“Well yes, I can manage that all right.  The fact is, the Germans may really be in to-morrow or Monday, and we’re thinking of evacuating all the British wounded to-day.  There are some men here that we ought to take to Ostend.  I’ve been talking to the President about it.”

And in the end they went with their wounded, less than an hour after John had started.

“I don’t say I’ll bring him back,” said Sutton.  “But at any rate we can find out what he’s up to.”  He meditated....  “We mayn’t have to bring him.  I shouldn’t wonder if he came back on his own.  He’s like that.  He can’t stand danger yet he keeps on coming back to it.  Can’t leave it alone.”

“I know.  He isn’t quite an ordinary coward.”

“I’m not sure.  I’ve known chaps like that.  Can’t keep away from the thing.”

But she stuck to it.  John’s cowardice was not like other people’s cowardice.  Other cowards going into danger had the imagination of horror.  He had nothing but the imagination of romantic delight.  It was the reality that became too much for him.  He was either too stupid, or too securely wrapped up in his dream to reckon with reality.  It surprised him every time.  And he had no imaginative fear of fear.  His fear must have surprised him.

“He’ll have got away from Bruges,” she said.

“I don’t think so.  He’ll have to put up at the Convent for a bit, to let Gurney rest.”

They had missed the Convent and were running down a narrow street towards the Market Place when they found John.  He came on across a white bridge over a canal at the bottom.  He was escorted by some Belgian women, dressed in black; they were talking and pointing up the street.

He said he had been to lunch in the town and had lost himself there and they were showing him the way back to the Convent.

She had seen all that before somewhere, John coming over the Canal bridge with the women in black....  She remembered.  That was in one of her three dreams.  Only what she saw now was incomplete.  There had been something more in the dream.  Something had happened.

It happened half an hour later when she went out to find John in the Convent garden where he was walking with the nuns.  The garden shimmered in a silver mist from the canal, the broad grass plots, the clipped hedges, the cones and spikes of yew, the tall, feathery chrysanthemums, the trailing bowers and arches, were netted and laced and webbed with the silver mist.  Down at the bottom of the path the forms of John and the three women showed blurred and insubstantial and still.

Presently they emerged, solid and clear; the nuns in their black habits and the raking white caps like wings that set them sailing along.  They were showing John their garden, taking a shy, gentle, absorbed possession of him.

And as she came towards him John passed her without speaking.  But his face had turned to her with the look she had seen before.  Eyes of hatred, eyes that repudiated and betrayed her.