Lying close to Marjorie on the sand, his mighty young body still hot from the joyous contact of the noonday sun, his eyes, full of an uncomplaining and uncomprehending agony, sought hers; and Marjorie looked dumbly back with a feeling of desolation growing within her as vast and dreary as the gray expanse lapping beside them, for it seemed to her that Leonard was groping, pleading—oh, so silently—for an explanation, an inspiration deeper than anything he had known before—a something immense that would make it all right, this gigantic twentieth-century work of killing; square it with the ideals and ideas that this most enlightened century had given him.
Marjorie strangled a fierce tide of feeling that welled up within her, and her eyes, bent on Leonard, were fierce because she loved him most and she had nothing, nothing to give him. For he had to go back, oh, he had to go back to-morrow, and he hated it so—they all hated it—the best of them! How clearly she saw through the superb, pitiful bluff, that it was all sport, "wonderful"! Wonderful? She knew, but she would never dare let Leonard see that she knew.
And still Leonard counted, his head in his arms: "Arnold and Allen, and Rothwood, and Jim Douglas, and Jack and—Oh, Christ! I can't count them all!" His voice trailed away and was lost in the sand, and the big clouds, spreading out faster and faster, swept over them.
IV
They came up to London in a first-class compartment. Any one could have told they were on their honeymoon, for they wore perfectly new clothes, and on their knees between them they balanced a perfectly new tea-basket. They were making tea and sandwiches, and although it was all rather messy, it gave them the illusion of house-keeping. The lumbering local seemed to them to be racing, and the country sped by and vanished as quickly as the fleeting moments, for it was the afternoon of the fourth day. An old lady and gentleman, their only traveling companions, went tactfully to sleep. Leonard glanced warily at them, and turned his back on the flying landscape.
"Marjorie," he said, carefully peeling a hard-boiled egg; "Marjie."
"Yes, Len."
"Were you ever in love before this?"
Marjorie laughed. She was in the mood for laughter. She must be happy and light-hearted. Time enough later on to be serious.