‘Evidently your ideas want bucking up again,’ said Bourne. ‘It was about time I came back. I didn’t think you would become soft-witted in ten days.’

He was not offended by their sulkiness: if he were a little hurt at first, he put it aside and ragged them into a good humour. Sergeant Tozer was glad he was back again, and liked the quiet little eating-house, one could scarcely call it a restaurant, better than the big noisy room in the estaminet. They could only get an omelette and pommes frites in the way of food; but presently Madame and her daughter, who both waited on them, crowned the table with a couple of bottles of Clicquot. Madame went straight back to her kitchen, but Bourne started to protest to the girl. She tried to reason with him, apparently, but he would not listen to her, and at length, a little reluctantly, she went to a drawer in a dresser and brought out a card with a piece of faded green cord, by which he suspended it on the corks of the two bottles. On it was printed boldly, in letters all the same size, ‘Réservée pour les officiers’. Madame, returning with the food, promptly removed it: some one might see it, she protested. The military police were very troublesome. At last, to pacify her, Bourne put the card in his pocket, saying he would keep it as a souvenir of the war.

They ate and drank in great good humour after that, and little Martlow followed the movements of the girl, who waited on them, with round eyes of admiration. No one else came in that night, they had the room to themselves, and they finished their wine at their leisure. Then Bourne crossed to the kitchen door and asked for the bill, which brought forth Madame and the daughter to him; he laughed as he went into their minute and detailed statements, and gave them money. Then quite impudently he kissed them both, the old woman first, and the daughter afterwards.

‘What did you want to kiss the old woman for?’ said Martlow as soon as they were in the street.

‘So that I could kiss the girl afterwards,’ said Bourne, laughing in the darkness.

They turned the corner and came again to the huts. As Sergeant Tozer wanted to go into the company office for a minute, Bourne waited for him outside, and the other two went on by themselves.

‘Don’t let us go back to kip yet, Sergeant,’ said Bourne when the other returned. ‘Let us go a little way behind the huts, and sit down, and smoke and talk. It is such a ripping night. Look at that slag-heap over there, cutting the sky-line like the rock of Gibraltar. There’s another towards Sains. The wine has enlivened without exciting me. …’

‘It ’as gone a bit to my ’ead, too,’ said the sergeant.

‘To say it has gone to my head would be incorrect,’ observed Bourne. ‘It has set my blood alight, it has warmed all my five senses simultaneously. I feel like a human being again. To tell you the plain, honest truth, sergeant, though I didn’t want to stay in the orderly-room, when old Tomlinson came up to me in his cat-like way and told me to go back to my company, I felt a bit hipped by it. My vanity was hurt, and he seemed to get a kind of satisfaction out of it. But as you would put it, I have been in a bad skin ever since we left Sandpits.’