Doggie drew from his patent note-case a sheaf of one-pound and ten-shilling treasury notes and handed them over to McPhail's vulture clutch. "Good night, laddie!" "Good night!" Phineas strode away into the blackness. Doggie shut the front door and put up the chain and went back into his sitting-room. He wound his fingers in his hair. "Enlist? My God!" He lit a cigarette and after a few puffs flung it into the grate. He stared at the alternatives. Flight, which was craven--a lifetime of self-contempt. Durdlebury, which was impossible. Enlistment----? Yet what was a man incapable yet able-bodied, honourable though disgraced, to do? His landlord found him at seven o'clock in the morning asleep in an arm-chair. CHAPTER IX After a bath and a change and breakfast, Doggie went out for one of his solitary walks. At Durdlebury such a night as the last would have kept him in bed in a darkened room for most of the following day. But he had spent many far, far worse on Salisbury Plain, and the inexorable reveille had dragged him out into the raw dreadful morning, heedless of his headache and yearning for slumber, until at last the process of hardening had begun. To-day Doggie was as unfatigued a young man as walked the streets of London, a fact which his mind was too confusedly occupied to appreciate. Once more was he beset less by the perplexities of the future than by a sense of certain impending doom. For to Phineas McPhail's "Why not?" he had been able to give no answer. He could give no answer now, as he marched with swinging step, automatically, down Oxford Street and the Bayswater Road in the direction of Kensington Gardens. He could give no answer as he stood sightlessly staring at the Peter Pan statue. A one-armed man in a khaki cap and hospital blue came and stood by his side and looked in a pleased yet puzzled way at the exquisite poem in marble. At last he spoke--in a rich Irish accent. "I beg your pardon, sir, but could you be telling me the meaning of it, at all?" Doggie awoke and smiled. "Do you like it?" "I do," said the soldier. "It is about Peter Pan. A kind of Fairy Tale. You can see the 'little people' peeping out--I think you call them so in Ireland." "We do that," said the soldier. So Doggie sketched the outline of the immortal story of the Boy Who Will Never Grow Old, and the Irishman listened with deep interest. "Indeed," said he after a time, "it is good to come back to the true things after the things out there." He waved his one arm in the vague direction of the war. "Why do you call them true things?" Doggie asked quickly. They turned away, and Doggie found himself sitting on a bench by the man's side. "It's not me that can tell you that," said he, "and my wife and children in Galway." "Were you there at the outbreak of war?"