They prowled and starved together through the long bitterness of winter in a world stripped bare of its last year’s harvest where all hungry mouths strove to keep other mouths at a distance; and time and again, when they grubbed for food or sought to take shelter, they were driven away with threats and with violence by those who already held possession of some tract of street or country. No claim to ownership could stand against the claim of a stronger, and one man, meeting them, would avoid them, slink out of their way—because, being two, they could strip him if the mood should take them. And when they, in their turn, sighted three or four figures in the distance, they made haste to take another road. Once, when a solitary wayfarer shrank from them and scuttled to the cover of a ragged patch of firwood, there came back to Theodore, like a rushing mighty wind, the memory of his last days in London, the thought of his journey down to York. The strange, glad fellowship of the outbreak of war, the eagerness to serve and be sacrificed; the friendliness of strangers, the dear love of England, the brotherhood!... The creature who scuttled at his very sight would have been his brother in those first days of splendid sacrifice! “Lord God!” he said and laughed long and uncontrollably; while the girl, Ada, stared in open-mouthed bewilderment—then pulled at his arm and began to cry, believing he was going off his head. * * * * * In their hunted and fugitive life their wanderings, of necessity, were planless; they drifted east or west, by this road or that, as fear, the weather or the cravings of their hunger prompted. They sought food, thought food only and, as far as possible, avoided the neighbourhood of those, their fellow-men, who might try to share their meagre findings. House-room, bare house-room, stood ready for their taking in the country as well as in the town; but wherever there was more than house-room—food or the mere possibility of food—the human wolf was at hand to dispute it with his rivals. There was a time when a road, followed blindly, led them down to the sea and the corpse of a pretentious little watering-place—where stiff, blank terraces of ornate brick and plaster stared out at the unbroken sea-line; they found themselves shelter in a bow-windowed villa that still bore the legend “Ocean View: Apartments,” trudged along the tide-mark in search of sand-crabs and fished from an iron-legged pier. When a long winter gale swept the pier with breakers and put a stop to their fishing, they turned and tramped inland again.... And there was another time when they were the sole inhabitants of a stretch of Welsh mining-village—they knew it for Welsh by the street-names—where they hunted their rats and grubbed for roots in allotments already trampled over. For very starvation they moved on again; and later—how much later they could not remember—took shelter,