Farrell, in spite of snow and storm, pushed his way back to Carton that night.  In that long motor drive a man took counsel with himself on whom the war had laid a chastening and refining hand.  The human personality cannot spend itself on tasks of pity and service without taking the colour of them, without rising insensibly to the height of them.  They may have been carelessly adopted, or imposed from without.  But the mere doing of them exalts.  As the dyer’s hand is ’subdued to what it works in,’ so the man that is always about some generous business for his fellow-men suffers thereby, insensibly, a change, which is part of the ‘heavenly alchemy’ for ever alive in the world.  It was so at any rate with William Farrell.  The two years of his hospital work—­hard, honest grappling with the problems of human pain and its relief—­had made a far nobler man of him.  So now, in this solitary hour, he looked his trouble—­courageously, chivalrously—­in the face.  The crash of all his immediate hopes was bitter indeed.  What matter!  Let him think only of those two poor things about to meet in France.

As to the future, he was well aware of the emotional depths in Nelly’s nature.  George Sarratt’s claim upon her life and memory would now be doubly strong.  For, with that long and intimate observation of the war which his hospital experience had brought him, Farrell was keenly aware of the merciful fact that the mere distance which, generally speaking, the war imposes between the man dying on the battle-field and those who love him at home, inevitably breaks the blow.  The nerves of the woman who loses her husband or her son are, at least, not tortured by the actual sight of his wounds and death.  The suffering is spiritual, and the tender benumbing touch of religion or patriotism, or the remaining affections of life, has less to fight with than when the physical senses themselves are racked with acute memories of bodily wounds and bodily death.  It is not that sorrow is less deep, or memory less tenacious; but both are less ruinous to the person sorrowing.  So, at least, Farrell had often seen it, among even the most loving and passionate of women.  Nelly’s renascence in the quiet Westmorland life had been a fresh instance of it; and he had good reason for thinking that, but for the tragic reappearance of George Sarratt, it would not have taken very long,—­a few months more, perhaps—­before she would have been persuaded to let herself love, and be loved again.

But now, every fibre in her delicate being—­physical and spiritual—­would be racked by the sight of Sarratt’s suffering and death.  And no doubt—­pure, scrupulous little soul!—­she would be tormented by the thought of what had just passed between herself and him, before the news from France arrived.  He might as well look that in the face.