Charlotte didn’t care.  She liked that beastliness, that hostility of theirs.  It was something you could put your back against; it braced her to defiance.  It brought her closer to John, to John and Gwinnie, and shut them in together more securely.  Sutton she was not quite so sure about.  Through all their depression he seemed to stand apart somehow by himself in a profounder discontent.  “There are only four of us,” he said; “we can’t call ourselves a corps.”  You could see the way his mind was working.

Then suddenly the atmosphere lifted at one point.  Mrs. Rankin changed her attitude to John.  You could see her beautiful hawk’s eyes pursuing him about the room.  When she found him in the corridors or on the stairs she stopped him and chattered; under her breath because of the hushed wards.

He told Charlotte about it.

“That Mrs. Rankin seems inclined to be a bit too friendly.”

“I haven’t noticed it.”

“Not with you.  With Sutton and—­and me.”

“Well—­”

“Well, I can’t answer for Sutton, but I don’t like it.  That isn’t what we’re out here for.”

They were going into the messroom together towards dinner time.  Mrs. Rankin and Alice Bartrum were there alone, seated at their tables, ready.  Mrs. Rankin called out in her stressed, vibrating voice across the room: 

“Mr. Conway, you people ought to come in with us.”

“Why?”

“Because there are only four of you and we’re twelve.  Sixteen’s the proper number for a unit.  Alice, didn’t I say, the minute I saw Mr. Conway with that car of his, didn’t I say we ought to have him?”

“You did.”

“Thanks.  I’d rather take my orders from the Colonel.”

“And I’d rather take mine from you than from McClane.  Fancy coming out at the head of a Field Ambulance looking like that.  Tell you what, Mr. Conway, if you’ll join up with us I’ll get the Colonel to make you our commandant.”

Alice Bartrum opened her shadowed eyes.  “Trixie—­you can’t.”

“Can’t I?  I can make the old boy do anything I like.”

John stiffened.  “You can’t make me do anything you like, Mrs. Rankin.  You’d much better stick to McClane.”

“What do any of us know about McClane?”

“What do you know about me?”

You could see how he hated her.

“I know you mean business.”

“Doesn’t he?”

“Don’t ask me what he means.”

She shrugged her shoulders violently.  “Come over here and sit by me.  I want to talk to you.  Seriously.”

She had shifted her seat and made a place for him beside her on the bench.  Her flushed, handsome face covered him with its smile.  You could see she was used to being obeyed when she smiled like that; when she sent that light out of her eyes men did what she wanted.  All her life the men she knew had obeyed her, all except McClane.  She didn’t know John.