Caudebec can be reached from Le Havre in a few hours, and although cars for hire and petrol were not abundant in France at the time, one could find a chauffeur to make the journey if one was prepared to pay.  Given fine weather, it was an ideal place for a day off in the spring.  And Peter knew it.

In the Grand Magasin Julie had talked of a day off, and a party of four had been mooted, but when he had leisure to think of it, Peter found himself averse to four, and particularly if one of the four were to be Donovan.  He admitted it freely to himself.  Donovan was the kind of a man, he thought, that Julie must like, and he was the kind of man, too, to put him, Peter, into the shade.  Ordinarily he asked for no better companion, but he hated to see Julie and Jack together.  He could not make the girl out, and he wanted to do so.  He wanted to know what she thought about many things, and—­incidentally, of course—­what she thought about him.

He had argued all this over next morning while shaving, and had ended by cutting himself.  It was a slight matter, but it argued a certain absent-mindedness, and it brought him back to decency.  He perceived that he was scheming to leave his friend out, and he fought resolutely against the idea.  Therefore, that afternoon, he went to the hospital, spent a couple of hours chatting with the men, and finally wound up in the nurses’ mess-room for tea as usual.  It was a little room, long and narrow, at the end of the biggest ward, but its windows looked over the sea and it was convenient to the kitchen.  Coloured illustrations cut from magazines and neatly mounted on brown paper decorated the walls, but there was little else by way of furniture or ornament except a long table and chairs.  One could get but little talk except of a scrappy kind, for nurses came continually in and out for tea, and, indeed, Julie had only a quarter of an hour to spare.  But he got things fixed up for the following Thursday, and he left the place to settle with Donovan.

That gentleman’s company of native labour was lodged a mile or so through the docks from Peter’s camp, on the banks of the Tancarville Canal.  It was enlivened at frequent intervals, day and night, by the sirens of tugs bringing strings of barges to the docks, whence their cargo was borne overseas in the sea-going tramps, or, of course, taking equally long strings to the Seine for Rouen and Paris.  It was mud and cinders underfoot, and it was walled off with corrugated-iron sheeting and barbed wire from the attentions of some hundreds of Belgian refugees who lived along the canal and parallel roads in every conceivable kind of resting-place, from ancient bathing-vans to broken-down railway-trucks.  But there were trees along the canal and reeds and grass, so that there were worse places than Donovan’s camp in Le Havre.

Peter found his friend surveying the endeavours of a gang of boys to construct a raised causeway from the officers’ mess to the orderly-room, and he promptly broached his object.  Donovan was entranced with the proposal, but he could not go.  He was adamant upon it.  He could possibly have got off, but it meant leaving his something camp for a whole day, and just at present he couldn’t.  Peter could get Pennell or anyone.  Another time, perhaps, but not now.  For thus can the devil trap his victims.