Elizabeth looked round the room.  Thank God the cottage did not belong to the Squire!  The bedroom was about ten feet by seven, with a sloping thatched roof, supported by beams three centuries old.  The one window was about two feet square.  The nurse pointed to it.

’The doctor said no pneumonia case could possibly recover in a room like this.  And there are dozens of them, Miss, in this village.  Oh, Mary is glad to go.  She nursed her mother for years, and then her father for years.  She never had a day’s pleasure, and she was as good as gold.’

Elizabeth held the clammy, misshapen hand, pressing her lips to it when she rose to go, as to the garment of a saint.

Then she walked quickly back through the fading spring day, her heart torn with prayer and remorse—­remorse that such a life as Mary Wilson’s should have been possible within reach of her own life and she not know it; and passionate praying for a better world, through and after the long anguish of the war.

’Else for what will these boys have given their lives!—­what meaning in the suffering and the agony!—­or in the world which permits and begets them?’

Then, at last, it was past seven o’clock.  The dusk had fallen, and the stars were coming out in a pure pale blue, over the leafless trees.  Elizabeth and Alice Gaddesden stood waiting at the open door of the hall.  A motor ambulance was meeting the train.  They would soon be here now.

Elizabeth turned to Mrs. Gaddesden.

‘Won’t you give a last look and see if it is all right?’

Alice’s weak, pretty face cleared, as she went off to give a final survey to Desmond’s room.  She admitted that Elizabeth had been ‘nice’ that day, and all the days before.  Perhaps she had been hasty.

Lights among the distant trees!  Elizabeth thought of the boy who had gone out from that door, two months before, in the charm and beauty of his young manhood.  What wreck was it they were bringing back?

Then the remembrance stabbed her of that curt note from France—­of what Mrs. Gaddesden had said.  She withdrew into the background.  With all the rest to help, she would not be wanted.  Yes, she had been too masterful, too prominent.

Two motors appeared, the ambulance motor behind another.  They drew up at the side door leading direct through a small lobby to the library, and the Squire, his eldest son, and Captain Chicksands stepped out—­then Pamela.

Pamela ran up to her sister.  The girl’s eyes were red with crying, but she was composed.

’On the whole, he has borne the journey well.  Where is Miss Bremerton?’

Elizabeth, hearing her name, emerged from the shadow in which she was standing.  To her astonishment Pamela threw an arm round her neck and kissed her.

‘Is everything ready?’

‘Everything.  Will you come and see?’

‘Yes.  They won’t want us here.’

For the lobby was small; and surgeon and nurses were already standing beside the open door of the ambulance, the surgeon giving directions to the stretcher-bearers of the estate who had been waiting.