her.  She would never be the same again.  The first shock was bad enough; this might be far worse.  Bridget’s selfishness, in truth, counted on the same fact as Farrell’s tenderness.  ’After all, what people don’t see, they can’t feel’—­to quite the same degree.  But if Nelly, being Nelly, had seen the piteous thing, she would turn against Farrell, and think it loyalty to George to send her rich suitor about his business.  Bridget felt that she could exactly foretell the course of things.  A squalid and melancholy veil dropped over the future.  Poverty, struggle, ill-health for Nelly—­poverty, and the starving of all natural desires and ambitions for herself—­that was all there was to look forward to, if the Farrells were alienated, and the marriage thwarted.

A fierce revolt shook the woman by the window.  She sat on there till the moon dropped into the sea, and everything was still in the little echoing hotel.  And then though she went to bed she could not sleep.

* * * * *

After her coffee and roll in the little salle a manger, which with its bare boards and little rags of curtains was only meant for summer guests, and was now, on this first of November, nippingly cold, Bridget wandered a little on the shore watching the white dust of the foam as a chill west wind skimmed it from the incoming waves, then packed her bag, and waited restlessly for Dr. Vincent.  She understood she was to be allowed, if she wished, two visits in the hospital, so as to give her an opportunity of watching the patient she was going to see, without undue hurry, and would then be motored back to D——­ in time for the night boat.  She was bracing herself therefore to an experience the details of which she only dimly foresaw, but which must in any case be excessively disagreeable.  What exactly she was going to do or say, she didn’t know.  How could she, till the new fact was before her?

Punctually on the stroke of eleven, a motor arrived in charge of an army driver, and Bridget set out.  They were to pick up Vincent in the town of X——­ itself and run on to the Camp.  The sun was out by this time, and all the seaside village, with its gimcrack hotels and villas flung pell-mell upon the sand, and among the pines, was sparkling under it.  So were the withered woods, where the dead leaves were flying before the wind, the old town where Napoleon gathered his legions for the attack on England, and the wide sandy slopes beyond it, where the pine woods had perished to make room for the Camp.  The car stopped presently on the edge of the town.  To the left spread a river estuary, with a spit of land beyond, and lighthouses upon it, sharp against a pale blue sky.  Every shade of pale yellow, of lilac and pearl, sparkled in the distance, in the scudding water, the fast flying westerly clouds, and the sandy inlets among the still surviving pines.

‘You’re punctuality itself,’ said a man emerging from a building before which a sentry was pacing—­’Now we shall be there directly.’