We must have driven for an hour before he spoke again:
“Well, George, if you want my advice, I should recommend you to burn Eric’s letter and pretend you’ve never seen it. Then begin again at the beginning.”
“You imagine I can forget it?,” I asked.
“If you think more of her and less of yourself. The bigger the crime, the more she must have been tempted: try to understand that instead of counting up the things a man has a ‘right’ to expect of his wife. Rights here, rights there! Every one’s thinking too much of his individual rights, George! Every group of nations, every nation, almost every man and woman.” . . .
4
After two years I can appreciate O’Rane’s patience better than was possible at the time. I know now that he was distracted by a civil war of his own; but I was too much preoccupied to enquire why Sonia and the children were in Hampshire; I should have been aggrieved if any one else had presumed to be unhappy.
“I suppose it’s all the same to you where we spend the night?,” I asked, several hours later, as we paused at a sign-post.
In the gathering dusk I could distinguish nothing but the gloomy contours of Stonehenge and the sharp, black outline of innumerable government huts. Then I saw O’Rane prick up his ears at the tramp of weary feet.
“Anywhere you like,” he answered, as a white-faced army advanced into the glare of my lamps. “I was in camp here in ’14. It’s a dam’ bad step. Recruits, I suppose. We should have been given hell if we hadn’t been smarter than that.”
As the column approached, I saw fifty or sixty men in tattered civilian clothes. Two or three wore medals; the rest had a brave line of ribbons on their coats. At their head marched two standard-bearers with the adequate device: “Wanted in 1914. Not wanted now.”