preparing to paddle, and once again she sighed. There was no band, no amusement—"Mon Dieu! but it was triste. This accursed war—would it never end?"

Margaret Trent's looks did not lie; she was tired. The rush of work just lately had almost broken her physical endurance, and there seemed but little chance of any slackening in the near future. She felt that all she wanted was rest—utter, complete rest, where such things as bandages and iodine were unknown. And even as the longing came to her she knew that a week of it would be all that she could stand. She could see beyond the craving ache to stop—the well-nigh irresistible cry of her body for rest. She could feel the call of spirit dominating mere bodily weariness. And it drove her on—though every muscle cried a halt.

Before the war she had been in that set which drifted pleasantly through life, and yet she had not been of it. She danced perfectly; she played tennis and golf and went to the proper places at the proper times—but she was different. She had in her a certain idealistic dreaminess, an intense love of the beautiful in life. Sordid things filled her with a kind of horror, and when the war came she tried to banish it from her mind like a dreadful nightmare. But there were stories in the papers, and there were letters from friends telling of losses and unspeakable sufferings. There was war all round her and one day the great unrest got hold of her, and would not be put aside. She felt she had to do something . . .

And so she became a V.A.D. and in the fulness of time arrived in France. Her friends prophesied that she would last a month—that she would never stand the sight of blood and wounds. Her answer had been two years at Etaples. And to those who know, that is an answer conducive of many things.

At times she tried to recall her outlook on life four years ago. She had enjoyed herself up to a point, but all the time she had been groping towards something she did not possess. She had read carefully and with discrimination, and the reading had only filled her with an added sense of her own futility. She felt that she wanted to do something—but what was there for her to do?

Marriage, naturally, had come into her mental horizon. But there had only been one man who had ever attracted her sufficiently to make it anything but an idle speculation. There had been a time, one season in London, when this man had been her constant companion, and she had been far from disliking it. At times he had seemed to be serious, and as a matter of fact the subtle difference between her and the stock pattern crowd had interested him more than he admitted even to himself. Then one day she discovered that a certain flat and its occupant were very closely connected with his bank account. It was by pure accident that she found it out. A chance remark which she overheard at a dinner party. . . . And the night before at the Grafton Galleries she had allowed him to kiss her as she had never before allowed a man . . .

It revolted her; and the man, astonished at first at her sudden change of manner, finally became annoyed, and the episode ceased. They still met; there was no quarrel—but they met only as casual acquaintances.

It was at that stage of her reflections that a shadow fell across her and she looked up. For a moment the coincidence failed to strike her, and then with a surprised little laugh she held out her hand.

"Why, Derek," she said, "I was just thinking of you."

Vane, his right arm tightly bound in a sling, sat down beside her.

"I thought you looked pretty weary," he laughed. "Jove! but it's great seeing you again, Margaret . . .! And the peace of it all." He waved his left hand round the deserted beach. "Why, it's like old times—before the world went mad" . . . He fumbled with his cigarette case, until she took it out of his hand, and struck a match for him.

"What ward are you in?" she asked, when he had made himself comfortable.

"Number 13; got here yesterday."

"I come on night duty there to-night. What's your trouble?"

"Machine-gun," he answered briefly. "A nice clean one through the shoulder. And the man beside me took the next bullet through his heart." He laughed shortly. "What a gamble—what a dam silly gamble, isn't it?"

She looked thoughtfully out to sea. The train of ideas his sudden appearance had interrupted was still half consciously occupying her mind.

"Four years, isn't it, since we met?" she said after a while.

"Four centuries, you mean. Four wasted centuries. Nothing will ever be the same again."

"Of course it won't. But don't you think it's just as well?" She faced him smilingly. "There was so much that was all wrong, Derek; so much that was rotten."

"And do you think that four years' insanity is going to prove the remedy?" Vane laughed cynically. "Except that there are a few million less men to carry on the rottenness"—

Margaret shook her head. "We wanted something to wake us up; it's been drastic, but we're awake."

"And what most of us want is to go to sleep again. Don't you feel tired, Margaret, sometimes?"

"Yes—I suppose I do. But it's the tiredness that comes with doing—not drifting. . . . It's we who have got to make the new Heaven and the new Earth, Derek . . ."

Again Vane laughed. "Still as idealistic as ever, I see. Six months after peace we shall be scrambling and fighting and snarling again—after jobs and money and work."

Margaret Trent was silent, tracing a pattern in the sand with her finger. "The worry of scrambling after a job is not likely to hit you very hard," she said at length.

"Which is perhaps as well," he returned lightly; "for I'm certainly too weary to take the trouble. I shall go away, if I'm alive to do it, to the South Sea Islands and live on fruit. The only proviso is that it should be sufficiently ripe to drop into my mouth, and save me the trouble of picking it."

The girl turned and looked at him suddenly. "You've got it rather bad, old boy, haven't you?"

"Got what?" he asked slowly.

"Mental jaundice," she answered. "Your world askew."

"Do you wonder?" he returned grimly. "Isn't the world askew?"

"And if it is, someone has got to put it back."

"That's what the little boy said when he pulled the chest of drawers over on top of him and lay struggling under it. But he couldn't do it himself. It's got beyond us, Margaret—and God seems to have forgotten. There is just a blind, malignant Fate running the show."

She looked at him gravely. "You're wrong, Derek—utterly wrong. The game is still in our hands, and we've got to keep it there. What are you smiling at?"

"I was wondering," he answered, "whether the last time I was told I was wrong, the sentence would have been concluded similarly. Unfortunately, the speaker died in the middle, thereby proving his contention."

"Oh! but you're little," she cried, striking her hands together. "Don't you see that you've got to look beyond the individual—that you've got to think Big?"

"We leave that to the newspaper men," he retorted cynically. "Our smiling heroes; our undaunted soldiers! They are heroes, those Tommies; they are undaunted, but it's because they've got to be. They're up against it—and the Juggernaut of Fate knows he's got 'em. And they know he's got 'em. They just eat and drink and are merry for to-morrow they. . . . Ah! no; that's wrong. We never die out here, Margaret; only