Well!—­patience and time—­there was nothing else to look to.  He braced himself to both, as he sped homeward through the high snowy roads, and dropped through sleeping Keswick to Bassenthwaite and Carton.  Then with the sight of the hospital, the Red Cross flag drooping above its doorway, as he drove up to it, the burden and interest of his great responsibilities returned upon him.  He jumped out to say a few cheery words of thanks to his chauffeur, and went on with a rapid step to his office on the ground floor, where he found important letters and telegrams awaiting him.  He dealt with them till far into the night.  But the thought of Nelly never really left him; nor that haunting physical memory of her soft head upon his shoulder.

CHAPTER XVI

Of the weary hours which intervened between her meeting with Cicely and Marsworth at Windermere station and her sight of Dr. Howson on the rain-beaten quay at Bolougne, Nelly Sarratt could afterwards have given no clear account.  Of all the strings that were pulled, and the exalted persons invoked, in order to place her as quickly as possible by the side of her dying husband, she knew practically nothing.  Cicely and Marsworth, with Farrell to help them at the other end of a telegraph wire, did everything.  Passports and special permits were available in a minimum of time.  In the winter dawn at Euston Station, there was the grey-headed Miss Eustace waiting; and two famous Army doctors journeyed to Charing Cross a few hours later, on purpose to warn the wife of the condition in which she was likely to find her husband, and to give her kindly advice as to how she could help him most.  The case had already made a sensation at the Army Medical Headquarters; the reports on it from France were being eagerly followed; and when the young wife appeared from the north, her pathetic beauty quickened the general sympathy.  Nelly’s path to France was smoothed in every possible way.  No Royalty could have been more anxiously thought for.

But she herself realised scarcely anything about it.  It was her nature to be grateful, sweet, responsive; but her gratitude and her sweetness during these hours were automatic, unconscious.  She was the spectator, so to speak, of a moving picture which carried her on with it, in which she was merely passive.  The crowded boat, the grey misty sea, the destroyers to right and left, she was aware of them in one connection only—­as part of the process by which she and George were to meet again.

But at last the boat was alongside the quays of the French port, and through sheets of rain she saw the lights of a climbing town, and the gleaming roadways of the docks.  Crowds of men in khaki; a park of big guns, their wet nozzles glittering under the electric lamps overhead; hundreds of tethered horses; a long line of motor lorries;—­the scene to her was all a vague confusion, as Cicely, efficient and masterful as usual, made a way for them both along the deck of the steamer through close ranks of soldiers—­a draft waiting their orders to disembark.  Then as they stepped on land, perception sharpened in a moment.  A tall man in khaki—­whom she recognised as Dr. Howson—­came eagerly forward.