morning. After breakfast Lady Asterisk led me into the garden and talked very kindly for a few minutes.
“I am sure you have had a very trying time at the front,” she said, “but you must not allow yourself to be worried by unpleasant memories. We want our soldier-guests to forget the War while they are with us.”
I replied, mumbling, that in such surroundings it wouldn’t be easy to worry about anything; and then the old Earl came out on to the terrace, pushing the wheeled apparatus which enabled him to walk.
Often during the next three weeks I was able to forget about the War; often I took refuge in the assuasive human happiness which Nutwood Manor’s hospitality offered me. But there were times when my mental mechanism was refractory, and I reverted to my resolution to keep the smoke-drifted battle memories true and intense, unmodified by the comforts of convalescence. I wasn’t going to be bluffed back into an easygoing tolerant state of mind, I decided, as I opened a daily paper one morning and very deliberately read a despatch from “War Correspondents’ Headquarters.”