“Look here—­to-day’s Wednesday.  Will you marry me on Friday if I get leave and a licence and fix it up tomorrow?  We shall have three days.”

“Three days.”  She seemed to be saying to herself that for three days—­No, it wasn’t worth while.

“Well, three months perhaps.  Perhaps six, if my rotten luck doesn’t change.  Because, I’m doing my level best to make it change.  So, you see, it’s got to be one thing or another.”

And still she seemed to be considering:  Was it or was it not worth while?

“For God’s sake don’t say you’re going to make conditions.  There really isn’t time for it.  You can think what you like and say what you like and do what you like, and wear anything—­wear a busby—­I shan’t care if you’ll only marry me.”

“Yes.  That’s the way you go on.  And yet you don’t, say you love me.  You never have said it.  You—­you’re leaving me to do all that.”

“Why—­what else have I been doing for seven years?  Nine years—­ten years?”

“Nothing.  Nothing at all.  You just seem to think that I can go off and get married to a man without knowing whether he cares for me or not.

“And now it’s too late.  My hands are all dirty.  So’s my face—­filthy—­you mustn’t—­”

“I don’t care.  They’re your hands.  It’s your face.  I don’t care.”

The chin-strap, the absurd chin-strap, fretted his mouth.  He laughed.  He said, “She takes her hat off when she goes into a scrimmage, and she keeps it on now!”

She loosened the strap, laughing, and threw her hat, the hat of a Canadian trooper, on to the floor.  His mouth moved over her face, over her hair, pressing hard into their softness; his arms clasped her shoulders; they slipped to her waist; he strained her slender body fast to him, straight against his own straightness, till the passion and the youth she had denied and destroyed shook her.

He said to himself, “She shall come alive.  She shall feel.  She shall want me.  I’ll make her.  I should have thought of this ten years ago.”

Her face was smooth; it smiled under the touch of his mouth and hands.  And fear came with her passion.  She thought, “Supposing something happens before Friday.  If I could only give myself to him now—­to-night.”

Then, very gently and very tenderly, he released her, as if he knew what she was thinking.  He was sorry for her and afraid.  Poor Dorothy, who had made such a beastly mess of it, who had come alive so late.

She thought, “But—­he wouldn’t take me that way.  He’d loathe me if he knew.”

Yet surely there was the same fear in his eyes as he looked at her?

* * * * *

They were sitting beside each other now, talking quietly.  Her face and hands were washed clean; as clean, she said, as they ever would be.

“When I think,” he said, “of the years we’ve wasted.  I wonder if there was anything that could have prevented it.”