"He was no better than other men," he replied bluntly. "It is wrong that you should sacrifice your life to a memory, wrong that you should worship an idol with feet of clay."

"I loath parables," she said coldly. "Will you tell me exactly what you mean about feet of clay?" The note in her voice was not lost on the man by her side.

"I don't like telling you--under other conditions I wouldn't. But I do it for both our sakes."

"Then, for goodness sake, do it!"

"I came across it accidentally at the Gordon Hotel at Brighton. He stayed there, whilst he was engaged to you, with a lady whom he described as Mrs. Carruthers. It was on his last leave."

"Why do you tell me this?" she asked after a silence; her voice was low and a little husky.

"Surely, my dear, you must see. He was no better than other men. The ideal you have conjured up is no ideal. He was a brave soldier, a darned brave soldier, and--until we both fell in love with you--my pal. But it is not fair that his memory should absorb you. It's--it's unnatural."

"I suppose you think I should be indignant?" There was no emotion of any kind in her voice.

"I simply want you to see that your idol has feet of clay," he said, with the stubbornness of a man who feels he is losing.

"What has that to do with it? You know I loved him."

"Other girls have loved----" he said bitterly.

"And forgotten? Yes, I know," she interrupted him. "But I do not forget, that is all."

"But after what I have told you. Surely----"

"You see I knew," she said, even more quietly than before.

"You--knew?"

"Yes. It was I who was with him. It was his last leave," she added thoughtfully.

And only the faint noise of the water and the wistful wind in the trees overhead broke the silence.

A GIRL IN IT

By ROWLAND KENNEY

(From _The New Age_)

1922

I was just cooking a couple of two-eyed steaks when Black Mick walked in, and, noting the look in his eyes and being for some reason in an expansive mood, I offered him a sit down. After comparing notes on the various possibilities of the district with regard to job-getting, we turned on to a discussion of the relative moralities of begging and stealing. But in this, I found, Mick was not vitally interested--both were too deeply immoral for him to touch. For Mick was a worker. He liked work. Vagrancy to him made no appeal. To "settle down" was his one definite desire. But jobs refused to hold him, and the road gripped him in spite of himself. So the problem presented itself to him in an abstract way only; to me there was a real--but let that go.

Mick's respectability was uncanny. He could speculate on these things as if they were matters affecting none of us there. In that fourpenny doss-house he remained as aloof as a god, and in some vague way the calmness of the man in face of this infringing realism for a time repelled me.