“I don’t envy,” he said, “the chaps who come out to soft jobs in this war.”

They had found the little man in tweeds asleep behind the engine house, his chin sunk on his chest, his hands folded on his stomach.  He had taken off his green velvet hat, and a crest of greyish hair rose up from his bald forehead, light and fine.

* * * * *

The sun was setting now.  The foam of the wake had the pink tinge of red wine spilt on a white cloth; a highway of gold and rose, edged with purple, went straight from it to the sun.

After the sunset, land, the sunk lines of the Flemish coast.

There was a stir among the passengers; they plunged into the cabins and presently returned, carrying things.  The groups sorted themselves, the Commission people standing apart with their air of arrogance and distinction.  The little man in tweeds had waked up from his sleep behind the engine house, and strolled with a sort of dreamy swagger to his place at their head.  Everybody moved over to the starboard side.

They stood there in silence watching the white walls and domes and towers of Ostend.  Charlotte and Conway had moved close to each other.  She looked up into his face, searching his thoughts there.  Suddenly from somewhere in the bows a song spurted and dropped and spurted again and shot up in the stillness, slender and clear, like a rod oft white water.  The Belgian boys were singing the Marseillaise.  On the deck their feet beat out the thud of the march.

Charlotte looked away.

VII

“Nothing,” Charlotte said, “is going to be worse than this.”

It seemed to her that they had waited hours in the huge grey hall of the Hotel-Hospital, she and Sutton and Gwinnie, while John talked to the President of the Red Cross in his bureau.  Everybody looked at them:  the door-keeper, the lift orderly; the ward men and nurses hurrying past; wide stares and sharp glances falling on her and Gwinnie, slanting downward to their breeches and puttees, then darting upwards to their English faces.

Sutton moved, putting his broad body between them and the batteries of amused and interested eyes.

They stood close together at the foot of the staircase.  Above them the gigantic Flora leaned forward, holding out her flowers to preoccupied people who wouldn’t look at her; she smiled foolishly; too stupid to know that the Flandria was no longer an hotel but a military hospital.

John came out of the President’s bureau.  He looked disgusted and depressed.

“They can put us up,” he said; “but I’ve got to break it to you that we’re not the only Field Ambulance in Ghent.”

Charlotte said, “Oh, well, we’d no business to suppose we were.”

“We’ve got to share our quarters with the other one....  It calls itself the McClane Corps.”

“Shall we have to sleep with it?” Sutton said.