It was not the work that excluded me.
The evening that passed then was an easy evening--very little to do.
We spent most of the night in playing _chemin-de-fer_.

No, it was not the work.

It was quite simply that something was happening to all of them in which I had no concern.

They were all changed and about them all--yes, even, I believe, about Semyonov--there was an air of suppressed excitement, rather the excitement that schoolboys have, when they have prepared some secret forbidden defiance or adventure.
Trenchard, whom I had left in the depths of a lethargic depression, was most curiously preoccupied.

He looked at me first as though he did not perfectly remember me.