“Where did I get it?  Just after Mons, on the road, in a house.”

“Have you been in the retreat?”

“I was.”

“And the angels?  Have you seen them?”

He paused, and then said with solemnity: 

“Was it an angel I saw?...  I was lying doggo by myself in a hole, and bullets whizzing over me all the time.  It was nearly dark, and a figure in white came and stood by the hole; he stood quite still and the German bullets went on just the same.  Suddenly I saw he was wounded in the hand; it was bleeding.  I said to him:  ’You’re hit in the hand.’  ‘No,’ he said—­he had a most beautiful voice—­’that is an old wound.  It has reopened lately.  I have another wound in the other hand.’  And he showed me the other hand, and that was bleeding too.  Then the firing ceased, and he pointed, and although I’d eaten nothing at all that day and was dead-beat, I got up and ran the way he pointed, and in five minutes I ran into what remained of my unit.”

The officer’s sonorous tones ceased; he shut his lips tightly, as though clinching the testimony, and the life of the bedroom was suspended in absolute silence.

“That’s what I saw....  And with the lack of food my brain was absolutely clear.”

Christine, on her back, trembled.

The officer replaced his mascot.  Then he said, waving the little bag: 

“Of course, there are fellows who don’t need mascots.  Fellows that if their name isn’t written on a bullet or a piece of shrapnel it won’t reach them any more than a letter not addressed to you would reach you.  Now my Colonel, for instance—­it was he who told me how good my mascot was—­well, he can stop shells, turn ’em back.  Yes.  He’s just got the D.S.O.  And he said to me, ‘Edgar,’ he said, ’I don’t deserve it.  I got it by inspiration.’  And so he did....  What time’s that?”

The gilded Swiss clock in the drawing-room was striking its tiny gong.

“Nine o’clock.”

The officer looked dully at his wrist-watch which, not having been wound on the previous night, had inconsiderately stopped.

“Then I can’t catch my train at Victoria.”  He spoke in a changed voice, lifeless, and sank back on the bed.

“Train?  What train?”

“Nothing.  Only the leave train.  My leave is up to-night.  To-morrow I ought to have been back in the trenches.”

“But you have told me nothing of it!  If you had told me—­But not one word, my dear.”

“When one is with a woman—!”

He seemed gloomily and hopelessly to reproach her.

Chapter 21

THE LEAVE-TRAIN

“What o’clock—­your train?”

“Nine-thirty.”

“But you can catch it.  You must catch it.”

He shook his head.  “It’s fate,” he muttered, bitterly resigned.  “What is written is written.”

Christine sprang to the floor, shuffled off the black gauze in almost a single movement, and seized some of her clothes.