the tray, but pivot on their shafts, and swing out at angles after my fingers have left them.

I love the long, the dim and lonely, corridor; the light centred in the gleam of the trays, salt-cellars, yellow butters, cylinders of glass....

Impermanency.... I don't wonder the Sisters grow so secret, so uneager. How often stifled! How often torn apart!

It's heaven to me to be one of such a number of faces.

To see them pass into Mess like ghosts—gentleman, tinker, and tailor; each having shuffled home from death; each having known his life rock on its base ... not talking much—for what is there to say?—not laughing much for they have been here too long—is a nightly pleasure to me.

Creatures of habit! All the coloured dressing-gowns range themselves round the two long tables—this man in this seat, that man by the gas-fire; this man with his wheel-chair drawn up at the end, that man at the corner where no one will jostle his arm.

Curious how these officers leave the hospital, so silently. Disappearances.... One face after another slips out of the picture, the unknown heart behind the face fixed intently on some other centre of life.

I went into a soldiers' ward to-night to inquire about a man who has pneumonia.

Round his bed there stood three red screens, and the busy, white-capped heads of two Sisters bobbed above the rampart.

It suddenly shocked me. What were they doing there? Why the screens? Why the look of strain in the eyes of the man in the next bed who could see behind the screens?

I went cold and stood rooted, waiting till one of them could come out and speak to me.

Soon they took away the screen nearest to me; they had done with it.

The man I was to inquire for has no nostrils; they were blown away, and he breathes through two pieces of red rubber tubing: it gave a more horrible look to his face than I have ever seen.

The Sister came out and told me she thought he was "not up to much." I think she means he is dying.

I wonder if he thinks it better to die.... But he was nearly well before he got pneumonia, had begun to take up the little habits of living. He had been out to tea.

Inexplicable, what he thinks of, lying behind the screen.

To-night I was laying my trays in the corridor, the dim corridor that I am likely often to mention—the occasional blue gas-lamps hanging at intervals down the roof in a dwindling perspective.

The only unshaded light in the corridor hangs above my head, making the cutlery gleam in my hands.

The swish-swish of a lame foot approached down the stone tiling with the tapping, soft and dull, of a rubber-tipped walking-stick.

He paused by the pillar, as I knew he would, and I busied myself with an added rush and hurry, an added irritating noise of spoons flung down.

He waited patiently, shyly. I didn't look up, but I knew his face was half smiling and suppliant.

"We shall miss you," he said.

"But I shall be back in a week!"

"We shall miss you ... laying the trays out here."

"Everything passes," I said gaily.

He whistled a little and balanced himself against his stick.

"You are like me, Sister," he said earnestly; and I saw that he took me for a philosopher.

He shuffled on almost beyond the circle of light, paused while my lips moved in a vague smile of response, then moved on into the shadow. The low, deep quiet of the corridor resumed its hold on me. The patter of reflection in my brain proceeded undisturbed.

"You are like me!" The deepest flattery one creature pays its fellow ... the cry which is uttered when another enters "our country."

Far down the corridor a slim figure in white approaches, dwarfed by the smoky distance; her nun-like cap floating, her scarlet cape, the "cape of pride," slipped round her narrow shoulders.

How intent and silent They are!

I watched this one pass with a look half-reverence, half-envy. One should never aspire to know a Sister intimately. They are disappointing people; without candour, without imagination. Yet what a look of personality hangs about them....

To-night ... Mr. Pettitt: "Sister!"

"Yes, Mr. Pettitt."

"Do you ever go to theatres? Do you like them?"

At the risk of appearing unnatural, I said, "Not much."

"Oh ... I thought.... H'm, that's a pity. Don't you like revues?"

"Oh, yes...."

"I thought you'd take me to a matinée one afternoon."

"Oh, charming! I can't get leave in the afternoons, though."

"You often have a day off."

"Yes, but it's too soon to ask for another."

"Well, how about Wednesday, then?"

"Too soon. Think of the new Sister, and her opinion of me! That has yet to be won."

"Well, let me know, anyway...."

(Staved off!)

The new Sister is coming quite soon: she has a medal.

Now that I know my Sister must go I don't talk to her much; I almost avoid her. That's true hospital philosophy.

I must put down the beauty of the night and the woman's laugh in the shadowy hedge....

I walked up from the hospital late to-night, half-past eight, and hungry ... in the cold, brilliant moonlight; a fine moon, very low, throwing long, pointed shadows across the road from the trees and hedges.

As one climbs up there is a wood on the right, the remains of the old wooded hill; sparse trees, very tall; and to-night a star between every branch, and a fierce moon beating down on the mud and grass.

I had on my white cap and long blue coat, very visible. The moon swept the road from side to side: lovers, acting as though it were night, were lit as though it was day.

I turned into the wood to take a message to a house set back from the road, and the moonlight and the night vapour rising from the marshy ground were all tangled together so that I could hardly see hedge from field or path.

I saw a lit cigarette-end, and a woman's laugh came across the field as naturally as if a sheep had bleated in the swampy grass. It struck me that the dark countryside was built to surround and hide a laugh like hers—the laugh of a lover, animal and protesting.

I saw the glowing end of the cigarette dance in a curve and fall to the ground, and she laughed again more faintly.

Walking on in the middle of the moonlight, I reached the gate I was looking for, ran up the pebbly drive to the dining-room window, gave my message, and returned.

I slipped my cap off my hair and pushed it into my pocket, keeping under the shadow of the hedge and into the quiet field.

They were whispering: "Do you?" "I do...." "Are you?" "I am...." crushed into the set branches of the hedge.

The Mess went vilely to-night. Sister adds up on her fingers, and that's fatal, so all the numbers were out, and the chef sent in forty-five meats instead of fifty-one. I blushed with horror and responsibility, standing there watching six hungry men pretending to be philosophers.

The sergeant wolfed the cheese too. He got it out from under my very eyes while I was clearing the tables and ate it, standing up to it in the pantry with his back to me when I went in to fetch a tray.

Whenever I see that broad khaki back, the knickered legs astride, the flexed elbow-tips, I know that his digestion is laying up more trouble for him.

Benks, the Mess orderly, overeats himself too. He comes to the bunk and thrusts his little smile