He shook his head decisively.
"I've no doubt they'd let me stay here if I behaved myself, but it's no good. I can't get back to my old position, there are too many people who remember me. I should never have stopped Jim Loring as I stopped you. No, I'm going vaguely into the Midlands, to some recruiting office——"
"They won't take you," I interrupted. "You're my age, you're thirty-five."
"I'm twenty-nine for the purposes of the Army," he answered. "And, if that's too old, I'm twenty-seven. I shall take this beard off, of course. But, look here, I'm keeping you——"
"I want to see you again, Draycott," I said, as we shook hands.
"Better not. And don't tell those other men. It was just a—a whim. We were always rather pals at Melton, you know...."
Nearly a year later Corporal Draycott of the Midland Light Infantry was recommended for a Distinguished Conduct Medal, but before the dispatch reached England he was dead of dysentery in the plague pit of Gallipoli.
When I reached the Club it was to find the same new spirit of gregariousness that I had noticed at luncheon, but in an intensified degree. The old antipathies were forgotten, and from the crowded hall to the echoing gallery stretched a living chain of eager, garrulous men. I passed from one to another under a hail of questions, as my own great-grandfather may have done a century before when 'the town' gathered beneath that same roof to await news of Leipzig.
Loring had taken refuge in the deserted card-room, and we had been sitting there raking over the old possibilities for half an hour when the door opened and Sir Roger Dainton entered in uniform.