After a long time the east began to lighten; a deepening glow rimmed West Hill, picking out in silver the trees along its edge.  If she meant to come she must come soon, he thought, but the rising moon distinctly showed the bare stile.  She had written a long time ago.  She was notoriously a rattlepate.  Of course she would have forgotten.  Then for a moment his straining eyes were puzzled.  His gaze had not shifted even for an instant, yet the post at the left of the stile had unaccountably thickened.  He considered it a trick of the advancing moonshine, and looked more intently.  It was motionless, like the other post, yet it had thickened.  Then he saw it was taller, but still it did not move.  It could be no one.  Mildly curious, he crept forward to make the post seem right in this confusing new glamour.  But it broadened as he neared it, and still was taller than its neighbour, its lines not so sharp.

He rose to his feet, with a dry laugh at his own credulity, taking some slow steps forward, expecting each stride to resolve the post to its true dimensions.  He was within a dozen feet of it before he saw it could not be a post—­anyway, not the same post.  His scalp crept into minute wrinkles at the back of his head.  He knew the feeling—­fear!  But, as in other times, he could not make his feet go back.  Two other steps and he saw she must be there.  She had not stirred, but the rising light caught her wan face and a pale glint of eyes.

All at once his fear was greater—­greater than any he had known in battle.  His feet dragged protestingly, but he forced them on.  He wanted her to speak or move to break that tension of fear.  But not until he reached out stiffening fingers to touch her did she stir.  Then she gave a little whispered cry and all at once it was no longer moonlight for him, but full day.  A girl in nurse’s cap and a faded, much laundered dress of light blue stood before a battered church, beside a timbered breach in its gray stone wall.  He was holding her.

The song was coming to him, harsh and full throated from many men:  “Where do we go from here, boys, where do we go from here?”

“We don’t go anywhere from here,” he heard himself say in anger.  They were the only words he had spoken.

The girl was shaking as she had shaken back at that church; uttering little shapeless cries from a throat that by turns fluttered and tightened.  One clenched hand was fiercely thumping his shoulder.  They were on strange land, as if they had the crust of the moon itself beneath their feet.  They seemed to know it had been true.

* * * * *

They were sitting on a log in shadow.  He rose and stepped into the light, facing his watch to the moon, now gone so high it had paled from gold to silver.  He went to her again.

“Do you know it’s nearly one?”

“It must be that—­I suppose so.”

“Shouldn’t you be going?”