He nodded towards the book. "Interesting?" he asked.
The young man shook his head and displayed the name on the cover. "Anatole France. I used to be crazy about him, but now he seems rather a back number." Then he glanced towards the just–vacated chair. "Australian," he said.
"How d'you know?"
"Can't mistake them. There's nothing else so lean and fine produced on the globe to–day. I was next door to them at Pozières and saw them fight. Lord! Such men! Now and then you had a freak, but most looked like Phoebus Apollo."
Dickson gazed with a new respect at his neighbour, for he had not associated him with battle–fields. During the war he had been a fervent patriot, but, though he had never heard a shot himself, so many of his friends' sons and nephews, not to mention cousins of his own, h
