The last two or three years or so of Boy Scouts and hospitals and extra prayer-meetings, attended by the people who attended everything else, seemed to have faded away.

There was hardly a gap between that first war evening which he remembered so clearly and this.

It was a common experience enough, and probably due to the fact that, whereas everything else had made little impression, he had lived for this moment and been extraordinarily impressed by that Sunday.

But he realised, also, that it was due as much to his present companions.

They had, seemingly, accepted him as he had never been accepted before.