This, the fact that his chum had been debarred from participation in the Great War which seemed to be bursting over his head, loomed up to Horace as far more lamentable than the wreck of his chum's life and the ruin of his ambitions to be an artist.
The footpath by the river, as the master had premised, was well protected. The Ourthe ran swiftly at the bottom of a wooded gully and the path closely followed the windings of the stream. The shells, Horace thought, would scarcely reach him there. The boy's mind, however, was not running on personal danger, but he was reviewing the tangled skein of circumstances which the master had explained to him as forming the cause of the war.
Ah!
From far away came a sound like the crushing of tissue-paper, which rapidly deepened and angered into a high droning hum suggestive of a hurricane of flying hornets.
A shell!
Facing it alone was a very different matter from when he had been with the master. In a flash the boy realized the value of companionship in peril.
Choking suddenly in panic and with a prickling sense all over his body as though the blood had gone to sleep and would not run in his veins, Horace threw himself down on the soft ground. The shell seemed to be coming straight for where he lay. The air quivered like a violin-string across which a demon-bow was drawn. One—two seconds passed, each apparently an hour long.
Then—a flash!
The shell had fallen on the other side of the river.
A frantic desire urged Horace to leap to his feet and run on, but his legs refused to obey.