“I suppose your mother’s delighted,” said I.

He threw back his head and laughed, as though he had never a black thought or memory in the world.

“Dear old mater!  She has the impression that I’m going out to take charge of the blessed campaign.  So if she talks about ’my dear son’s army,’ don’t let her down, like a good chap—­for she’ll think either me a fraud or you a liar.”

He rose suddenly, with a change of expression.

“You’re the only man in the world I could talk to like this about my mother.  You know the sterling goodness and loyalty that lies beneath her funny little ways.”

He strode to the window which looks out on to the garden, his back turned on me.  And there he stood silent for a considerable time.  I helped myself to marmalade and poured out a second cup of tea.  There was no call for me to speak.  I had long realized that, whatever may have been the man’s sins and weaknesses, he had a very deep and tender love for the Dresden china old lady that was his mother.  There was London of the clubs and the theatres and the restaurants and the night-clubs, a war London full and alive, not dead as in Augusts of far-off tradition, all ready to give him talk and gaiety and the things that matter to the man who escapes for a brief season from the never-ending hell of the battlefield; ready, too, to pour flattery into his ear, to touch his scars with the softest of its lingers.  Yet he chose to stay, a recluse, in our dull little town, avoiding even the kindly folk round about, in order to devote himself to one dear but entirely uninteresting old woman.  It is not that he despised London, preferring the life of the country gentleman.  On the contrary, before the war Leonard Boyce was very much the man about town.  He loved the glitter and the chatter of it.  From chance words during this spell of leave, I had divined hankering after its various fleshpots.  For the sake of one old woman he made reckless and gallant sacrifice.  When he was bored to misery he came round to me.  I learned later that in visiting Wellingsford he faced more than boredom.  All of this you must put to the credit side of his ledger.

There he stood, his great broad shoulders and bull-neck silhouetted against the window.  That broad expanse, a bit fleshy, below the base of the skull indicates brutality.  Never before, to my eyes, had the sign asserted itself with so much aggression.  I had often wondered why, apart from the Vilboek Farm legend, I had always disliked and distrusted him.  Now I seemed to know.  It was the neck not of a man, but of a brute.  The curious repulsion of the previous evening, when he had carried me into the house, came over me again.  From junction of arm and body protruded six inches of the steel-covered life-preserver, the washleather that hid its ghastly knob staring at me blankly.  I hated the thing.  The gallant English officer—­and in my time I have known and loved a many of the most gallant—­does