The Squire could still see
the marks made on the polished floor by the rolling backward of the
bed at night. And on the wall near there was a brown mark on the
wall-paper. He remembered that it had been made by a splash from a
bowl of disinfectant, and that he had stared at it one morning in a
dumb torment which seemed endless, because Desmond had woke in pain
and the morphia was slow to act.
_England_! His boy was dead--and his country had its back to the
wall. And he--what had he done for England, all these years of her
struggle? His carelessness, his indifference returned upon him--his
mad and selfish refusal, day by day, to give his mind, or his body,
or his goods, to the motherland that bore him.
'_Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?_'
No--it had been nothing to him. But Desmond, his boy, had given
everything. And the death-struggle was still going on. '_Each one of
us must fight on to the end._' Before his eyes there passed the
spectacle of the Army, as he had actually seen it--a division, for
instance, on the march near the Salient, rank after rank of young
faces, the brown cheeks and smiling eyes, the swing of the lithe
bodies.
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