And, after all, the Germans hadn’t come round the corner.  Perhaps he wouldn’t have left her if they had really come.  How did she know what he wouldn’t have done?

No.  That was thin.  Thin.  She couldn’t take herself in quite in that way.  It was the way she had tried with Gibson Herbert.  When he did anything she loathed she used to pretend he hadn’t done it.  But with John, if she didn’t give him up, her eyes must always be open.  Perhaps they would get beyond yesterday.  Perhaps she would see other things, go on with him to something new, forgetting.  Her unique, beautiful happiness was smashed.  Still, there might be some other happiness, beautiful, though not with the same beauty.

If John had got the better of his fear—­She thought of all the men she had ever heard of who had done that, coming out in the end heroic, triumphant.

* * * * *

Three things, three little things that happened that morning, that showed the way his mind was working.  Things that she couldn’t get over, that she would never forget.

John standing on the hospital steps, watching Trixie Rankin and Alice Bartrum as they started with the ambulances; the fierce fling of his body, turning away.

His voice saying, “I loathe those women.  There’s Alice Bartrum—­I saw her making eyes at Sutton over a spouting artery.  As for Mrs. Rankin they ought to intern her.  She oughtn’t to be allowed within ten miles of any army.  That’s one thing I like about McClane.  He can’t stand that sort of thing any more than I can.”

“How about Gwinnie and me?”

“Gwinnie hangs her beastly legs about all over the place.  So do you.”

John standing at the foot of the stairs, looking at the Antwerp men.  Their heads and faces were covered with a white mask of cotton wool like a diver’s helmet, three small holes in each white mask for mouth and eyes.  They were the men whose faces had been burned by fire at Antwerp.

“Come away,” she said.  But he still stood, fascinated, hypnotised by the white masks.

“If I were to stick there, doing nothing, looking at the wounded, I should go off my head.”

“My God!  So should I. Those everlasting wounds.  They make you dream about them.  Disgusting dreams.  I never really see the wound, but I’m just going to see it.  I know it’s going to be more horrible than any wound I’ve ever seen.  And then I wake....  That’s why I don’t look at them more than I can help.”

“You’re looking at them now,” she said.

“Oh, them.  That’s nothing.  Cotton wool.”

And she, putting her hand on his arm to draw him up the stairs, away.  John shaking her hands off and his queer voice rising.  “I wish you wouldn’t do that, Charlotte.  You know I hate it.”

He had never said anything to her like that before.  It hadn’t struck her before that, changed to himself, he would change to her.  He hadn’t got over last night.  She had hurt him; her knowledge of his cowardice hurt him; and this was how he showed his pain.