“This is too bad,” said Jevons.  “You ought to be looking after Charlie.  Why aren’t you looking after him?”

“Charlie,” she said, “died three hours ago—­at twelve o’clock.”

It wasn’t five hours since we had left her with him in the nun’s cell under the crucifix.  I don’t think I had realized it before, but now it came over me as a new and strange thing, how little he had mattered.  Then it struck me that Jevons must have known it all the time.

“I’ve done everything,” she said, “that had to be done.  And I’ve written to Aunt Matty and Uncle George—­and Mildred.”

“Mildred?” I wondered.

“Well—­yes.”

Jevons and I had forgotten Mildred.  We had forgotten her engagement to Charlie, though I suppose nobody knew better than we did why it had been broken off.

To his father and mother and Mildred he did matter.

And perhaps he mattered to Viola, in a way; for she said she would have given anything to have saved him.  He must have mattered to Jevons when he brought him from Antwerp and when we buried him in Ghent.

And the cross on his grave reproves me, reminding me that to his country he mattered supremely, after all.

* * * * *

After Lokeren Jevons and I tried to come to terms with Viola.

The conference took place upstairs in their bedroom, where we had withdrawn for greater privacy.  Viola sat on the one chair and Jimmy and I on the bed.  Jimmy did most of the talking.

He said, “Look here, my dear child, if there wasn’t a war on, I wouldn’t stand in the way of your amusement for the world.  And there’s a great deal to be said for you. I think you adorable in a tunic and breeches, and General Roubaix agrees with me, if Furny doesn’t.  We all think you heroic, and you are sometimes useful.  But there isn’t a thing you’ve done yet that a man can’t do better—­except getting Furny through the lines, and nobody wants Furny in the lines.  And when you’re in them you’ve a moral effect equal to about ten seventeen-inch guns.  If the men see you hovering round their trenches they’re so jumpy they can hardly hold their rifles.  If Kendal sees you he’s so jumpy he can hardly steer.  Colville says he’d rather hang himself than go through another day like Baerlere.  Furny all but lost his job on the Morning Standard because he was told off to look after you when he ought to have gone to Antwerp—­he would have lost it if I hadn’t done his work for him.  And you don’t make things easier for me.  Good God!—­sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing.

“It isn’t fair on us.  It isn’t fair.”

“It isn’t fair on me,” she said. “I’m jumpy when I’m kept back.  You don’t know what it’s like, Jimmy. Don’t turn me back.”

And the poor child began to talk about her duty to the wounded, and that made him burst out again.