red-tape in which the Irish mind gets strangled and awry. Well, there's another subject to avoid. I want to hear only good things to-night. Tell me of London, of Kensington Gardens, of the way from the Strand to Temple Bar, of the lights that gleam along the Embankment when lovers go hand-in-hand and see stars in the old black river. Are they all there?"
"They are all changed," said Brand. "It is a place of gloom. There are no lights along the Embankment. They have dowsed their glims for fear of air-raids. There are few lovers hand-in-hand. Some of the boys lie dead round Ypres, or somewhere on the Somme, or weep out of blind eyes, or gibber in shell-shock homes, or try to hop on one leg—while waiting for artificial limbs,—or trudge on, to-night, towards Maubeuge, where German machine-guns wait for them behind the ditches. Along the Strand goes the Painted Flapper, luring men to hell. In Kensington Gardens there are training camps for more boys ear-marked for the shambles, and here and there among the trees young mothers who are widows before they knew their wifehood. There is vice, the gaiety of madness, the unspeakable callousness of people who get rich on war, or earn fat wages, and in small stricken homes a world of secret grief. That is London in time of war. I hate it."
Brand spoke with bitterness and a melancholy that startled the girl who sat with folded hands below the crucifix on the whitewashed wall behind her.
"Dear God! Is it like that?"
She stared at the wall opposite as though it were a window through which she saw London.
"Yes, of course it is like that. Here in Lille we thought we were suffering more than anybody in the world. That was our egotism. We did not realise—not in our souls—that everywhere in the world of war there
