“And I sort of know how you feel about the War.  You don’t want to stick bayonets into German tummies, just because they’re so large and oodgy.  You’d think of that first and all the time and afterwards.  And I shan’t think of it at all.

“Besides, you disapprove of the War for all sorts of reasons that I can’t get hold of.  But it’s like this—­you couldn’t respect yourself if you went into it; and I couldn’t respect myself if I stayed out.”

“I wonder,” Michael said, “if you really see it.”

“Of course I see it.  That’s the worst of you clever writing chaps.  You seem to think nobody can ever see anything except yourselves.”

When he had left him Michael thought:  “I wonder if he really does see?  Or if he made it all up?”

They had not said to each other all that they had really meant.  Of Nicky’s many words there were only two that he remembered vividly, “Not yet.”

Again he felt the horror of the great empty space opened up between him and Nicky, deep and still and soundless, but for the two words:  “Not yet.”

XX

It was as Nicholas had said.  Anthony and John were rejected; Anthony on account of his age, John because of the mitral murmur that he didn’t know about.

The guv’nor had lied, John said, like a good ’un; swore he was under thirty-five and stuck to it.  He might have had a chance if he’d left it at that, because he looked a jolly sight better than most of ’em when he was stripped.  But they’d given him so good an innings that the poor old thing got above himself, and spun them a yarn about his hair having gone grey from a recent shock.  That dished him.  They said they knew that sort of hair; they’d been seeing a lot of it lately.

Anthony was depressed.  He said bitter things about “red tape,” and declared that if that was the way things were going to be managed it was a bad look-out for the country.  John was furious.  He said the man who examined him was a blasted idiot who didn’t know his own rotten business.  He’d actually had the beastly cheek to tell him they didn’t want him dropping down dead when he went into action, or fainting from sheer excitement after they’d been to the trouble and expense of training him.  As if he’d be likely to do a damn silly thing like that.  He’d never been excited in his life.  It was enough to give him heart-disease.

So John and Anthony followed the example of their women, and joined the ambulance classes of the Red Cross.  And presently they learned to their disgust that, though they might possibly be accepted as volunteers for Home Service, their disabilities would keep them forever from the Front.