"I do. She is sticking to you very loyally." Oliver was a bit of an idealist. "The time may come when she'll be up the devil's own tree. She'll develop a patriotic conscience. If she sticks to you while you do nothing she'll be miserable. If she chucks you, as she probably will, she'll be no happier. It's all up to you, James Doggie Marmaduke, old son. You'll have to gird up your loins and take sword and buckler and march away like the rest. I don't want Peggy to be unhappy. I want her to marry a man. That's why I proposed to take you out with me to Huaheine and try to make you one. But that's over. Now, here's the real chance. Better take it sooner than later. You'll have to be a soldier, Doggie." His pipe not drawing, he was preparing to dig it with the point of a dessert-knife, when Doggie interposed hurriedly. "For goodness' sake, don't do that! It makes cold shivers run down my back!" Oliver looked at him oddly, put the extinct pipe in his dinner-jacket pocket and rose. "A flaw in the dainty and divine ordering of things makes you shiver now, old Doggie. What will you do when you see a fellow digging out another fellow's intestines with the point of a bayonet? A bigger flaw there somehow!" "Don't talk like that. You make me sick," said Doggie. CHAPTER VI During the next few months there happened terrible and marvellous things, which are all set down in the myriad chronicles of the time; which shook the world and brought the unknown phenomenon of change into the Close of Durdlebury. Folks of strange habit and speech walked in it, and, gazing at the Gothic splendour of the place, saw through the mist of autumn and the mist of tears not Durdlebury but Louvain. More than one of those grey houses flanking the cathedral and sharing with it the continuity of its venerable life, was a house of mourning; not for loss in the inevitable and not unkindly way of human destiny as understood and accepted with long disciplined resignation--but for loss sudden, awful, devastating; for the gallant lad who had left it but a few weeks before, with a smile on his lips, and a new and dancing light of manhood in his eyes, now with those eyes unclosed and glazed staring at the pitiless Flanders sky. Not one of those houses but was linked with a battlefield. Beyond the memory of man the reader of the Litany had droned the accustomed invocation on behalf of the Sovereign and the Royal Family, the Bishops, Priests and Deacons, the Lords of the Council and all prisoners and captives, and the congregation had lumped them all together in their responses with an undifferentiating convention of fervour. What had prisoners and captives, any more than the Lords of the Council, to do with their lives, their hearts, their personal emotions? But now--Durdlebury men were known to be prisoners in German hands, and after "all prisoners and captives" there was a long and pregnant silence, in which was felt