“Please may I have my skirt?”

“Your what?”

“My serge skirt.”

It had not struck Lawrence till then that she was dressed in a white muslin blouse and a pink and blue striped petticoat.  “Do you mean to say that was your skirt you gave me to tie up the dog’s head in?”

“I hadn’t anything else,” said Isabel still more apologetically, and blushing—­she was feeling very guilty, very much ashamed of the trouble she had given:  “and you don’t know how fond Ben was of Billy!”

“Oh, damn Billy!” said Lawrence for the second time.

He went out into the summer sunshine.  The dog, the fallen man, the fallen woman, not one of them had stirred a hair.  All was peaceful and clear in every note of black and white and scarlet on the turf plat where they lay as if on a stage, in their green setting of dimpled hillside and beech grove and marsh.  There was a sickly smell in the hot bright air which carried Lawrence back to the trenches.

He went to examine the human wreckage.  No need to examine Billy —­his record for good or ill was manifestly closed:  and Lawrence had a sickening suspicion that Mrs. Janaway too had finished with a world which perhaps had not offered her much inducement to remain in it.  He lifted her up and laid her down again in a decent posture, straightening her limbs and sweeping back her clotted grey hair:  no, no need to feel for the pulse in that faded breast from which her husband had partly torn away the neatly darned stuff bodice, so modest with its white tucker and silver Mizpah brooch.  Lawrence composed its disorder with a reverent hand, spreading his own coat over her face.

He went on to Ben, and was frankly disappointed to find that Ben was not dead—­far from it:  he gave a deep groan when Lawrence rolled him over:  but it was a case of broken arm and collarbone, if not of spinal injury as well.  Lawrence found a length of line in the yard—­Clara’s clothes-line, in fact—­and knotted it into a triple cord, for, though no sane man could have got far in such a state, it was on the cards that Janaway in his madness might scramble up and wander away on the downs.  So Lawrence lashed him hand and foot, and Ben blinked and grinned at the sun and slavered over his beard.

It was while thus employed that Lawrence began to wonder what would have happened if Isabel had come to Wancote alone.  She might have run away.  But would she, while Ben was engaged in carpet-beating?  Not she!  Lawrence was not a fanciful man:  but the red and grey remains of Clara Janaway would have set the visualizing faculty to work in the mind of a ploughboy.  After tying the last of a dozen knots, reef knots and none too loose, he went to the back of the cottage where Isabel could not see him and was swiftly and violently sick.

After that he felt better.  There was a pump in the yard, and he rinsed his head and hands under it, and washed off as best he could the stains of the fight, and re-knotted his scarf and shook himself down into his disordered clothes before going back to Isabel.  And then it was that Isabel received of him a fresh impression as though she had never known him before, one of those vivid second impressions that efface earlier memories.