kept safe) and Margot began to read extracts from Betty's (about nails, and bad roads, and different kinds of shells, and people) and Uncle Gerald read bits out of the paper (about Hill 60, and Hartmannsweilerkopf, and Sedd el Bahr, and the Leon Gambetta, and liquor, and Mr. Lloyd George).

4

Alix slipped out at the window and limped round to the side door and into the house and upstairs to the schoolroom, which she was allowed to use as a studio. It was littered with things of hers: easels, chalks, paints, piles of finished and unfinished drawings and paintings. Some hung on the walls: some of hers and some by the writer of the letter she took out to read. He painted better than she did, but drew worse—or had, in the long-ago days when persons of his age and sex were drawing and painting at all.

Alix read the letter. It was headed obscurely with an R, some little figures of men, and two weeping eyes, which was where the writer was for the moment stationed. Every now and then a phrase or sentence was erased. The writer, apparently a man of honour, had censored it himself. His honour had not carried him so quixotically far as to erase the hieroglyphics at the head of the paper.

It said:—

CONTENTS

'Dear Alix,—Since I last wrote we've been moved some miles; I mustn't, of course, indicate where to. It is nice country—less flat than the other place, and jolly distant ridges, transparent blue and lavender coloured. I'll do a sketch when we get into billets at the end of the week. My company is in the trenches now; commodious trenches they are, the best in the line, but rather too near the people opposite for comfort—they're such noisy lunatics. It's eight o'clock now, and they've begun their evening hate; they do a bit every evening. The only creature they've strafed to-night yet is a brown rat, whom we none of us grudge them. It's interesting the different noises the shells make coming; you can nearly always tell what kind they are. If I was musical I'd make a symphony out of them. I should think your cousin Terry Orme could. Some of them scream, thin and peevishly, like a baby fretting; some howl like a hyena, some mew like a kitten. Then there's Lloyd George's Special, which says "Lloyd-Lloyd-Lloyd-Lloyd," and then all the men shout "George."' (A page of further discursion on shells, too technical for reproduction here. Then, resumed next morning,) 'I'm fairly sleepy this morning; we had to stand to from two to six A.M., expecting an attack which never came off. I wish it had, it would have been a way to get warm. 

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