‘Well?—­mayn’t anyone give things to a sick child?  Hush!—­here she is!’

He drew further back into the room, and they both watched a little figure in a serge dress crossing the footbridge beyond the garden.  Then she came into the garden, and up the sloping lawn, her hat dangling in her hand, and the spring sunshine upon her.  Hester thought of the preceding June; of the little bride, with her springing step, and radiant eyes.  Nelly, as she was now, seemed to her the typical figure—­or rather, one of the two typical figures of the war—­the man in action, the woman in bereavement.  Sorrow had marked her; bitten into her youth, and blurred it.  Yet it had also dignified and refined her.  She was no less lovely.

As she approached, she saw them and waved to them.  Farrell went to the sitting-room door to meet her, and it seemed both to him and Hester that in spite of her emaciation and her pallor, she brought the spring in with her.  She had a bunch of willow catkins and primroses in her hand, and her face, for all its hollow cheeks and temples, shewed just a sparkle of returning health.

It was clear that she was pleased to see Farrell.  But her manner of greeting him now was very different from what it had been in the days before her loss.  It was much quieter and more assured.  His seniority—­there were nineteen years between them—­his conspicuous place in the world, his knowledge and accomplishment, had evidently ceased to intimidate her.  Something had equalised them.

But his kindness could still make her shy.

Half-way across the room, she caught sight of a picture, on an easel, both of which Farrell had brought with him.

‘Oh!—–­’ she said, and stopped short, looking from it to him.

He enjoyed her surprise.

’Well?  Do you remember admiring it at the cottage?  I’m up to the neck in work.  I never go there.  I thought you and Hester might as well take care of it for a bit.’

Nelly approached it.  It was one of the Turner water-colours which glorified the cottage; the most adorable, she thought, of all of them.  It shewed a sea of downs, their grassy backs flowing away wave after wave, down to the real sea in the gleaming distance.  Between the downs ran a long valley floor—­cottages on it, woods and houses, farms and churches, strung on a silver river; under the mingled cloud and sunshine of an April day.  It breathed the very soul of England,—­of this sacred long-descended land of ours.  Sarratt, who had stood beside her when she had first looked at it, had understood it so at once.

‘Jolly well worth fighting for—­this country! isn’t it?’ he had said to Farrell over her head, and once or twice afterwards he had spoken to her of the drawing with delight.  ’I shall think of it—­over there.  It’ll do one good.’

As she paused before it now, a sob rose in her throat.  But she controlled herself quickly.  Then something beyond the easel caught her eye—­a mass of flowers, freesias, narcissus, tulips, tumbled on a table; then a pile of new books; and finally, a surprising piece of furniture.