He was summoned, then, one fine morning, to his A.C.G.’s office in town, and he departed on a bicycle, turning over in his mind such indiscretions of which he had been guilty and wondering which of them was about to trip him.  Pennell had been confident, indeed, and particular.

“You’re for it, old bean,” he had said.  “There’s a limit to the patience even of the Church.  They are going to say that there is no need for you to visit hospitals after dark, and that their padres mustn’t be seen out with nurses who smoke in public.  And all power to their elbow, I say.”

Peter’s reply was certainly not in the Prayer-Book, and would probably have scandalised its compilers, but he thought, secretly, that there might be something in what his friend said.  Consequently he rode his bicycle carelessly, and was indifferent to tram-lines and some six inches of nice sticky mud on parts of the pave.  In the ordinary course, therefore, these things revenged themselves upon him.  He came off neatly and conveniently opposite a small cafe debit at a turn in the dock road, and the mud prevented the pave from seriously hurting him.

A Frenchman, minding the cross-lines, picked him up, and he, madame, her assistant, and a customer, carried him into the kitchen off the bar and washed and dried him.  The least he could do was a glass of French beer all round, with a franc to the dock labourer who straightened his handle-bars and tucked in a loose spoke, and for all this the War Office—­if it was the War Office, for it may, quite possibly, have been Lord Northcliffe or Mr. Bottomley, or some other controller of our national life—­was directly responsible.  When one thinks that in a hundred places just such disturbances were in progress in ten times as many innocent lives, one is appalled at their effrontery.  They ought to eat and drink more carefully, or take liver pills.

However, in due time Peter sailed up to the office of his immediate chief but little the worse for wear, and was ushered in.  He was prepared for a solitary interview, but he found a council of some two dozen persons, who included an itinerant Bishop, an Oxford Professor, a few Y.M.C.A. ladies, and—­triumph of the A.C.G.—­a Labour member.  Peter could not conceive that so great a weight of intellect could be involved in his affairs, and took comfort.  He seated himself on a wooden chair, and put on his most intelligent appearance; and if it was slightly marred by a mud streak at the back of his ear, overlooked by madame’s kindly assistant who had attended to that side of him, he was not really to blame.  Again, it was the fault of Lord Northcliffe or—­or any of the rest of them.