A cleverer, a more experienced, a more practical woman, in such a case, would have found a hundred excuses and justifications for herself that never occurred to Nelly Sarratt, to this young immature creature, in whom the passionate love of her marriage had roused feelings and emotions, which, when the man on whom they were spent was taken from her, were still the master-light of all her seeing—­still so strong and absorbing, that, in her widowed state, they were like blind forces searching unconsciously for some new support, some new thing to love.  She had nearly died for love—­and then when her young strength revived it had become plain that she could only live for love.  Her hands had met the hands seeking hers, inevitably, instinctively.  To refuse, to stand aloof, to cause pain—­that had been the torment, the impossibility, for one who had learnt so well how to give and to make happy.  There was in it no sensual element—­only Augustine’s ‘love of loving.’  Yet her stricken conscience told her that, in her moral indecision, if the situation had lasted much longer, she had not been able to make up her mind to marry Farrell quickly, she might easily have become his mistress, through sheer weakness, sheer dread of his suffering, sheer longing to be loved.

Explanations and excuses, for any more seasoned student of human nature, emerged on every hand.  Nelly in her despair allowed herself none of them.  It merely seemed to her, in this night vigil, that she was unworthy to touch her George, to nurse him, to uphold him; utterly unworthy of all this reverent pity and affection that was being lavished upon her for his sake.

She sat up most of the night, wrapped in her fur cloak, alive to any sound from the room below.  And about four in the morning, she stole down the stairs to listen at his door.  There one of the nurses found her, and moved with pity, brought her in.  They settled her in an arm-chair near him; and then with the tardy coming of the November day, she watched the sad waking that was so many hours nearer death, at that moment when man’s life is at its wretchedest, and all the forces of the underworld seem to be let loose upon it.

And there, for five days and nights, with the briefest possible intervals for food, and the sleep of exhaustion, she sat beside him.  She was dimly conscious of the people about her, of the boundless tenderness and skill that was poured out upon the poor sufferer at her side; she did everything for George that the nurses could shew her how to do—­; it was the one grain of personal desire left in her, and doctors and nurses developed the most ingenious pity in devising things for her to do, and in letting every remedy that soothed his pain, or cleared his mind, go, as far as possible, through her hands.  And there were moments when she would walk blindly along the sea beach with Cicely, finding a stimulus to endure in the sharpness of the winter wind, or looking in vague wonder at the great distant camp, with its streets of hospitals, its long lines of huts, its training-grounds, and the bodies of men at work upon them.  Here, the war came home to her, as a vast machine by which George, like millions of others, had been caught and crushed.  She shuddered to think of it.