A man’s money-standard is of necessity comparative. Five pounds is a fortune to the beggar; ten thousand a charity-subscription for a millionaire. But in Peter’s case money had hitherto represented more than mere coin to spend or save as the mood happened: it had stood for the measure of success in his career. So that, as he walked home through Lombard Street that fine April evening, he bore, in addition to the weight of his loss (and no man, pauper or millionaire, likes losing money), another heavier burden—the burden of failure.

The whole street, the gold-deviced signs that had hung three hundred years and more outside stolid buildings, buttressed on millions, the marble-pillared windows, the iron-shuttered entrances, mocked at such failures as his own; seemed glutted with money, money to be picked up by anybody with brains and nerve. He hurried through it; left the low black bulk of the Bank of England behind him; struck westwards through Cheapside.

It was late, and most of the shops had closed. He slackened his pace to the slow dawdle of the man who thinks.

“Failure!” thought Peter. “Argue round it as you like—the result’s the same.” And so thinking, there came over him another wave of that bitterness which, under the Voluntary System, is reserved for those who fight for their country while others, equally fit, stay safe at home. Tolerance for those others, clean pride in himself were submerged in that bitter wave; the scum of thought floated upwards.

“A fine fool I made of myself,” he argued, “rushing into the army. Why didn’t I wait? All these people at home are making more money than ever. Marcus must be coining it out of Nirvana. Beresfords’ will get back the purchase-price of Jamesons in six months. If I’d only stayed at home!”

He began to rail, as so many railed in that black time, against the very thing to which he had dedicated himself. “What are we all fighting for! The country? Oh, hell! A lot ‘the country’ cares. Look at it. Every one having the time of their lives—more money being made and spent than ever—politicians at £5,000 a year yapping of patriotism, munition-workers getting ten pounds a week—while poor bloody Tommy is blown to bits for seven bob.”

“Poor bloody Tommy!” The thought acted as a life-buoy in the storm of anger. What right had he, Peter Jameson, Lieutenant and Adjutant of Gunners, he Peter with his cushy job at the front, his security from want at home, to grouse at hard luck, while men—(thought pictured them clearly)—trudged the shelled duck-boards to Railway Wood through endless nights, clung to its whizz-banged breastworks through endless days? And among those men—a dozen confided stories leaped to mind—were plenty who had sacrificed not half an inherited fortune, but everything: men with assured positions, skilled mechanics, dock-foremen, master-printers, who had thrown up fine jobs, whose wives struggled along on ludicrous separation allowances, because.... “Because of what?” asked thought. And reason answered thought in one clear sentence: “Because they were men!”

Evening had come as he dawdled. Twilight brooded over London. But now no twilight brooded over the soul of Peter Jameson. The burden of the past week dropped from him as a heavy pack drops from weary shoulders. He stood upright in a sudden blaze of clarity. Let the old, the emasculate, the pimps and the panderers haggle in their market-places, babble at their talking-shops: his path led clean away from their market-places and their talking-places, clean across the seas into that other country where neither his money nor his talk but only a man’s manhood availed him: a loathsome and a desolate country, a country of fear and mud and boredom intolerable, of maiming and of death: yet a country above whose desolation shone always the one clear light—the Light of Duty!