“Do you want to?”

“Awfully.”

She had drawn up the ambulance in the Square before the Hospital and sat in her driver’s seat, waiting.  Sutton came to her there.  When he saw her he stood still.

“You going?”

“Rather.  Do you mind?”

Sutton didn’t answer.  All the way out to Berlaere he sat stolid and silent, not looking at anything they passed and taking no more notice of the firing than if he hadn’t heard it.  As the car swung into Berlaere she was aware of his voice, low under the noise of the engine.

“What did you say?”

“Conway told me it was you who saved the guns.”

Suddenly she was humbled.

“It was the men who saved them.  We just brought them away.”

“Conway told me what you did,” he said quietly.

Going out with Sutton was a quiet affair.

“You know,” he said presently, “it was against the Hague Convention.”

“Good heavens, so it was!  I never thought of it.”

“You must think of it.  You gave the Germans the right to fire on all our ambulances....  You see, this isn’t just a romantic adventure; it’s a disagreeable, necessary, rather dangerous job.”

“I didn’t do it for swank.  I knew the guns were wanted, and I couldn’t bear to leave them.”

“I know, it would have been splendid if you’d been a combatant.  But,” he said sadly, “this is a field ambulance, not an armoured car.”

IX

She was glad they had been sent out with the McClane Corps to Melle.  She wanted McClane to see the stuff that John was made of.  She knew what had been going on in the commandant’s mind.  He had been trying to persuade himself that John was no good, because, from the minute he had seen him with his ambulance on the wharf at Ostend, from the minute he had known his destination, he had been jealous of him and afraid.  Why, he must have raced them all the way from Ostend, to get in first.  Afraid and jealous, afraid of John’s youth with its secret of triumph and of courage; jealous of John’s face and body that men and women turned back to look at as they passed; even the soldiers going up to the battlefields, going up to wounds and death, turned to look at this creature of superb and brilliant life.  Even on the boat he must have had a dreadful wonder whether John was bound for Ghent; he must have known from the beginning that wherever Conway placed himself he would stand out and make other men look small and insignificant.  If he wasn’t jealous and afraid of Sutton she supposed it was because John had had that rather diminishing effect on poor Billy.

If Billy Sutton distinguished himself that would open McClane’s eyes a little wider, too.

She wondered why Billy kept on saying that McClane was a great psychologist.  If it was true that would be very awful for McClane; he would see everything going on inside people, then, all the things he didn’t want to see; he wouldn’t miss anything, and he would know all the time what John was like.  The little man was wilfully shutting his eyes because he was so mean that he couldn’t bear to see John as he really was.  Now he would have to see.