But supposing—­

All the talk that evening had been of a new ’push’—­a new and steady offensive, as soon as the shell supply was better.  George would be in that ‘push.’  Nobody expected it for another month.  By that time he would be back at the front.  She lay and thought, her eyes closed, her harsh face growing a little white and pinched under the electric lamp beside her.  Potentially, her thoughts were murderous.  The wish that George might not return formed itself clearly, for the first time, in her mind.  Dreams followed, as to consequences both for Nelly and herself, supposing he did not return.  And in the midst of them she fell asleep.

CHAPTER VII

August came, the second August of the war.  The heart of England was sad and sick, torn by the losses at Gallipoli, by the great disaster of the Russian retreat, by the shortage of munitions, by the endless small fighting on the British front, which eat away the young life of our race, week by week, and brought us no further.  But the spirit of the nation was rising—­and its grim task was becoming nakedly visible at last. Guns—­men! Nothing else to say—­nothing else to do.

George Sarratt’s battalion returned to the fighting line somewhere about the middle of August.  ‘But we are only marking time,’ he wrote to his wife.  ’Nothing doing here, though the casualties go on every day.  However we all know in our bones there will be plenty to do soon.  As for me I am—­more or less—­all right again.’

Indeed, as September wore on, expectation quickened on both sides of the Channel.  Nelly went in fear of she knew not what.  The newspapers said little, but through Carton and the Farrells, she heard a great deal of military gossip.  The shell supply was improving—­the new Ministry of Munitions beginning to tell—­a great blow was impending.

Weeks of rain and storm died down into an autumnal gentleness.  The bracken was turning on the hills, the woods beginning to dress for the pageant of October.  The sketching lessons which the usual August deluge had interrupted were to begin again, as soon as Farrell came home.  He had been in France for a fortnight, at Etaples, and in Paris, studying new methods and appliances for the benefit of the hospital.  But whether he was at home or no, the benefactions of Carton never ceased.  Almost every other day a motor from the Hall drove up laden with fruit and flowers, with books and magazines.

The fourth week of September opened.  The rumours of coming events crept more heavily and insistently than ever through a sudden spell of heat that hung over the Lakes.  Nelly Sarratt slept little, and wrote every day to her George, letters of which long sections were often destroyed when written, condemned for lack of cheerfulness.