“Only for one minute.  One little minute.  I think there’s a wounded man, like you, Monsieur, in that house.”

“Ah—­h—­A wounded man?” He seemed to acknowledge the integrity of her purpose.  “If only I were not wounded, if only I could crawl an inch, I would go instead of Mademoiselle.”

* * * * *

The wounded man lay on the floor of the room in his corner by the fireplace where John had left him.  His coat was rolled up under his head for a pillow.  He lay on his side, with humped hips and knees drawn up, and one hand, half clenched, half relaxed, on his breast under the drooped chin; so that at first she thought he was alive, sleeping.  She knelt down beside him and clasped his wrist; she unbuttoned his tunic and put in her hand under his shirt above the point of his heart.  He was certainly dead.  No pulse; no beat; no sign of breathing.  Yet his body was warm still, and limp as if with sleep.  He couldn’t have been dead very long.

And he was young.  A boy.  Not more than sixteen.  John couldn’t have left him.

She wasn’t certain.  She was no nearer certainty so long as she didn’t know when the boy had died.  If only she knew—­

They hadn’t unfastened his tunic and shirt to feel over his heart if he were dead.  So he couldn’t have been dead when they left him....  But there was Sutton.  Billy wouldn’t have left him unless he had been dead.  Her mind worked rapidly, jumping from point to point, trying to find some endurable resting place....  He was so young, so small, so light.  Light.  It wouldn’t take two to carry him.  She could have picked him up and carried him herself.  Billy had had the lame man to look after.  He had left the boy to John.  She saw John looking back over his shoulder.

She got up and went through the house, through all the rooms, to see if there were any more of them that John had left there.  She felt tired out and weak, sick with her belief, her fear of what John had done.  The dead boy was alone in the house.  She covered his face with her handkerchief and went back.

The Belgian waited for her at the entrance to the yard.  He had dragged himself there, crawling on his hands and knees.  He smiled when he saw her.

“I was coming to look for you, Mademoiselle.”

She had him safe beside her against the stable wall.  He let his head rest on her shoulder now, glad of the protecting contact.  She tried not to think about John.  Something closed down between them.  Black.  Black; shutting him off, closing her heart against him, leaving her heart hard and sick.  The light went slowly out of the street, out of the sky.  The dark came, the dark sounding with the “Boom—­Boom” of the guns, lit with spiked diamond flashes like falling stars.

The Belgian had gone to sleep again when she heard the ambulance coming down the street.

* * * * *

“Is that you, Charlotte?”