire the schoolboy tone; schoolboy atmosphere; schoolboy slang. The exploits of the hero after he becomes “Cock of the School”—whatever that may be—and leads the football team to victory, are dismissed by us as too lofty and distant for our achievement. We are much more interested—more painfully interested—in his experiences as a freshman or fag. We endeavour to pick up tips as to what a boy entering school for the first time should do, and more particularly what he should not do, in order to avoid being tossed in a blanket or sent to Coventry, or labelled “sissy,” or “cry-baby”—and all the other vague terrors which have kept prospective Cocks of the School awake at night since the dawn of Education.