"His orderly," said Ralton, briefly. "Quite unnecessarily he was walking up a road in full sight of the Boches. They were some distance away—true; but a rifle-bullet carries some distance. Behind him was his orderly." With a frown he looked at the girl beside him. "You’ve never heard a rifle-bullet probably," he continued, after a moment. "Never heard that sudden ping past your head which sounds like a huge mosquito. He heard it that evening—twice; and the first time he took no notice. You understand, don’t you, that there was no necessity for him to have been on the road?" She nodded. "The second bullet did not miss. It hit the orderly, and Jones just got him into the ditch beside the road before he died...." Ralton was examining his niblick with unusual care. "This old club seems to have suffered some." "Is that your story?" demanded the girl. "Yes, that is the story. The story of a man who posed." "You mean..." began Ruth Seaton, tentatively. "I mean that the thought which had come to him in his dugout, the thought which he had striven so hard against, was that he didn’t really want to die. He was young, and his wife’s death was beginning to lose its sting. He wanted to live; to see his son; and he posed because he thought it was disloyal to her memory. He posed even to himself. And it was only as he knelt over the man in the ditch that he realized it...." Ralton turned to the girl impulsively. "My dear," he cried, "he learned his lesson at a great price—the price of a man’s life. There is no call for you to do that. But you’re young, and life, and all that it means, is crying out to you. And you’re posing. The sympathy of all those people at the hotel isn’t real sympathy; and you know it isn’t. They’re posing, too. When things are really cutting one, when one’s really up against it, one’s just got to go away and hide. The crowd is no use then." He stood up and looked at her with a grave smile. "He won’t think it disloyal, believe me. You see—he understands." She watched the tall, straight figure striding away towards the green where his ball lay, and then for a long while she sat motionless staring out to sea. Once or twice she saw him in the distance, as he continued on his solitary round, until a sudden shiver of cold warned her that March at Portsdown was not the ideal month for sitting out-of-doors. She rose, and started to walk towards the club-house. In her path lay the seventeenth green, and as she reached the pin she paused. Not a soul was in sight: save for the screaming gulls the girl was alone in the falling dusk.