‘Somehow all the “ologies” seem very far away—­don’t they?’ murmured Sarratt, after they had laughed together.  They were standing at the window again, his arm close round her, her small dark head pressed against him.  There was ecstasy in their nearness to each other—­in the silver beauty of the lake—­in the soft coming of the June evening; and in that stern fact itself that in one short week, he would have left her, would be facing death or mutilation, day after day, in the trenches on the Ypres salient.  While he held her, all sorts of images flitted through his mind—­of which he would not have told her for the world—­horrible facts of bloody war.  In eight months he had seen plenty of them.  The signs of them were graven on his young face, on his eyes, round which a slight permanent frown, as of perplexity, seemed to have settled, and on his mouth which was no longer naif and boyish, but would always drop with repose into a hard compressed line.

Nelly looked up.

‘Everything’s far away’—­she whispered—­’but this—­and you!’ He kissed her upturned lips—­and there was silence.

Then a robin singing outside in the evening hush, sent a message to them.  Nelly with an effort drew herself away.

’Shan’t we go out?  We’ll tell Mrs. Weston to put supper on the table, and we can come in when we like.  But I’ll just unpack a little first—­in our room.’

She disappeared through a door at the end of the sitting-room.  Her last words—­softly spoken—­produced a kind of shock of joy in Sarratt.  He sat motionless, hearing the echo of them, till she reappeared.  When she came back, she had taken off her serge travelling dress and was wearing a little gown of some white cotton stuff, with a blue cloak, the evening having turned chilly, and a hat with a blue ribbon.  In this garb she was a vision of innocent beauty; wherein refinement and a touch of strangeness combined with the dark brilliance of eyes and hair, with the pale, slightly sunburnt skin, the small features and tiny throat, to rivet the spectator.  And she probably knew it, for she flushed slightly under her husband’s eyes.

‘Oh, what a paradise!’ she said, under her breath, pointing to the scene beyond the window.  Then—­lifting appealing hands to him—­’Take me there!’

CHAPTER II

The newly-married pair crossed a wooden bridge over the stream from the Lake, and found themselves on its further shore, a shore as untouched and unspoilt now as when Wordsworth knew it, a hundred years ago.  The sun had only just vanished out of sight behind the Grasmere fells, and the long Westmorland after-glow would linger for nearly a couple of hours yet.  After much rain the skies were clear, and all the omens fair.  But the rain had left its laughing message behind; in the full river, in the streams leaping down the fells, in the freshness of every living thing—­the new-leafed trees, the grass with its flowers, the rushes