From the point of view of my profession the story he told me was not without interest. I give it for what it may be worth, not as an instance of mental abnormality, but merely as it bore on our Case.

I have said that Westbury was about thirty-five, which means that he was still under thirty when the war broke out. It is no man's business, certainly not mine, to enter into the question whether he should or could have joined up, nor whether he would have been of much use if he had. His interest to me lies in the fact that he did not. For all I know he may have been of far greater use to his country in his brown check than in a khaki jacket, for his experience of his complicated profession was considerable, and I understand that he became a person of some little temporary importance when the commandeering of hotels and other properties got fairly into swing. Therefore he did not attest under the Derby Scheme, and his subsequent applications for exemption were allowed.

I repeat, I wish to be perfectly fair to him. During a few London air-raids he probably saw as much of the actuality of war as many thousands of uniformed men who spent their year or two years "in France." We see these things a little more clearly now. "In France" may mean much or it may mean very little. Of our millions, I have been informed that only about eight per cent. went "over the top," and that this eight per cent. consisted largely of the same men over and over again. Later the gunners' casualties approached those of the infantry, and I believe there was a time when the losses of the Flying Corps were twenty per cent. per week. Granted that there was no arm that did not suffer its proportion of loss; but—we know now by whom the brunt of the fighting was borne. Mr. Harry Westbury may claim, if he wishes, that he did as much of it as many and many another whose allowances were credited to them at Cox's.

But there was a strain of resentment in his nature, by no means uncommon among his kind save that he experienced it in an uncommon degree. I myself had heard him say of our flyers, "They're paid for it, aren't they—they know the risks, don't they?" but it went much further than that. According to Dadley, he showed suspicion and mistrust towards any who had given an eye, a limb or life itself. He seemed to think that in some obscure way these people had wronged him. And, Dadley went on, in some cases this mistrust became positive dislike and hate.

"If the war was to begin all over again I fancy Harry'd be in it next time," he said. "Speaking for myself, I should say it worried him. Got it on his mind like. Maybe it's that that's stopped him going about very much except to a few places. Sometimes you'd think he'd quarreled with the whole world."

"From the little I've seen of him I can't say I found him a prepossessing young man," I observed.

"Well, myself, I can't help feeling a bit sorry for him," the old man continued, with a shake of his head. "Many a man without a leg's happier than what Harry is. He isn't even the man he was two or three weeks ago. He thinks everybody's got their knife into him. Nor that inquest he was on didn't do him much good neither. He's moped and muttered about it ever since. Talks to himself, he does, up and down the streets and play-acts dreadful things he's going to do, as you might say. Says he won't stand this and that and the other. Any little thing sets him off. Then there was that about that bullet. I expect Mr. Esdaile told you about that?"

"Yes."

"Well, he goes clean off his head about that sometimes. Has the kids downstairs—fetches 'em out of bed—and makes 'em tell him it all over and over again. Says somebody tried to murder 'em. Oh, and a whole lot more nonsense. What he ought to do is to get away into the country for a bit, but when the doctor tells him that, he glares and says it's all a conspiracy to get him out of the way so things can be hushed up."

"What things?"

"Oh, I can't tell you half the rubbish. I keep out of his way now—go somewhere else. I like to have my glass of whisky in peace, not with all this muttering and fist-shaking going on. Yes, he ought to get away for a bit."

"You say a doctor's attending him?"

"Well, he is and he isn't, in a manner of speaking. The doctor goes round—Doctor Dobbie of Carlyle Square he is—but Harry won't do what he tells him, so he might just as well be without one. He'll neither go to bed nor get about his business, as you might say. He's got a couch pulled up to the bedroom window, and he sits there by the hour together staring out. That's the bedroom where the bullet came in. And he writes scores of letters, but I don't think his missis posts all of them. They're to all sorts of people. He gets 'em out of directories."

"What are the letters about?"

"All about miscarriage of justice, and one law for the rich and another for the poor, and lots of them's to the newspapers. Oh, he's going downhill is Harry, I'm afraid. Downhill he's going. He was never any particular friend of mine, but it isn't a pleasant thing to see a man you've chatted with over your glass of whisky going downhill. Not much more than a boy by the side of me neither. I can give him getting on for forty years."

I mused for a moment; then: "You said something about his not being sympathetic to Mr. Rooke. What do you mean by that exactly?"

But at that moment the most astonishingly unexpected thing happened. A customer came into his shop. And so, as Dadley grabbed incredulously for his spectacle case, my question went unanswered.