You can't attend to a poor brave devil grinning with pain, while a surgeon pokes a six-inch probe down a sinus in search of bits of bone or shrapnel, and be acutely conscious of your own two-penny-half-penny little miseries.
Many a heartache, in this wise, has been cured in the Houses of Pain.
Now, nothing much would have happened, I suppose, if Phyllis, driven from the hospital by superior decree that she should take fresh air and exercise, had not been walking some days afterwards across the common by the canal.

Bordering the latter, Wellingsford has an avenue of secular chestnuts of which it is inordinately proud.

Dispersed here and there are wooden benches sanctified by generations of lovers.

Carven thereon are the presentments, often interlaced, of hearts that have long since ceased to beat; lonely hearts transfixed by arrows, which in all probability survived the wound and inspired the owner to the parentage of a dozen children; initials once, individually, the record of many a romance, but now, collectively, merely an alphabet run mad.
Phyllis entered the avenue, practically deserted at midday, and rested, a pathetically lonely little grey-uniformed figure on one of the benches.

On the common, some distance behind her, stretched the lines of an Army Service train, with mules and waggons, and here and there a tent.