She opened her eyes.  Something hurt them.  Gwinnie, coming late to bed, had turned on the electric light.  And as she rolled over, turning her back to the light and to Gwinnie, her mind shifted.  It saw suddenly the flame leaping in John’s face.  His delight in danger, that happiness he felt when he went out to meet it, happiness springing up bright and new every day; that was a real part of him.  She couldn’t doubt it.  She knew.  And she was left with her queer, baffled sense of surprise and incompleteness.  She couldn’t see the nature of the bond between these two realities.

That was his secret, his mystery.

XII

She woke very early in the morning with one clear image in her mind:  what John had done yesterday.

Her mind seemed to have watched all night behind her sleep to attack her with it in the first moment of waking.  She had got to come to a clear decision about that.  If Billy Sutton had done it, or one of McClane’s chauffeurs, her decision would have been very clear.  She would have said he was a filthy coward and dismissed him from her mind.  But John couldn’t be dismissed.  His funk wasn’t like other people’s funk.  Coupled with his ecstatic love of danger it had an unreal, fantastic quality.  Somehow she couldn’t regard his love of danger as an unreal, fantastic thing.  It had come too near her; it had moved her too profoundly and too long; she had shared it as she might have shared his passion.

So that, even in the sharp, waking day she felt his fear as a secret, mysterious thing.  She couldn’t account for it.  She didn’t, considering the circumstances, she didn’t judge the imminence of the Germans to be a sufficient explanation.  It was as incomprehensible to-day as it had been yesterday.

But there was fear and fear.  There was the cruel, animal fear of the Belgians in the plantation, fear that was dark to itself and had no sadness in it; and there was John’s fear that knew itself and was sad.  The unbearable, inconsolable sadness of John’s fear!  After all, you could think of him as a gentle thing, caught unaware in a trap and tortured.  And who was she to judge him?  She in her “armour” and he in his coat of nerves.  His knowledge and his memory of his fear would be like a raw open wound in his mind; and her knowledge of it would be a perpetual irritant, rubbing against it and keeping up the sore.  Last night she hadn’t done anything to heal him; she had only hurt....  And if she gave John up his wound would never heal.  She owed a sort of duty to the wound.

Of course, like John, she would go on remembering what had happened yesterday.  She would never get over it any more than he would.  Yet, after all, yesterday was only one day out of his life.  There might never be another like it.  And to set against yesterday there was their first day at Berlaere and the day afterwards at Melle; there was yesterday morning and there was that other day at Melle.  She had no business to suppose that he had done then what he did yesterday.  They had settled that once for all at the time, when he said Billy Sutton had told him she was going back with him.  It all hung on that.  If that was right, the rest was right....