The burst of laughter that followed, all out of proportion to the humour of the remark, revealed the tensity of the strain through which they had passed.
Through the little town of Etaples they drove together in almost complete silence, until they had emerged into the country, lying spread out about them in all the tender beauty of the soft spring evening. As the car moved through the sweet silence of the open fields, the V. A. D. said softly:
A quick flush came into the beautiful face and a soft light to the brown eyes, as she answered:
“And mine is Phyllis.” Then she hurried to add, “I was going to say that you helped me this afternoon as nothing has since my dear brothers went.”
“Thank you, Phyllis. What you have been to me through all these days, I wish I could tell, but I can't find words.”
Then they rode together in silence that was more eloquent than any words of theirs could be. At length Barry burst forth enthusiastically:
“Those Americans! What a beautiful and gracious act of kindness that was to me.”
“Oh,” replied Phyllis, with answering enthusiasm, “aren't they fine! That was perfectly ripping of them.”
Barry's return to the battalion was like a coming home. In the mess there was no demonstration of sympathy with him in his loss, but the officers took occasion to drop in casually with an interesting bit of news, seeking to express, more or less awkwardly, by their presence what they found it impossible to express in actual words.
It was to Barry an experience as new as it was delightful. Hitherto, as far as any real fellowship was concerned he had lived a life of comparative isolation among his fellow officers, and while they were careful to preserve the conventions and courtesies imposed by their mutual relations, he had ever been made to feel that in that circle he was an outsider.
Among the officers who came to call upon him, none surprised him more than did Major Bayne. While that officer had always been careful to maintain an attitude toward him, at once correct and civil, there had never been any approach to friendliness. As a matter of fact, Major Bayne was too entirely occupied with his own interests to have either the leisure or the inclination for anything but a casual concern for the chaplain and his affairs. That was not to be wondered at. Life in the army, notwithstanding all its loyalties and its fine unselfishnesses, is, in some of its phases, a brutally self-centred form of existence. Its routine consists in the continual performance of “duties” under an authority ruthless in its exactions and relentless in its penalties. Only after months of experience of its iron rigidity does the civilian, accustomed as he is to self-determination, with a somewhat easygoing regard for the conventions of his community, arrive at the state of mind in which unconsciously and as a matter of second nature he estimates the quality of the most trivial act by its relation to the standard set by the Military High Command. Like a spectre does that solemn, impalpable, often perfectly unreasonable omniscient and omnipotent entity lurk in the shadow ready to reach out a clutching hand, and for some infraction of regulations, wilful or inadvertent, hale the luckless and shivering defaulter to judgment. It therefore behooves a man to take heed to himself and to his ways, for, with the best intention, he may discover that he has been guilty of an infraction, not of a regulation found in K. R. & O., with which he has painfully made himself familiar and which he has diligently exercised himself to observe, but of one of those seventeen hundred and sixty-nine “instructions” and “informations” which from time to time have appeared in those sacred writings known as Army, Divisional, Brigade, or Battalion Orders.