‘A day or two certainly—­perhaps a week,’ he said reluctantly.  ’It’s a question of strength.  Sometimes it lasts much longer than we expect.’

He said nothing to her of her sister’s visit.  Instinctively he suspected some ugly meaning in that story.  And Nelly asked no questions.

Suddenly, she was aware of lights in the darkness, and then of a great camp marked out in a pattern of electric lamps, stretching up and away over what seemed a wide and sloping hillside.  Nelly put down the window to see.

‘Is it here?’ ‘No.  A little further on.’

It seemed to her interminably further.  The car rattled over the rough pavement of a town, then through the darkness of woods—­threading its way through a confusion of pale roads—­until, with a violent bump, it came to a stop.

In the blackness of the November night, the chauffeur, mistaking the entrance to a house, had run up a back lane and into a sand-bank.

‘Do you hear the sea?’ said Howson, as he helped Nelly to alight.  ‘There’ll be wind to-night.  But here we are.’

She looked round her as they walked through a thin wood.  To her right beyond the bare trees was a great building with a glass front.  She could see lights within—­the passing figures of nurses—­rows of beds—­and men in bed jackets—­high rooms frescoed in bright colours.

’That used to be the Casino.  Now it’s a Red Cross Hospital.  There are always doctors there.  So when we moved him away from the camp, we took this little house close to the Hospital.  The senior surgeon there can be often in and out.  He’s looking after him splendidly.’

A small room in a small house, built for summer lodgings by the sea; bare wooden walls and floor; a stove; open windows through which came the slow boom of waves breaking on a sandy shore; a bed, and in it an emaciated figure, propped up.

Nelly, as the door closed behind her, broke into a run like the soft flight of a bird, and fell on her knees beside the bed.  She had taken off her hat and cloak.  Excitement had kindled two spots of red in her pale cheeks.  The man in the bed turned his eyes towards her, and smiled.

‘Nelly!’

Howson and the Sister went on tiptoe through a side door into another room.

‘Kiss me, Nelly!’

Nelly, trembling, put her soft lips to his.  But as she did so, a chill anguish struck her—­the first bitterness of the naked truth.  As yet she had only seen it through a veil, darkly.  Was this her George—­this ghost, grey-haired, worn out, on the brink of the unknown?  The old passionate pressure of the mouth gone—­for ever!  Her young husband—­her young lover—­she saw him far back in the past, on Rydal lake, the dripping oars in his hand.  This was a spirit which touched her—­a spiritual love which shone upon her.  And she had never yet known so sharp an agony.

So sharp it was that it dried all tears.  She knelt there with his hands in hers, kissing them, and gazing at him.