Supposing Billy hadn’t told him anything of the sort, though?  She would never know that.  She couldn’t say to Billy:  “Did you tell John I was going back with you?  Because; if you didn’t—­” She would have to leave that as it was, not quite certain....  And she couldn’t be quite certain whether the boy had been dead or alive.  And ...  No.  She couldn’t get over it, John’s cowardice.  It had destroyed the unique, beautiful happiness she had had with him.

For it was no use saying that courage, physical courage, didn’t count.  She could remember a long conversation she had had with George Corfield, the man who wanted to marry her, about that.  He had said courage was the least thing you could have.  That only meant that, whatever else you hadn’t, you must have that.  It was a sort of trust.  You were trusted not to betray defenceless things.  A coward was a person who betrayed defenceless things.  George had said that the world’s adoration of courage was the world’s cowardice, its fear of betrayal.  That was a question for cowards to settle among themselves.  The obligation not to betray defenceless things remained.  It was so simple and obvious that people took it for granted; they didn’t talk about it.  They didn’t talk about it because it was so deep and sacred, like honour and like love; so that, when John had talked about it she had always felt that he was her lover, saying the things that other men might not say, things he couldn’t have said to any other woman.

It was inconceivable that he—­It couldn’t have happened.  As he had said of the defeat of Belgium, it was so bad that it couldn’t happen.  Odd, that the other day she had accepted at once a thing she didn’t know for certain, while now she fought fiercely against a thing she knew; and always the memory of it, returning, beat her down.

She had to make up her mind on what terms she would live with it and whether she would live with it at all.  Supposing it happened again?  Supposing you had always to go in fear of its happening?...  It mightn’t happen.  Funk might be a thing that attacked you like an illness, or like drink, in fits, with long, calm intervals between.  She wondered what it would feel like to be subject to attacks.  Perhaps you would recover; you would be on the look-out, and when you felt another fit coming on you could stave it off or fight it down.  And the first time wouldn’t count because you had had no warning.  It wouldn’t be fair to give him up because of the first time.

He would have given her up, he would have left her to the Germans—­Yes; but if she broke with him now she would never get beyond that thought, she would never get beyond yesterday; she would always see it, the flagged road swinging with the swinging bulge of the stretcher, the sudden stopping, the Flamand with his wound, the shafts of the stretcher, suddenly naked, sticking out; and then all the fantastic, incredible movements of John’s flight.  Her mind would separate from him on that, closing everything down, making his act eternal.