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beer.
    The Fallen ... as Dr. Brinley drank the melancholy toast his hand trembled, and his heart was torn anew at the tragedy that he himself should have been too young to serve. For what bond can equal the bond which unites for ever those who have once been heroes together, however long ago? “I was at the Alma, I was at Inkermann ...” Oh to have been able to say today “I charged with the Light Brigade!” But they wouldn’t have him; for alas, in 1853 he was only aged fifteen.
    The Fallen ... at one with them, perhaps, in their everlasting blank sleep: or conscious only at this annual moment of the raised glasses that he too was one of the forever-unforgotten. But now he must die in any case, and die alone ...
    For Dr. Brinley believed he was at least doctor enough to know that in a very few months he himself would have to take to his bed. For a while the invaluable Blodwen—the fat, white, smiling Blodwen—would look after him. But only for a while. Blodwen was a wonderful nurse, so long as she thought you might recover: but not for “the dying part.” She couldn’t do with that . A village woman of fifty, drawn to sick beds like a moth to a candle and never yet had she seen a body dead! No, at a given stage and with nothing said Blodwen disappeared and her sister Eirwen took her place. For Eirwen was wonderful with “the dying part,” kind Eirwen had closed more eyes than any woman at the Cross. They always knew what it meant when Blodwen left them and Eirwen took her place.
    Meanwhile?—Meanwhile, he drained another glass.
    He felt now he was set on a pinnacle: he supposed it must be the pinnacle of his own approaching death. Anyway, from his pinnacle how remote they all suddenly began to seem, this crowd he had courted all his life! This crowd here jabbering and eating ... hoping ... young.
    From his pinnacle (it swayed a little as in the wind, from all the whiskey he had drunk) he now saw all the hearts of all the kingdoms of the world outspread, on offer—such as all his life he had coveted. But a change seemed somehow lately to have seeped into his soul from the very bottom: he found now he did not desire them any more.
    Suddenly his pinnacle shot up to a towering height from which these people looked no more than minute gesticulating emmets. Moreover his pinnacle was swinging violently to and fro, now, in a full gale: he had to set his whole mind to clinging on.
    He hoped the motion would not make him sea-sick.
    The bishop, covertly watching him, saw that gray look, the sagging and trembling jaw: “This man has at last begun to die,” he said to himself. But then he saw also the transparent empty eyes, and recalled looking in through other eyes like them—younger eyes, but opening onto the same unbottomed vacant pit within: “Also he is very, very drunk,” he told himself understandingly.
    Maybe—reckoning from the bottom up—the old doctor was indeed three parts dead already: for already there was so much nothing in him down there where once the deeper emotions had been. But at the still-living trivial brink of his mind there was something stirring even now: something which teased and foxed him, for he could not quite recognize what it was ...
    â€œThursday!” that something said.
    Moreover his eyes had begun to prick with tears! Was there something wrong about “Thursday,” then? “ Thursday! ” “THURSDAY!” The word was booming insistently in his head like any bell. He took another sip of whiskey to recall his wandering memory. A-a-a-ah! Now it had come back to him. The telephone call, the little body ... he had to hold an inquest ...
    At that the lately too-penetrable eyes clouded over, the jaw closed, the drooping cheeks tautened to expression of a kind. He turned and gripped the bishop’s arm with his bridle hand and his face was all puckered to suit his words: “My Lord!” he gulped,