The Corporal was a long time getting well, but in that he was obeying instructions. Those most competent to speak of his case had told him not to be in a hurry; otherwise he might be permanently lame. And he was entitled to take his time. He had done his bit. Moreover, as his father-in-law assured him, it was the turn of younger men to "carry on." He had been through more than a year and a half in the trenches amid some of the cruelest fighting of the war; he was entitled to wear two stripes of gold braid on his sleeve. If any man could nurse a painful injury with a good conscience that man was Corporal Hollis. In spite of searing memories, in spite of the whole nation's anxieties, in a measure made less, yet not wholly dispelled by the entrance into the war of a great Ally, the Corporal was allowed a taste of those half-forbidden fruits, Poetry and Romance. At such a time, perhaps, with the issue still undecided and the trials of the people growing more severe every week, the gilt on life's gingerbread should have been denied him altogether. And yet by dogged pluck he had earned that guerdon, and Melia by her simple faith was worthy to share it with him. The famous erection at the end of the garden, a weathercock at its apex, a course of bricks and twelve stone steps at its base, was haunted continually by an unseen presence. And it was a presence with whom the Corporal long communed. Many an odd hour between sunrise and sunset, a humble disciple of the Highest, pencil or brush in hand, strove with hardly more than infantile art to surprise some of the secrets of woodland, stream and hill. No wonder that at that particular corner, where mile upon lovely mile of England rolled back to the frontiers of three counties, two of her greatest painters had gloried in Beauty and drunk deep. The lights tossed from the sky to the silver-breasted river gleaming a thousand feet below and then cast back again were so many heralds and sconce-bearers for those who had eyes to see. When the Corporal was not being wheeled round his enchanted garden, or was not smoking his pipe in the sun, he was sitting with his back to the weather, drawing and painting and dwelling in spirit with the genius of place and, through it, with one immortal friend. Autumn came and the Corporal still needed a crutch. But he could get about the garden now and even pluck the weeds, although not yet able to dig. And he was so happy that he didn't chafe against the slow recovery. He needed rest and he had earned it; of that there could be no question. Meanwhile the months passed and events moved quickly. The war, to which no glimpse of an end was yet in sight, continued to press ever more severely upon all sections of the population. There was a shortage of everything now except the spirit of grim determination. It was a people's war, as no war had ever been, and the people, come what might, were set on winning it.