She was always like that, hard and insolent, with her damned courage.  As if courage were ever anything more than just being decent, and as if other people couldn’t be decent too.  She hated John because she couldn’t make him come to her, couldn’t make him look with pleasure at her beautiful, arrogant face.  She disliked Sutton and McClane for the same reason, but she hated John.  He treated her face with a hardness and insolence like her own.  You could see her waiting for her revenge, watching every minute for a chance to stick her blade into him.  He was pretending that he hadn’t heard her.

His hair stood up in pointed tufts, rumpled from his pillow.  His eyes had a dazed, stupid look as if he were not perfectly awake.  But at the sound of the rasping voice his mouth had tightened; it was pinched and sharp with pain.  He didn’t look at Mrs. Rankin.  He came to her, Charlotte Redhead, straight; straight as if she had drawn him from his sleep.

The McClane people got up, one after another, and went out.

“Charlotte,” he said, “did you really think I’d left you?”

“I thought you’d left me.  But I knew you hadn’t.”

“You knew it wasn’t possible?”

“Yes.  Inside me I knew.”

“I’m awfully sorry.  Sutton told me you were going on with him, and I thought you’d gone.”

XI

She would remember for ever the talk they had on the balcony that day while Antwerp was falling.

They were standing there, she and John Conway and Sutton, looking over the station and the railway lines to the open country beyond:  the fields, the tall slender trees, the low mounds of the little hills, bristling and dark.  Round the corner of the balcony they could see into the Place below; it was filled with a thick black crowd of refugees.  Antwerp was falling.  Presently the ambulance train would come in and they would have to go over there to the station with their stretchers and carry out the wounded.  Meanwhile they waited.

John brooded.  His face was heavy and sombre with discontent.  “No,” he said.  “No.  It isn’t good enough.”

“What isn’t?”

“What we’re doing here.  Going to all those little tin-pot places.  The real fighting isn’t down there.  They ought to send us to Antwerp.”

“I suppose they send us where they think we’re most wanted.”

“I don’t believe they do.  We were fools not to have insisted on going to Antwerp, instead of letting ourselves be stuck here in a rotten side show.”

“We’ve had enough to do, anyhow,” said Sutton.

“And there isn’t anybody but us and Mac to do it,” Charlotte said.

John’s eyebrows twisted.  “Yes; but we’re not in it.  I want to be in it.  In the big thing; the big dangerous thing.”

Sutton sighed and got up and left them.  John waited for the closing of the door.