She explained that he had only to offer himself, and turned up an English newspaper bought the day before at Dieppe to point out a paragraph giving the situation of the various London recruiting stations. He studied it with interest and showed her that the nearest to Charing Cross was a station on the Horse Guards Parade. She had not understood that his intention was to enlist at the moment of arrival in London, and suggested a delay of a day or two for rest if not for reflection: the life before him was a hard one physically, and he had been passing through a week of exhaustion both physical and mental. To her arguments he shook his head, stubbornly impatient; he was so urgent to translate his new convictions into immediate action that it was with difficulty she prevailed on him to delay at Charing Cross for breakfast, and only manoeuvred him into the hotel by assuring him—whether rightly or wrongly she knew not—that it was as yet far too early in the day for any recruiting official to be at his post. On that assurance he yielded, and they took their last meal together. She had contracted an odd species of affection for the little bereft and destitute man whom chance had thrown on her hands in his hour of need; it was difficult for her to rid herself of a sense of responsibility for him and his doings: and as they disposed of their eggs and bacon she found herself wondering, with tears in her throat, how he could come through the discipline and hardship for which his soft life had done so little to prepare him. It was pathetic and even ridiculous to think of him as a soldier, this wisp of a town-bred talker; to think of him marching and bearing arms in defence of such as herself—who topped him by a good two inches and had treated him almost as a child. She coaxed him to eat a good breakfast, dawdling over her own that he should sit and rest the longer; and when he suddenly remembered to ask her how much he owed her for the expenses of the last few days, she gave him, with the hastily invented amount, her address in Somerset and made him promise to write and keep her informed of his doings. He, on his part, shrinking instinctively from those who had shared his errors in the old life, clung to her as the one person who understood the new world into which he had so lately entered—understood it because she was part of it; thus neither was unmoved when they shook hands as friends and parted at the door of the hotel. She entered a taxi for Paddington and he turned his face to Whitehall and the tent on the Horse Guards Parade.