"Good Lord," cried the other, "stop it. That’s just what maddens me—I don’t want to think of it." William laughed sullenly with his chin resting on his hand. "I’ve not much else to think of," he said. * * * * * He watched the lean man down the hill till a winding of the road hid him; and then he too rose, in his turn, and went back to the town—to the rat-trap wherein he made war! *CHAPTER XVIII* The war was well past its third anniversary when William again met Edith Haynes. The silence once broken between them they had corresponded with a fair regularity, and, leave being due to him, he wrote to ask if he should be likely to meet her in London; receiving in answer a hearty invitation to pass as much of his leave as he could spare—the whole of it if he would—with her mother and herself in Somerset. The reply was an eager acceptance; hitherto his leave, if a respite from the office, had been dreary enough in comparison with the home-comings of other men—it was a suspicion of the loneliness in which it was usually passed that had prompted Edith’s invitation. She met him at the station and drove him home, and they picked up their odd friendship at the point where they had left it off. The only other member of the family with whom he made acquaintance was a delicate, pale mother, given, since her firstborn was killed at Thiepval, to long silences and lonely brooding; a younger son had been a prisoner since the surrender at Kut, and Edith ran her mother as well as the house and the estate. She looked older, and by more than the passing of three years; the iron of war had entered into her soul, for the brother killed in France had been her darling as well as her mother’s; but in other ways she was just what William remembered her, a kindly and capable good comrade. The delicate, pale mother kept much to her room, and the pair, in consequence, were left often to each other’s company—sometimes tramping the home farm with Edith bent on bailiff’s duties, sometimes sitting by the evening fire. For the first day or two he was not communicative—engrossed, perhaps, in mere pleasure in his new surroundings; but even through the stiffness and restraint of his letters she had guessed at something of the change that had come over him, and when he showed signs of emerging from his shell she took pains, on her side, to draw him out and discover his attitude of mind. By degrees, from his silences as much as from his speech, she learned of the weariness that had settled like a mist on his soul, the aimlessness with which he plodded the pathway of his disciplined life. She knew him for a man disillusioned, in whom the imaginings of his pre-soldier days had died as completely as his faith in his pre-war creed. Had the lot fallen to him he would not have shrunk from his turn in the trenches, and at the bottom of his heart, for Griselda’s sake, there was always a