The proud rigour of association with pressing service alone, with absolutely nothing else, the bare commodious house, so otherwise known to me of old and now--like most of our hostels, if I am not mistaken, the most unconditioned of loans from its relinquishing owner--the lingering look of ancient peace in the precincts, an element I had already, as I passed and repassed at the afternoon hour, found somehow not at all dispelled by the presence in the central green garden itself of sundry maimed and hobbling and smiling convalescents from an extemporised small hospital close at hand, their battered khaki replaced by a like uniformity of the loose light blue, and friendly talk with them through the rails of their enclosure as blest to one participant at least as friendly talk with them always and everywhere is: such were the hovering elements of an impression in which the mind had yet mainly to yield to that haunting force on the part of our waiting proscripts which never consents to be long denied. The proof of which universally recognised power of their spell amid us is indeed that they have led me so far with a whole side of my plea for them still unspoken. This, however, I hope on another occasion to come back to; and I am caught meanwhile by my memory of how the note of this conviction was struck for me, with extraordinary force, many months ago and in the first flush of recognition of what the fate that had overtaken our earliest tides of arrival and appeal really meant--meant so that all fuller acquaintance, since pursued, has but piled one congruous reality after another upon the horror.