Mrs. Clegg mechanically turned over the pages of the magazine. It was one of those periodicals which was doing its characteristic best at that time to compensate our warriors in the field for compulsory severance from domestic felicity by a weekly display, on a generous—nay, prodigal—scale, of the forms and features of loved ones far away—particularly of such as happened to be connected with the lighter walks of the lyric drama. Mrs. Clegg’s eye was caught by a photograph on the middle page—of a tall, slender girl, draped from head to foot in what looked like a flag, with the Cap of Liberty perched upon her fair head. The face seemed familiar. Mrs. Clegg adjusted her tortoise-shell lorgnette—at home, when reading, she wore simple spectacles—and examined the photograph in greater detail. Then she perused the journalistic effusion underneath. It began: One cannot have _Too Many Girls_ of This Kind, Can one?... Mrs. Clegg was a dutiful wife. On her way home she stopped at the railway station and bought a copy of the magazine at the book-stall. After dinner she showed the middle page to her husband. It was a courageous act, for no such literature had ever been introduced into Netherby before. That night, when the household had retired to bed, Albert Clegg reopened the Family Bible, lying since prayers at the head of the dining-room table; turned to the Births, Marriages, and Deaths and sent his fountain-pen scouting down the first column. Presently he came to the name he wanted. He scored it out—scored it, and scored it, to complete obliteration. When he had finished, Marjorie had joined Aunt Eliza in the ranks of the Legion of the Lost. *CHAPTER IX* *THE BOOK OF THE WORDS* We were due back in the line that night, and I was struggling, in company with one humid orderly-room sergeant and several hundred houseflies, to clean up the usual orderly-room mess—indents, returns, and other nuisances which, in the absence of the adjutant, usually fall upon the patient shoulders of that regimental tweeny, the second-in-command. I was seated at the kitchen table of a farm-house in Picardy. The weather had been wet and misty for weeks—the weather at critical moments in this war was invariably pro-Boche—but this afternoon the sun had reappeared and summer had come back with a rush. Still, on the overworked highway outside mud still lay deep. At the farm-gate two transport men were admonishing two mules, in the only way they knew, for indicating reluctance (in the only way _they_ knew) to hauling the headquarters company’s field-kitchen out of the oozy ruts where it had reposed for ten days. Through the open door, looking east, I could descry the wrecked spire of Albert Church, with its golden Virgin and Child projecting horizontally from the summit, like the flame of a candle in a steady draught.