CHAPTER XI

In the summer of 1916, a dark and miserable June, all chilly showers and lowering clouds, followed on the short-lived joys of May.  But all through it, still more through the early weeks of July, the spiritual heaven for English hearts was brightening.  In June, two months before she was expected to move, Russia flung herself on the Eastern front of the enemy.  Brussiloff’s victorious advance drove great wedges into the German line, and the effect on that marvellous six months’ battle, which we foolishly call the Siege of Verdun, was soon to be seen.  Hard pressed they were, those heroes of Verdun!—­how hard pressed no one in England knew outside the War Office and the Cabinet, till the worst was over, and the Crown Prince, ‘with his dead and his shame,’ had recoiled in sullen defeat from the prey that need fear him no more.

Then on the first of July, the British army, after a bombardment the like of which had never yet been seen in war, leapt from its trenches on the Somme front, and England held her breath while her new Armies proved of what stuff they were made.  In those great days ’there were no stragglers—­none!’ said an eye-witness in amazement.  The incredible became everywhere the common and the achieved.  Life was laid down as at a festival.  ’From your happy son’—­wrote a boy, as a heading to his last letter on this earth.

And by the end of July the sun was ablaze again on the English fields and harvests.  Days of amazing beauty followed each other amid the Westmorland fells; with nights of moonlight on sleeping lakes, and murmuring becks; or nights of starlit dark, with that mysterious glow in the north-west which in the northern valleys so often links the evening with the dawn.

How often through these nights Nelly Sarratt lay awake, in her new white room in Mountain Ash Farm!—­the broad low window beside her open to the night, to that ‘Venus’s Looking Glass’ of Loughrigg Tarn below her, and to the great heights beyond, now dissolving under the moon-magic, now rosy with dawn, and now wreathed in the floating cloud which crept in light and silver along the purple of the crags.  To have been lifted to this height above valley and stream, had raised and strengthened her, soul and body, as Farrell and Hester had hoped.  Her soul, perhaps, rather than her body; for she was still the frailest of creatures, without visible ill, and yet awakening in every quick-eyed spectator the same misgiving as in the Manchester doctor.  But she was calmer, less apparently absorbed in her own grief; though only, perhaps, the more accessible to the world misery of the war.  In these restless nights, her remarkable visualising power, which had only thriven, it seemed, upon the flagging of youth and health, carried her through a series of waking dreams, almost always concerned with the war.  Under the stimulus of Farrell’s intelligence, she had become a close student of the