One afternoon, late in August, she had come home, to sleep till dinner-time between her day’s work and her night’s work, when she found him upstairs in her study.  He had been there an hour waiting for her by himself.  The others were all at bandage practice in the schoolroom.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said.  “Your mother told me to wait up here.”

She had come in straight from the garage; there was a light fur of dust on her boots and on the shoulders of her tunic, and on her face and hair.  Her hands were black with oil and dirt from her car.

He looked at her, taking it all in:  the khaki uniform (it was the first time he had seen her in it), the tunic, breeches and puttees, the loose felt hat turned up at one side, its funny, boyish chin-strap, the dust and dirt of her; and he smiled.  His smile had none of the cynical derision which had once greeted her appearances as a militant suffragist.

“And yet,” she thought, “if he’s consistent, he ought to loathe me now.”

“Dorothea.  Going to the War,” he said.

“Not yet—­worse luck.”

“Are you going as part of the Canadian contingent from overseas, or what?”

“I wish I was.  Do you think they’d take me if I cut my hair off?”

“They might.  They might do anything.  This is a most extraordinary war.”

“It’s a war that makes it detestable to be a woman.”

“I thought—­” For a moment his old ungovernable devil rose in him.

“What did you think?”

“No matter.  That’s all ancient history.  I say, you look like business.  Do you really mean it?  Are you really going to Flanders?”

“Do you suppose any woman would go and get herself up like this if she wasn’t going somewhere?”

He said (surprisingly), “I don’t see what’s wrong with it.”  And then:  “It makes you look about eighteen.”

“That’s because you can’t see my face for the dirt.”

“For the chin-strap, you mean.  Dorothy—­do you realize that you’re not eighteen?  You’re eight and twenty.”

“I do,” she said.  “But I rather hoped you didn’t; or that if you did, you wouldn’t say so.”

“I realize that I’m thirty-eight, and that between us we’ve made a pretty mess of each other’s lives.”

“Have I made a mess of your life?’

“A beastly mess.”

“I’m sorry.  I wouldn’t have done it for the world if I’d known.  You know I wouldn’t.

“But one doesn’t know things.”

“One doesn’t if one’s Dorothea.  One knows some things awfully well; but not the things that matter.”

“Well—­but what could I do?” she said.

“You could have done what you can do now.  You could have married me.  And we would have had three years of each other.”

“You mean three centuries.  There was a reason why we couldn’t manage it.”

“There wasn’t a reason.  There isn’t any reason now.