purely and fully. Of course he had been loving Gerald all along, and all along denying it.

He lay in the bed and wondered, whilst his friend sat beside him, lost in brooding. Each man was gone in his own thoughts.

‘You know how the old German knights used to swear a BLUTBRUDERSCHAFT,’ he said to Gerald, with quite a new happy activity in his eyes.

‘Make a little wound in their arms, and rub each other’s blood into the cut?’ said Gerald.

‘Yes — and swear to be true to each other, of one blood, all their lives. That is what we ought to do. No wounds, that is obsolete. But we ought to swear to love each other, you and I, implicitly, and perfectly, finally, without any possibility of going back on it.’