She was so angry that she forgot which side of the brush to use. She struck at him blindly and he felt all the bristles stinging his flesh. She did it again and he tried to smack back at her. Suddenly they were circling round in the middle of the room, clinging together and aiming furious blows at each other.

They both wanted to laugh now; but they would not.— That night when they had forgiven each other and she had come to see him in his bath, he lay flat on his back and would not turn over, so that she should not see the fierce purple pricks which the stiff bristles had printed all over his behind . . .

The door opened softly and Ben came in. Orvil in his half-asleep state thought for one moment that some fine-looking stranger had opened the wrong bedroom door, for Ben was dressed all in uniform with shining buttons, and his bleached hair was as white and fine and glistening as isinglass.

Ben came and lay down on the bed beside Orvil and started talking. In the courtyard outside, a drop of water kept falling from a choked gutter to the flagstones far below. Orvil heard and waited for each flute-like plop, while he listened to his brother’s stories about life at the camp.

Ben told of the hundreds of sardines which had been left to go bad in their opened tins before being offered for supper—of the boy who was taken up for dead after his tent had been let down on him—of the people with smelly feet who snored all night—of the exciting night-operations, when people lay together for hours in dark ditches. The last story was of a poor youth who had been hit on the head with a mallet until bright green phlegm gushed out of his mouth.

Ben chortled, thoroughly delighting in the stories. He was a kind person, but one who could only show gaiety when talking of violence.

He held up his hand above his head. The cuticle round one of the nails was tom.

“What can I do about this?” he asked, “it pulls and hurts each time I use that finger.”

Orvil looked at the tom cuticle. It seemed a very little thing to him.

“We’d better ask Daddy what to do,” he said perfunctorily.

They got up and went down to a late tea; and afterwards Mr. Pym took them to a chemist’s shop, where he bought women’s cuticle cream for Ben’s finger.

Orvil was feeling sick and rather other-worldly from sleeping all the afternoon; and when a lipstick rolled from the tray of bright cosmetics on this women’s counter he stooped down in a flash, picked it up and thrust it in his pockct, almost before he knew what he was doing.

“What fell down?” his father asked. Orvil was able to answer quite easily:

“I’m not sure, I think it was a lipstick, but it’s rolled right under the counter.”

The girl got down on her hands and knees, and they left the shop.

As they went back into the hotel, a wiry beak-nosed man looked up from his paper, then came forward holding out his hand.

“Hullo, Pym, this is a pleasant surprise!” he said.

Mr. Pym recognized him as someone he had once known in the Far East. They had never been particularly friendly, and had not met for several years, but now they shook hands very affably.

The man was also in Salisbury because his son was at the O.T.C. camp.

He seemed quite silly for love of this son. He kept tellinglittle anecdotes excitedly. His eyes danced and he showed his nice white false teeth. He described his son’s dare-devilry and his very attractive appearance. He ended up by saying in a humorous cockney voice which yet was quite serious underneath, “Though I say it as shouldn’t, Jim is an amazing fine lad.”

Orvil was very surprised by this display. He had never believed fathers capable of showing anything but cool tolerance or annoyance towards their sons. He was suddenly envious of this unknown Jim, and to get rid of the feeling he told himself that the father’s obsession made both of them look very ridiculous.

They left the man to go in to dinner, and at the door of the dining-room the thing that Orvil had been waiting for happened. The man turned back to his father and said hurriedly, “I say, I was so awfully sorry to hear about your—”

Mr. Pym cut him short brutally before the final word.

“It was much the best thing,” he said with satisfaction. “If she’d lived, she would have been an invalid, and you can guess how she would have liked that!” It was a most curious, leering, hideous voice. The man melted away, looking very red, wishing that he had not made himself say what he had not wanted to say.

A very old-fashioned waiter with flat feet, wispy remains of hair, and greasy napkin on his arm, led them to a table. Orvil looked at him as at an interesting relic. He did not like to think of him as human, for this would have spoilt the meal. The vast unhappiness of the waiter came out to him in waves, and he beat them back, trying to concentrate on the menu.

Ben had beer. He really wanted whisky-and-soda, but his sense of rightness told him that this w’ould look silly and precocious in a boy of seventeen, and he never went against this hard sense of rightness.

When they got into the car after their meal, the chauffeurseemed to be in a fit of sulks. Orvil sat in the front with him, as he sometimes liked to do.

“But don’t you want to see the Searchlight Tattoo yourself?” Orvil asked, trying to thaw him.

“That’s all very well, but I’d got my own arrangements,” the chauffeur said importantly. Hitherto he had had every evening free for drinking in the pubs and for picking up the women in each new town. He liked this quick sampling and moving on, and he mourned for his lost liberty on this particular night.