It was not his afternoon off, but he arranged to change with a mate. A light railway ran from the East-end of the Town along the edge of the Levels to join the main line at the wayside station known as the Decoy Park between Beachbourne and Polefax. Ernie took the two o'clock train, and, ensconced in a third-class smoker, watched. Very soon the Captain came swinging along the platform, a light burberry over his arm, athletic, resolute, and quite the English gentleman, his coloured tie striking a charming note of gaiety in his otherwise fresh but sober costume. Ernie watched him critically. In externals the Captain was the typical representative of a Service in which men move, like Wordsworth's cloud, all together or not at all. For the skilled observer, indeed, the history of the British Army during the last seventy years is to be read in the evolution of the moustaches of its officers. At the moment now recorded the flowing _beau-sabreur_ moustache which dominated the Service from Balaclava to Paardeberg had long gone out; while the tuft moustache which commemorated for the British Army the advent of the Great War had not yet come in. The tooth-brush or touch-me-not or crawling-caterpillar moustache, brief, severe, and bristling, which had held its own against all comers since South Africa, was still the rage; and gave the wearer that suggestion of something between a hog-maned horse-in-training and a rough-haired terrier on the look-out for a row with a rat which was the fashionable pose for the British officer in the years between the two Wars. To be quite _comme-il-faut_ Royal should have had trailing at his heels a little bustling terrier, rather like himself, harsh in manner, but virile, aggressive and keen. But Captain Royal did not like dogs. Ernie, chewing a fag in a corner, as he watched his enemy march by, remembered that; remembered too and suddenly that it had been common talk in the lines that Royal was not popular among his brother-officers--"not class enough" the whisper went. Ernie, who had wondered then, understood that now. At the Decoy Park the Captain got out. Ernie saw him off the platform, and well started down the road to the Decoy Woods before he followed. A chilly wind blew from across the Levels. The Captain marched along towards the Park, the tail of his burberry floating out, his green hat with the feather in it cocked to meet the breeze, the shapely curves of his legs exposed by the wind. Just outside the Park he looked sharply behind him, but saw only a shabby figure slouching casually along some two hundred yards away. Once inside the Park Ernie left the road and, walking swiftly among the trees at the wayside, drew closer. Here in the woods peacocks strutted, and close by was an aviary in which parrots chuckled, golden pheasants preened themselves, and birds with gay plumage fluttered.